This richly illustrated publication is a selection of hundreds of still photographs shot during the making of Rebel Dabble Babble, a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son Damon McCarthy.

Rebel Dabble Babble is a complex installation and video projection work originally inspired by both Nicholas Ray’s 1955 classic Hollywood film Rebel Without a Cause and the furious rumours that swirled around the off-set relationships between its director and his stars James Dean, Nathalie Wood, and Sal Mineo.

This densely layered opus confronts definitions of power and role-playing, and expands far beyond references to the 1955 movie and related legends. Ultimately, Rebel Dabble Babble is an expansive meditation upon the archetypes and Oedipal tensions that define family dynamics as they have been played out in private homes, in the evolution of art history, and in the development of the entertainment industry.

In the film, Paul McCarthy and his actors (including Hollywood star James Franco) play hybrids both of Nick Ray’s cinematic characters and the actors who performed as those characters. With this mind-bending series of doubles, binaries, and inversions, Rebel Dabble Babble presents perversions of interchangeable roles and fetish relationships.

Published with Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/London/New York.