Last week I travelled for work to Minneapolis, a lovely city full of great food, music, and art. (The freak April snowstorm that dropped 9+ inches of snow the night before my flight? Not so great.) With a free morning to spare, I headed over to the Walker Art Center, a fantastic art museum not only by Midwestern standards – it’s truly one of the nation’s best museums for those with an interest in modern and contemporary art. Typically, my love of Disney doesn’t often intersect with my “day job,” but on this jaunt over to the Walker I found a bit of Disney I wasn’t looking for. Frankly, it was a piece of Disney I wasn’t sure I wanted to see.

In an exhibit on post-1989 art, a long gallery wall displayed a collage of sorts, a collection of photographs arrayed with care.  On my first pass through the gallery I didn’t quite stop to take it in, but on second glance, I excitedly realized there was some Disney on display. And then…I felt less excited. And then my stomach clenched, and I spent the rest of the time viewing this piece – to say nothing of the hours later that day – feeling quite uncomfortable. What was it I saw, you might ask? Here’s the description, straight from the gallery wall (click to enlarge):

Paul McCarthy, “Documents 1995-1999.”

Now, I’ve long heard the toss-off comments alluding to Walt Disney’s fascism, the tongue-in-cheek referrals to Disney as a “Nazi” company hellbent on brainwashing your children. These are comments you don’t (or shouldn’t) take seriously. But one is compelled to consider these comments – or at least the spirit of these comments – when confronted with such a stark visual comparison of American popular culture and Third Reich utopian landscapes. At their cores, aren’t both about the pursuit of an ideal of perfection, of creating spaces of security and unity and shared values? One the one hand, you end up with castles at the end of Main Streets, and on the other, you end up with unspeakable atrocities and the very questioning of humanity itself.  To think that these two seemingly unrelated phenomena are, in fact, at least loosely connected – it’s quite unsettling.  (Or maybe you don’t think they are at all connected – that’s fine, too. I have no agenda here.)

We’re not in Fantasyland anymore.

Through the website ArtsConnectEd, the Walker has made McCarthy’s work available online, and you can view it in its entirety here. Be warned that it’s a bit NSFW, and perhaps a little unsettling for some.

Something I’ll be thinking about for a long time.