...What really happened to utopia is perhaps the central subject of the young Irish artist Caroline McCarthy’s oeuvre. Her concerns are the popular imagination of landscape and nature and the synthetic manner of our engagement with it, and the distortion of utopian projects and ideals into commodities.
In some senses McCarthy (b. 1971) is an artist adapting and appropriating traditional modernist strategies: those of appropriation and collage. Her materials are not, however, the artefacts of popular culture like magazines and newspapers that modernists such as Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield or Ray Johnson chose; they are far more mundane than that. McCarthy uses food packaging, in particular the cartons that contain ready-meals. [Fig. 70] This packaging is almost utterly generic, as a quick visit to any supermarket, or perhaps a look inside your fridge will confirm. The back of the thin card sleeve will carry cooking instructions; the front will bear a idealised photograph of the cooked meal and, since such ready-meals are almost universally “classics” of distinctive national or regional cookery, there will be some kind of visual symbol of generalised ethnicity or location alongside it. A spaghetti dish might have somewhere an image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a curry the Taj Mahal, a boeuf bourguignon the Eiffel Tower...