Paul McCarthy: ‘All for the Gut’
Robert Storr
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.
[George W. Bush] So we strive to be a compassionate, decent, hopeful society.
It’s almost impossible not to pay attention to what he does, it’s almost impossible to pay attention to it for a sustained period of time without becoming nauseous.
One of the purposes of doing all of this work was not simply to create an avant-garde scandal. Certainly, he doesn’t mind doing that but that’s not the motive. The motive is to get to a very primal state of imaginative activity. And to get the viewer there as fast as possible.
I think Paul McCarthy is, like many other artists, conscious of his context. I think he is indeed satirising human disposition, human taboos and the world that’s around him. So, the success of people like Paul McCarthy, I think goes entirely along the lines of paths chartered long ago in our culture but blocked in modern times under this kind of idea of ‘good taste’. And Paul just bravely and insouciantly abolishes good taste.
People looking at this kind of work should listen to their guts, should feel their guts. They should not go to their heads; they should not immediately try to correlate it with what they know about art or somehow find a way to accommodate what they know to be good in relation to it. They should go directly to where it hits them. If they’re troubled, if they laugh out loud, if they do anything that is a totally spontaneous reaction to the disturbances that McCarthy and others are trying to create, that’s the place to start.
If you think about the British tradition, Gillray and the caricaturists of the 18th century, did this all the time. You can go down to Cecil Court and buy prints by Gillray which are every bit as obscene, and then some, as a thing that Paul McCarthy shows. I remember looking in a shop where I go quite often and finding one of Napoleon swimming in a swamp. But he’s not just in a swamp, he’s in a swamp full of turds. Now if people can’t handle Paul McCarthy, why can they handle Gillray?
Ketchup is, on the one hand, just simply a banal condiment. It is the icon of normalcy. What Paul does is to take it and use it for what it is: it’s liquid, it’s gooey, its shapeless, resembles bodily fluids. When Paul was making these ketchup pieces it was already in the time of AIDS, so the idea of contamination of blood was a very, very serious matter, a matter of great discomfort for people. Mayonnaise isn’t exactly semen but it’s close. If you have an artist gleefully mixing this stuff up and playing like a child, making the mess that all parents tell children not to make and doing it as an adult, and doing it with these things that are at least metaphorically associated with every taboo you can think of… It becomes something different than just a kind of sloppy clowning. It becomes deeply psychologically disturbing.
[Paul McCarthy, Painter, 1995] Try to understand the emotions. Try to see it my way…
He’s really aware of these connotations and all of the really serious stuff that he’s toying with.
Paul McCarthy comes from Utah, comes from a Mormon environment although he’s not a Mormon himself. And he went to the West Coast as a student. This was at a time in the 60s, where the idea was that the sculptor was no longer the person who made something but who initiated a process. And was even a part of that process.
Paul got famous by doing performances. And he also was one of the artists that used videotaping fairly early on to record performance. He did a piece called Bossy Burger. In it he did a satire of a television cooking show. And the cook wears a chef’s hat, he wears a plastic mask of Alfred E. Neuman from MAD magazine, and MAD magazine is a great influence, by the way, on this kind of work that comes mostly from beyond New York. And then, what he has are huge canisters of mayonnaise, ketchup and mustard. His performance consists largely of taking this material and smearing it on pieces of furniture which he has up on the table. And the show lasted for a month or more, so that by the time that show came to an end, those chairs had thoroughly rotted with all their food material on them, and the gallery thoroughly stank. And there was this primary repulsiveness to the whole thing. It was like nothing else. Now, what’s the reason for it? To get past taste, is to get past bad taste because bad taste has been institutionalised too. It’s to get to some kind of primitive experience of the body, and of having the viewer just have to cope with their own simultaneous fascination and desire to avoid.
Paul’s work is not just an American thing. Paul was given an installation opportunity at La Monnaie which is the French mint. It’s where they minted coins once upon a time and now where they make medals and medallions, and all of the commemorative things that the French so love. And he was invited to come and do a show there. So, he created a chocolate factory, where people made – onsite – a chocolate figurine of a Santa Claus figure, that was at the same time a butt plug, which is to say, a dildo, a sexual toy, that you would insert into the anus. Now to make a chocolate butt plug in the shape of Santa Claus, in the French mint, is a kind of amazing gathering together context and content. The greatest scatological humourist of all time was François Rabelais. Rabelais wrote a whole series of parodies on the body, and on the church and on the state. He is the prime example of the critical grotesque. The critical grotesque has always been operating on the principles that under certain conditions of permission you can make fun of cardinals, you can make fun of kings. The high can be brought low. We think we are created in the divine image, but in fact we are created in an animal reality.
