- At the time Artists Space got no ink in the art press. There were no reviews that I recall. Many of the actual works in the Met show of 2009 were shown first either during Paul’s tenure at Artists Space or at Project Inc. in the 70s. About those years David Salle wrote in 1998, “Whether we constituted an artistic alliance, I’m not really sure. But the galvanizing member of this unusual club was someone who hadn’t gone to CalArts, and that was Paul McMahon…I keep coming back to the same point: Pictures was all really ephemeral. It was never meant to last and didn’t last, not really. The key intelligence here was always Paul McMahon, and the keynote of Paul McMahon, as an art critic, was humor. He was essentially a postmodern comedian.”-500 Artists Return to Artists Space.
The Battle of the Bands was an impromptu all hands on deck party game he emceed in the midst of parties at 135 Grand St 1978-80. They have come to be well known, referenced in the Pictures Generation book and since then a few magazines and books of and by David Salle and Eric Fischl, who alleges he had a hand in it.
- With Nancy Chunn he created the Party Club in 1978 and again in 1986. Many wonderful artists and musicians in performance festivals in faux niteclub settings at the Franklin Furnace, including coatcheck girl Cindy Sherman, roving polaroid paparazza Paula Court and Linda Mary Montano in her orange year as the resident gypsy fortuneteller. One of the volunteers, a young guy from Madison, in part inspired by the Party Club, opened the Knitting Factory that winter and asked McMahon to book it, which wasn’t that good an idea for either of them but it was fun for a while. It was when McMahon connected Michael to Philip Johnston who connected him to Wayne Horvitz to book Thursday nights that the floodgates opened for the new jazz scene with John Zorn, Elliot Sharp et al who totally made the Knitting Factory happen in 1987. In Woodstock, Paul organized concerts and showed his art works in 1991-3 at the Wittenberg Center, a shamanic workshop center and seminary where he was Artist in Residence. In 1994 Paul opened an acoustic music venue in a shop, called the Dharmaware Cafe. The Woodstock shop sold ritual objects to students at KTD Buddhist monastery and other things like clothing from Asia. A diverse program of musical, video and spiritual presentations plus food was put on by McMahon with help from Marc Hayden Jargow.
- He also hosted a series of Poetry Parties in the late 90s in his living room salon with local youth. For some reason all of the teens and twenty-somethings in town suddenly considered themselves poets. There are six chapbooks of all of the participants, called ‘Of the Beet and Poe Tree’. He directs the Mothership, an everything center in his house in Woodstock, in operation since 2007 (a long story). It is a gallery, a B’n’B, music venue, classroom, and a site for spiritually oriented events, like memorials. It is a social sculpture in progress as McMahon has been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to be some of the change he would like to see. The small population of Woodstock is heavily weighted to the creative and spiritual. McMahon’s aspiration is to amplify peace and love through the presentation and encouragement of creativity in self and others. When we make art we feed the spirits-Joseph “Beautiful Painted Arrow” Rae