Letter To Mara McCarthy
This letter to Mara McCarthy is an outrageous collaboration proposal disguised as art-historical courtship, political strategy, and scatological prophecy. Williams links Paul McCarthy's Piggies and Shit Pile to his own Super-Sized Toilet Paper project, then proposes two enormous black-and-white inflatable toilet-paper rolls as a national-election intervention. The proposal's brilliance lies in its excessive referential machinery: the Joker, Wally Hedrick, Jeff Koons, Richard Serra, Obama, McCain, Piss Christ, The New Yorker, and BCAM all become supporting evidence for the inevitability of the toilet roll as monumental form. What appears crude is in fact a savage sculptural argument about race, politics, softness, monumentality, and the exhausted authority of Serra's heavy industrial cylinders. The letter is not merely a pitch; it is a complete theory of the inflatable as anti-monument, election bomb, and art-world humiliation device.
- DATE:
- 2008
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Letter / Open Letter
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Mara McCarthy; Paul McCarthy; Heath Ledger; Christopher Nolan; Wally Hedrick; Mike Cram; James Ensor; Emil Nolde; CoBrA; Jeff Koons; Richard Serra; Andres Serrano; Barack Obama; John McCain; Peter Schjeldahl; David Lynch
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- Luhring Augustine Gallery; The Box; Haus der Deutschen Kunst; Broad Contemporary Art Museum; Hollywood and La Brea; New York Times; New Yorker
- KEYWORDS:
- toilet-paper roll as anti-monument; Paul McCarthy Piggies as lineage; race and politics in inflatable form; Serra cylinders deflated; election bomb; toilet as monumental form; theory of the inflatable; collaboration as conceptual artillery