This two-volume publication documents two major works by Paul McCarthy—Piccadilly Circus and Bunker Basement

—offering extensive visual and textual engagement with some of his most ambitious performance- and installation-based projects from 2003. In Piccadilly Circus, McCarthy staged a complex, site-specific performance in the labyrinthine interior of a disused bank in London, where figures inspired by contemporary cultural icons enact scenes of exaggerated behaviour. Bunker Basement continues this interrogation of ritual, fetishism, and psychological regression, drawing on the artist’s sustained interest in the grotesque, the comic, and the abject. Rather than operating as discrete documentation, the volumes position these works within a conceptual frame emphasising McCarthy’s critique of representational stability and cultural mythologies. Essays by Ralph Rugoff and Robert Storr situate McCarthy’s practice within post-1960s performance and installation discourses, highlighting his integration of sculptural, cinematic, and performative modes. Throughout, the publication demonstrates how McCarthy’s work mobilises humour, excess, and disruption to reveal underlying structures of desire, power, and cultural production. The artist’s deployment of visceral materials, embodied gesturality, and immersive scenography foregrounds process over product and situates his practice at the intersection of performance, media critique, and institutional critique.