Paul McCarthy and Francis Alÿs

Last week I saw two exhibitions that I wouldn't normally have chosen to have seen. The first was the Paul McCarthy show at the Whitechapel and at an offsite location at the end of Brick Lane.

LaLa Land Parody Paradise was a show of two halves, really. I absolutely hate this sort of indulgent, Freudian nonsense, because it so often turns in to an excuse for showing off, for the worst kind of scatalogical art that I generally find childish and boring. The Whitechapel part of the show did have some drawings in it that were very basic and adolescent in their style and content. A fellow visitor remarked 'It's all rather vulgar'. And he wasn't wrong on the whole.

In the Whitechapel part of the show, there were a couple of pieces that weren't vulgar, and these were the older ones: an H-shaped crawling tube, with marks where people had been crawling through it; and some photographs from an aeroplane window of a journey from Salt Lake City to LA. I wanted to crawl through the H-shaped tube myself, but as a firm but fair invigilator chastised a fellow visitor for bringing a 'beverage' into the gallery, I thought better of it. The photographs, interesting as they were, didn't seem to be put together too professionally, with creeping edges and crumpled corners in the frame. There was a humidity monitor in the corner of the small space that these pieces were sited in.

The real beef of the show was at the offsite location. There was something very clandestine about knocking and being admitted to the giant warehouse space, containing three huge pirate ships, loads of projections of filthy activities, and the overwhelming sound of wailing and grunting. Initial disgust turned to depression the longer I spent in the piece. It was like a portrait of a corrupt culture, featuring consumerism, violence, shit, porn, and piracy on the high seas; and it was a portrait in which I became complicit by my attendance and my participation. Ugh. Nasty stuff, but very powerful and deeply, deeply depressing.

However, the other show, a Francis Alÿs Artangel commission, seemed far more European in its style and approach than McCarthy's American excess. There was a lot of work in this Portman Square exhibition, and among the standout pieces were a wonderfully charming slide projection of milk bottles on doorsteps, a set of videos of a walker clanking railings with a drumstick (one of which included a fantastic skid on an icy pavement), and a large quantity of revealing research material which offered an insight into the processes that led to the work. The most interesting piece was 'Guards', a video of bearskinned, red-jacketed, gun-carrying guardsmen locating each other and gradually assembling into column in the City of London. It's rare that a video piece can be frightening, humourous, charming and incongruent all at the same time. While it was slightly chilling to watch an army assembling itself on London's streets, especially in light of recent events, the piece piece retained a humility and a sense of humour, toying with the iconic image of the guardsmen and their real function as working soldiers. A very interesting piece of work indeed.