Who's That Girl?

Paul MacCarthy: That Girl (T.G. Awake), 2012-13

Photo: Copyright © Hauser and Wirth, 2014

If any artwork has ever solicited (and problematized) the viewer's gaze in a more challenging and slightly unnerving manner than Paul MacCarthy's That Girl (T.G. Awake) then, if I'm honest, I'm not sure I want to see it. 

Although not billed as the main attraction of the current Hayward exhibition on contemporary figurative sculpture, MacCarthy's hyperreal and clone-like figures - three silicone versions of the same girl sitting naked, legs apart, on glass-topped trestle tables - are nevertheless the stars of the show and, I think, deservedly so.

For whilst there might be issues of cynical exploitation and rather lazy porno-sensationalism, one ultimately comes away wanting to know more about the young woman who so courageously dared to expose herself in this manner and submit to the intensive, intimate, and extremely messy modelling process (as documented in the accompanying video T.G. Elyse (2011)).  

And this desire to name and to provide a personal history or biography - to effectively bring a dead object to life - is to experience what obsessed and tormented Pygmalion. Thus, in this way, MacCarthy achieves something extraordinary; he allows us to directly share in the primal (erotic) fantasy of art and to feel what he feels, not simply see what he sees.    

Notes: 

The above work by Paul MacCarthy can be viewed as part of The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, an exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Hayward Gallery, London (17 June - 7 September 2014).

That Girl is Elyse Poppers; a twenty-something American actress who has effectively become a muse to MacCarthy, having appeared in two of his films - Rebel Dabble Babble (2012) and WS (2013) - as well as in the work discussed above.