
“Male Moments,” the first exhibition at Maccarone of the undersung artist Danny McDonald, is full of collectibles—action figures, horror props and other appropriated paraphernalia from the mainstream culture of American masculinity. Displayed on pedestals, McDonald’s sculptures are baroque fantasies constructed from what is supposed to be tough-guy stuff. In The Sudden Realization of Male Pattern Baldness (2014), an action figure of the Rock, a pro wrestler, stands in an ice-filled bathtub draped in a towel and holding a hand mirror. Atop his shoulders is a tower of other bald figures from various pop culture sources: Freddy Kruger, Gollum, Austin Powers’s Mini-Me. There are no female characters represented in the exhibition’s 12 works, though the crucial, heteronormative distinction between dolls and action figures that makes such toys marketable to boys and men appears highly unstable in some instances, such as a camo-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger drinking from a penis-shaped water bottle.