Paul McCarthy: The Box

This handsome new book by Paul McCarthy (born 1945) highlights a major new work that refers to both the physical and the mental space of artistic creativity. The Box is McCarthy’s reflection on the phenomenon of the artist’s studio. As inconspicuous as any other plain moving box from the outside, the interior of the work reveals a striking, barely comprehensible diversity of things that inhabit this intimate and ever-changing incubator for artistic ideas. First, McCarthy constructed a model of a barn-like space in Pasadena, California, which served as his studio during the 1970s. Turned on its side 90 degrees, along with its approximately 3,000 objects--from a bulky steel cabinet to a pencil--the work compels a disorienting shift of perception in the viewer, which is impressively extended into the tactile quality of the book and its abundance of images.