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Paul McCarthy: ‘All for the Gut’

Paul McCarthy: ‘All for the Gut’

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and ground-breaking contemporary American artists but for some people his visceral work can be hard to stomach.

The artist is known for his gut-wrenching, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums, from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting. McCarthy often mixes high and low culture in his work, seeking to break the boundaries of art by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food, his end goal to provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs about culture and human appetites.

In this HENI Talk, eminent critic Robert Storr surveys McCarthy's provocative work and makes a case for it to be read in the same vein as grotesque social satirists such as François Rabelais and James Gillray's oeuvres, which have long become canonical.

Time Period:

Various