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Paul McCarthy, with the mask of Mad Magazine icon Alfred E. Neuman, prepares a meal – makes a mess – in the set of the America soap ‘Family Affair’.
In contrast with McCarthy's recent projects, however, many of his older works are little short of incendiary--particularly three videos from 1975, whose now lo-fi texture and queasy saturation only add to their bad-dream quality. Here is McCarthy, in Experimental Dancer, as something legitimately alarming: an idiot self-celebrant prancing naked in a grotesque, grinning mask, tucking his cock between his legs or pulling it into distension, waving scissors around, ceremonially trimming his pubic hair, and pushing his anus toward the camera.
Artists McCarthy and Kelley re-stage classic 1970s performance pieces by Vito Acconci, with a decidedly ironic Southern California sensibility. States McCarthy: "[The piece] is a reference to art now, to a resurgence of the 1970s and an interest in youth in the art world. There are also references to Hollywood 8 movies and soft porn made in the Hollywood hills... In Fresh Acconci, the New York art scene is sandwiched with Hollywood. Two kinds of aesthetics overlap. The tape itself crosses lines of what is politically correct, exploitation and softening or obscuring the meaning."
The performance takes place in a small setting with an audience, but that's only a part of the artwork. After filming the performance he uses them again in installations where he is Miss Piggy or Heidi. And of course lots of ketchup, Mayonnaise and chocolate sauce.
In Painter, the mythology of the artist as hero is attacked in a grotesque, parodic performance that unambiguously points to the abstract expressionists. Performing as the painter, McCarthy undermines pre-packaged ideas about the creative process by turning it into an absurdist soap-opera.
In a shamanistic, quasi-sexual ritual performance, McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup-spattered classroom at the University of California, San Diego until dazed and self-injured. He then vomited several times and inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum. The piece ended when the audience could no longer stand to watch his performance.
Dressed in a green wig, clown mask, and small hat, the artist raises and lowers his hands, sways his unclothed body, and hums a simple melody. He performs in front of a wooden partition, with close-up shots of his face intercut with views of his full body or torso. Eventually, he makes a loud exit from the frame. This work is the precursor to Experimental Dancer.
Depicting a sailing party gone wrong. McCarthy questions the effects that violence and mutilation, both real and simulated, have on the viewer in contemporary culture.
Rocky comprises a single monitor video and fourteen related drawings. The video begins with a man, McCarthy himself, waiting before the camera with his back turned and then turning to face it. Wearing shorts and boxing gloves, he begins to address the viewer in muttered sounds which mimic the manner in which actor Sylvester Stallone speaks as the character Rocky in the eponymous 1976 film. He begins occasionally to hit himself on the head, as though to clear his thoughts and to demonstrate his virility, but gradually the number and violence of the blows increases. It appears as though the Rocky character is having an imaginary fight with another person, but as the film develops it turns into a masochistic fight with himself.
With his Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma, Paul McCarthy shows that interfaces don't always have to be a complicated business. Contact with the world of this American artist is established by dressing in red & yellow coveralls, enormous red plastic shoes and a mask with a long tube for a nose. Dressed in this low tech interface the audience can see on video how another Pinocchio - Paul McCarthy himself - covers himself in ketchup and chocolate paste.