Paul McCarthy.

Weil, Harry Jacob

Whitney Museum of American Art | New York, New York

The Whitney's whopping "Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement/Three Installations, Two Films" (through October 12, 2008) was the must-see event of last-summer. With rather art-historical exhibitions in the neighborhood--Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim and Kirchner at MoMA--McCarthy served up enough excitement and art smarts to please any crowd. The usual scatological spectacle of clowns and rotting food that we have come to expect from this Los Angeles-based artist is now but a distant memory. Instead, a more reserved artist logically working out spatial and visual illusions emerges in these 22 objects dating from 1966 to the present.

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The link between past and present is an essential component of this mini-retrospective. The showcasing of his early films and performance photographs in the vicinity of large-scale installations--two restored and a new one created for the occasion--wonderfully demonstrates the conceptualist nub of his work. It all comes down to McCarthy's keen interest in viewer-manipulated perception, now called interactive or participatory art. An early example is the three-minute black-and-white film Spinning Camera, Walking, Mike Cram Walking from 1971, which shows a camera being rotated on a tripod in a mostly empty room. The result is a dizzying display of sun-drenched windows and darkened corners, occasionally giving a glimpse of a man walking in circles around the camera. Eerily, the long wall of mirrors bisecting the Whitney's second floor begins to take on the same giddy dimensions as the film it features, dramatically doubling the floor space.

It's hard not to be skeptical about this vertiginous tour de force, especially after reading in a wall text that the work is intended "to create perceptual disorientation in the viewer through spinning mirrors, rotating walls, projections, and altered space." Is this Hanger 18, or a James Bond-style briefing on the latest techniques in national security, or what? As Ken Johnson in the NY Times suggests, "Over and over Mr. McCarthy returns to the human fact that we are inescapably at the mercy of what our senses tell us about the world and what our brains manage to make of that information. We may go out of our minds, but we can never get out of our heads." But surely the point is that the current technocracy wants to keep us confused.

The artist's most powerful installation, Bang Bang Room (1992)--four hinged, motorized walls that open and close, locking you in if you chance inside--wonderfully demonstrates this sense of being in a surrealistic horror movie. Each wall has a door that keeps opening and banging shut, giving the illusion of controlling the movement of the walls. Museum visitors caught inside this claustrophobic contraption, where the sound of the slamming doors gets even louder, find themselves instantly transported to a scene from one of the Saw movies. Bang Bang Room is a prime example of why McCarthy so richly deserves his current stardom, even if it leaves the museum's love affair with trippy, kinetic cubist traps entirely hanging.