PAUL McCARTHY
September 12 - 26, 2000
 
 

 
 
Paul McCarthy's artistic statement on the political situation in Austria follows the David Shrigley work that was shown on the Secession facade earlier this month. (Open letter to the Austrian president by the board of the Secession).
 
 

 
 
In his project for the Secession facade, Paul McCarthy uses images which cultures create of other cultures, pictures which do not differentiate but stick to clichés this is an idea frequently found in his videos and installations, too. The motif on the Secession facade is based on a kind of business card for the US-movie "The Sound of Music" (starring Julie Andrews) which still plays around the world in the original and numerous dubbed versions. The movie tells the story of the Trapp family who emigrated from Salzburg to the United States during Nazi times and became a highly successful folk music group there. The family continues to be famous in the USA until today. Moreover, US tourists visiting the Salzburg locations where the movie was filmed still account for veritable "Sound of Music" tourism. The business card bearing the names of the two men who wrote the score and lyrics for the film is lying on a green surface, a meadow, which refers to the Trapp family and their songs as attached to nature and "natural".
 
McCarthy is not interested in the narrative of the movie. He underscores this by showing the video tape played backwards and without sound on a monitor in the lobby of the Secession: the irritating way of presenting the film, with a storyline that one cannot follow this way, is to draw our attention to the type of film instead of the narrative. McCarthy is more interested in the "images" which (in this case) Hollywood conveys to the American audience the folk costumes (dirndl, dresses and lederhosen), the music all of this presented as typically Austrian in a generalising way. The movie is a typical example of how codes reducing the identity or recognisability of cultures to a few clichéd images are assigned through the visual media. McCarthy tries to trace these images which reach us through leisure-time and mass media every day, to identify and alienate, or even destroy them.
 
 
Further artists include: Monica Bonvicini, Milica Tomic, Heimo Zobernig.
 
 
For updated information please contact Matthias Herrmann, Sylvie Liska and Eleonora Louis at the Vienna Secession on +43- 1- 587 53 07.