And Rabelais’ famous line was ‘tout pour les tripes’, which is to say ‘all for the gut’. Everything is for the gut. So what Paul McCarthy is doing is taking the grotesque of Rabelais and updating it. And making it even more grotesque than maybe Rabelais imagined.
I think the first thing is to have your nerve be hit. And then to notice that it has been hit. And then to move forward into saying “How could this be? How could this ridiculous thing in front of me have gotten to me? That must mean that the ‘to me’ that has gotten to me, is already there. There’s some part of me already predisposed to enjoy this, or to feel it in some way, intensely.”
If you look at Goya, if you look at Gillray – any number of caricaturists of the Baroque, Renaissance, period and any number of caricaturists of the modern era – the fact that we’re affected by them means the potential to be affected by them exists in us already. So, if we deny them, what we’re doing is we’re denying this pre-disposition, this sense of the absurdity of things that we all kind-of already know is true.
It’s one thing to make a small pop object, another thing to make a mammoth gargantuan one, an oppressively large joke. We’re accustomed to heroic, monolithic sculptures, of beautiful figuresque, statuesque people: the beautiful male, the beautiful female, and so on. But what about ugliness raised to the same height and placed in the same public situation? What about being asked to look at, forced to look at, versions of ourselves that we prefer not to think about? Paul has gone into that in a big way.
There’s part of Paul’s work which is also direct political cartooning. For example, the Piccadilly Project that was done in the heart of London, where you had caricatures of the Queen of England, of Osama Bin Laden and of George Bush. And they’re all these kind-of demonic dolls, playing with each other in apocalyptic circumstances. This is political art but not in a sense of a kind of art that preaches, or that even just condemns. Because who’s to say who’s the more villainous: the Queen, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush? From Paul’s work you can’t tell. They’re all figures of power that he has caricatured and brought low. That’s the important thing. It’s about mocking everybody. Mocking the absurdity of our situation, and the low comedy of our behaviour.
I also think – and this is my own view, I don’t think of anything that Paul has said that backs this up – but I think that Paul has sort-of taken advantage of the money that has come to him, to squander it. In other words, I think that the impetus behind a lot of his work is to spend what the art market now brings to artists at his level.
[Paul McCarthy, Painter, 1995] How much money do you owe me now? Why haven’t you paid me the money you owe me?
Of course, one version of what art is, is that art again is a kid playing in his diaper.
[Paul McCarthy, Painter, 1995] You owe me a real lot of money, why don’t you pay me the money you owe me?
One version of what money is, according to Freud, is that money is a surrogate for faeces. So, supposing a lot of Paul’s work is shitting out the money the art market has delivered to him for doing the things he was doing. I think he does it saying: ‘Okay, fine, if I can have 2 million dollars, what can I do with 2 million dollars? I know, rather than making models of things, I will make them full scale. In making them full scale, I will go to the film industry and buy up bits and pieces of left-over productions and incorporate them in my work, but I’ll also make things that rival the real big things that films use in their productions’.
So, for example, there was a year or two when he and his son, with whom he works, were making pirate movies, sort-of satires of pirate movies. And by this time already Johnny Depp was all over the place with Pirates of the Caribbean. But there’s a long tradition of such pirate movies, and Errol Flynn was one of the heroes. He bought up the model that was used in one of Errol Flynn’s films, and started playing with it. Well, this is already a very big expenditure, a very big prop left over from the grand days of the Hollywood studio production. And he did this in an industrial park on the edge of Los Angeles, so he was almost like a guy now creating 20th Century Fox in its old Hollywood context. And then making satire films, travesties, of the kinds of things that Hollywood used to produce but almost at the scale of the real thing.
So, if you think that there’s 20th Century Fox, and there’s MGM, and now there’s McCarthy.
[Paul McCarthy, Heidi, Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone, 1991-92]
Puppet 1: I have seen them naked at times, when they have stripped off their false ornament. They somehow become more animal.
Puppet 2: All nudes are perfect, there is not one that is not pried from the Lord’s, nature’s, mould…
Many of the things that artists do is to play in public, and to play in an exemplary way that others may think about the things they do, in terms that question what they are. And Paul McCarthy for all the other labels you could attach to him: funk, West Coast, weird, cartoony, whatever it is – he’s primarily a man playing and playing on a grand scale, with concepts that are some of them very serious, and some of them that are truly child’s play.
