Paul McCarthy: Piccadilly Circus, Bunker Basement

This two-volume artist’s book captures a video performance and installation by influential artist Paul McCarthy. In the labyrinthine basement of an abandoned bank in London’s Piccadilly, McCarthy staged a performance populated by characters that refer to leaders of our time, exaggerated and disorted into representations of ideologies, values, and moral precepts. Their often disturbing actions hints at psychological processes such as regression, self-destruction, and obsession and a scene of increasing isolation and helplessness unfolds. Alongside documentation of the project, essays by Ralph Rugoff and Robert Storr examine McCarthy’s ‘slapstick Twilight of the Gods’ and explore the primary urges, destruction, and debauchery that it presents.