500 __ |a Piccadilly Circus: Performance at Hauser & Wirth, London, May 12 to 16, 2003; exhibited at Hauser & Wirth, London, October 16 to December 20, 2003; Bunker basement: Performance at Paul McCarthy's Studio, Los Angeles, August 26 to 29, 2003; video exhibited at Hauser & Wirth, London, October 16 to December 20, 2003.

500 __ |a McCarthy studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting. In 1972 he studied film, video, and art at the University of Southern California receiving an MFA. From 1982 to 2002 he has taught performance, video, installation, and performance art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. McCarthy currently works mainly in performance art and sculpture.

505 0_ |a Using the Victorian interior of an abandoned bank on Londons Piccadilly as the on-site location for this video performance, and a rudimentary re-creation of that banks subterranean vaults in his studio outside Los Angeles for supplementary footage, McCarthy has staged a slapstick Twilight of the Gods that also doubles as the most disturbing Sadeian fantasia since Pier Paolo Pasolinis Salo. (Robert Storr) A president (George W. Bush), multiple Queen Mums, and a terrorist (Osama bin Laden) are the protagonists, With their oversized heads and giant clown shoes, they resemble strangely hybrid creatures... cartoon characters that shit, bleed, and possess real genitals. (Ralph Rugoff) In frenzied acts of self- and reciprocal mutilation, sawing and hacking away at each others oversized foam heads, McCarthys characters do not appear to be thinking at all. Instead, they act instinctually, which is the political moral of McCarthys riotous scenario: reasons of state cannot explain such destruction and debauchery but an amoral state of nature, which no mask of decorum can hide or contain, unleashes primary urges that do.