Performance on Film: Paul McCarthy's 'DADDA POODLE HOUSE SALOON'

We are excited to present a new summer film series dedicated to ‘Performance on Film’ at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street.

Celebrating a long tradition of Hauser & Wirth artists working in performance, the series will comprise selected works by artists represented by the gallery, as well as documentation from various past performances at Hauser & Wirth’s New York and Los Angeles locations and two world premieres from artists outside the gallery’s roster.

Screenings will take place over two weeks this summer, Thursday 11 July to Wednesday 17 July. All screenings are free and open to the public; however, due to limited space, reservations are required.

All screenings are free and open to the public; however, due to limited space, reservations are required. Please register for each film individually.

Wednesday 17 July
7.30 pm

‘DADDA – POODLE HOUSE SALOON’
Co-directed by Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy
1 hr 30 mins

Please note this film is intended for audiences 18 years and over. Viewer discretion is advised.

About Paul McCarthy’s ‘DADDA – Poodle House Saloon’
Co-directed by ">span> and Damon McCarthy, conceived by Paul McCarthy and edited by Damon McCarthy, ‘DADDA—POODLE HOUSE SALOON’ was filmed in 2017 and made its debut in 2018. The film is the first of five feature-length films shot in the Saloon set, all part of the larger ‘CSSC / DADDA’ series, which will be composed of approximately twenty feature-length chapters. DADDA, inspired by the campaigns of the 2016 election cycle, is part of Paul McCarthy’s acclaimed multidisciplinary practice that merges performance, sculpture, photography, painting, video, installation and virtual reality. Themes of family, mass media and the dissolution of societal structures sit at the center of a sprawling oeuvre that illuminates society’s double standards and hypocrisies.  
 
Archetypal American narratives unfold with McCarthy’s characteristic amalgam of wit, rage and subversiveness. The artist’s ongoing excavation of human drives and desires continues here in the visual language of Hollywood Westerns. Co-opting tactics from the mainstream film industry to recast icons of Americana in deviant roles, ‘DADDA’ introduces new characters alongside others that have recurred over the years in the artist’s practice. The startling performances of McCarthy’s cast are set within a saloon and accrue to a powerful meditation on America’s distinctive brand of intermingled sex and violence.  

‘The saloon set used for ‘DADDA–Poodle House Saloon’ was built as a replica of the saloon that appears in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1971 film ‘Whity’, coincidentally, this was the same saloon Sergio Leone used for his 1966 classic Spaghetti Western ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,’ starring Clint Eastwood. This original saloon exists to this day in Mini Hollywood, a wild-west town in Almeria, Spain, that directors of Westerns frequently used as a cheaper film location in the 1960s and 70s. In re-creating this set, a kind of cultural looping and layering has been embedded in DADDA. The performance is a form of abstracted appropriation, a tool to critique, to peel the onion of what is.’
—Paul McCarthy

Image: DADDA Donald and Daisy Duck Adventure, 2018 (film still). © Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy