Post Pop East matches West review – an exhibition beyond style

Alexander Kosolapov’s Hero, Leader, Jesus at the Post Pop East Meets West event at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Photograph Rex

We f you felt envious regarding the French with regards to their big art controversy associated with the autumn over the Los Angeleno provocateur Paul McCarthy’s “butt plug” sculpture in the traditional heart of Paris, here’s your chance to be appalled.

McCarthy’s 1993 masterpiece Spaghetti Man is just a lifesize statue with a bunny head and a penis that curls in a tube that is pasta metres very long right into a heap on the ground. It’s a male fantasy made ridiculous, a phallic paradox. His cock can be so long it’s useless, like spaghetti. I felt something melt inside me personally.

Post Pop East Meets West, in which McCarthy’s character that is grotesque a natural house, can be an event beyond flavor. Its packed with trash, kitsch, commercialism and cynicism – and that’s just the g d stuff. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ glows in all its mystical obscenity beside the same artist’s powerful Black Supper, where a tableau of Leonardo’s Last dinner is drowned in bubbles and also the faces become darkly spectral.

Bunny strange … Paul McCarthy’s Spaghetti Man, 1993. Photograph Rex

Such surprise art for the 1980s and 90s is hardly ever shown in Britain’s public art galleries nowadays. They ch se video clip installations and lo-fi ruminations on identification, protest and theory that is marxist.

It is still exactly what collectors like, though. “Post pop music” means art enthusiastic about commodities, glamour and high effect – the sort of art Charles Saatchi became fabled for collecting back in your day. This is not a show from their collection many regarding the works I am fairly sure) belonged to him once upon a time, and it has that Saatchi je ne sais quoi – a sheer appetite for the shocking and bizarre and brazen that puts the po-faced seriousness of more respectable galleries to shame in it.

I can’t state I like everything here. How will you “like” a set of lifesize photographs of corpses dressed up in goth fashions? It really takes goth culture to its literal extreme. AES+F’s series of macabre fashion dishes additionally takes contemporary art and haute couture for their absurd conclusion that is logical. Damien Hirst and Alexander McQueen, eat your hearts out. Here are the dead, dressed to your nines.

AES+F are really a Russian art team, yet on your whole the artists here from communist and post-communist states are not since convincing as the created capitalists. How variations that are many the themes of Chairman Mao, Lenin and Coca-Cola can anyone soak up? Komar and Melamid’s 1982-83 painting The Origins of Socialist Realism is just a classic that is modern frequently reproduced into the flesh its seriously disturbing. an elegant muse that is semi-naked the chin of a eerily static Stalin. It seems to be occurring inside a tomb – the death in life that was Stalinism.

It better than the people who were immersed in it from birth, the western children of the free market when it comes to pop imagery no one does. There’s a terrifying purity to Jeff K ns. Their basketballs float inside their g ey liquid, still buoyant in the end these years. Rubber lasts better than shark flesh, as K ns has outlasted Hirst. The drifting basketballs are a statement that is simple of. Here is a religion that is american. Why not worship the perfect orange ball instead of Christ in their urine of suffering and decay?

The purity that is terrifying of K ns … Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1986. Photograph Jonathan Brady/PA

This event includes a nice line in blasphemy. Women in smothering black robes kneel before empty icons in an installation that is truly disconcerting Sergei Shutov. The all-immersing fabric that is dark the lifesize numbers seem to move. Their faith is unspecified, but all religions get yourself a knock or two here. Also Confucius is available in for stick. Mei Dean-E’s Confucius Confusion is just a woven portrait associated with ancient sage with their beard unravelling in a tangled heap of w l on the ground, because mad while the Spaghetti Man’s penile outpouring.

This is usually a refreshingly unprescriptive show. Its concept of post pop music is generous and totally unrepressed by today’s idea of c l. Unc l performers such as David Mach and Bill W drow l k alongside c l ones such as Gary Hume.

Ah, Hume. Exactly what a artist that is difficult. His art courts banality so assiduously it is easy to miss out the nightmare gloss that makes it vicious. A few of his most readily useful paintings come in this show, including their medical center d rways that suggest empty, psychotic faces. I found myself interested in these portals that are hopeless. They teeter in the edge of modern life’s deepest, most abysses that are appalling.

This exhibition is fun, shocking and finally t much like our time. Nonetheless it’s the survey that is best of modern art in any London gallery at this time. This is when we have been and how we live. The market pours forth miracles until they pall. Christ watches sadly from their tank of piss.

Post Pop East Meets West is at the Saatchi Gallery, London, until 23 February.