With thanks to
Dylan Huig
Hauser & Wirth
Paul McCarthy Studio
Archive
AP Archive
British Museum
Getty Images
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Morgan Library and Museum
Rijksmuseum
Music
9 Lives
Audio Network
Paul McCarthy Artworks
All works © Paul McCarthy
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Hollywood Halloween, 1977
Performance, video, photographs
Photos: Karen McCarthy
Piccadilly Circus, 2003
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Photos: Ann-Marie Rounkle
Hot Dog, 1974
Performance, video, photographs
Photos: Spandau Parks / Karen McCarthy
Experimental Dancer, 1975
Performance, video, photographs
Photos: Mike Cram
Plaster Your Head and One Arm into a Wall, 1973
Performance, photographs
Photo: Mike Cram / Karen McCarthy
Excerpt from performance video Penis Dip Painting, 1974
Black and white video with sound
Duration: 17:50
Train, Mechanical, 2003-2010
Steel, platinum silicone, fiberglass, rope, electrical and mechanical components
109 x 223 x 60 inches
Excerpts from performance video Piccadilly Circus, 2003
4-channel color video with sound
Duration: 76:50
Excerpt from performance video Rocky, 1976
Color video with sound
Duration: 21:30
Still from performance video Santa Chocolate Shop, 1997
2-channel color video with sound
Duration 43:00
Excerpt from performance video WGG Test / Wild Gone Girls, 2003
Color video with sound
Duration: 5:40
Excerpt from performance video Icicle Slobber, 1975
Black and white video with sound
Duration: 1:11
Excerpt from performance video Spitting on the Camera Lens, 1974
Black and white video with sound
Duration: 1:00
Excerpt from performance video Bossy Burger, 1991
Color video with sound
Duration: 59:08
WS White Snow, 2012-13
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Photo: Jeremiah McCarthy
The Garden, 1991-1992
Wood, fiberglass, steel, electric motors, latex rubber, foam rubber, wigs, clothing, artificial turf. leaves, Pine needles, rocks & trees
22 x 30 x 20 feet
WS White Snow Mammoth, 2013
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Photo: Louisa McCarthy
Santa Chocolate Shop, 1996-97
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Santa With Butt Plug (Inflatable 80′), 2007
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
80 x 40 x 40 feet
Photo: Mark Vos
Santa With Butt Plug (Inflatable 80′), 2007
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
80 x 40 x 40 feet
Photo: Raivo Puusemp
Shoe Penis, 2009
Charcoal, oil stick, collage on paper
98 x 93 x 8 inches
WS White Snow, 2012-13
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Photo: Damon McCarthy
Caribbean Pirates, 2005
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Collaboration with Damon McCarthy
Photos: Sidney Duenas
Grand Pop, 1977
Performance, photographs
University of Southern California Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA
Daddies Ketchup, 2001
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
374 x 126 x 126 inches
Photo: Ann-Marie Rounkle
Excerpts from performance video Face Painting- Floor, White Line, 1972
Black and white video with sound
Duration: 6:02
Death Ship, 1981
Performance, photographs
Photo: Steve Durland
WS White Snow, 2012-13
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Photo: Josh White
Excerpts from performance video Pinocchio Pipenose Householddilemma, 1994
Color video with sound
Duration: 43:58
Excerpts from performance video Painter, 1995
Color video with sound
Duration: 50:01
Excerpt from performance video Whipping a Wall and a Window with Paint ,1974
Black and white video with sound
Duration: 7:06
Installation view, Chocolate Factory Monnaie De Paris, 2014
Melting/tempering tanks, 36-head spinner, 225 custom plastic injected molds, chocolate, cocoa butter, windows, plumbing, AC units, 2 refrigerators, linoleum, rubber flooring, wallpaper, tables, baskets, buckets, conveyor belts, packaging,
Dimensions variable
Photo: Marc Domage
Installation view, Chocolate Factory Monnaie De Paris, 2014
Melting/tempering tanks, 36-head spinner, 225 custom plastic injected molds, chocolate, cocoa butter, windows, plumbing, AC units, 2 refrigerators, linoleum, rubber flooring, wallpaper, tables, baskets, buckets, conveyor belts, packaging,
Dimensions variable
Photo: Naotaka Hiro
Installation view, Chocolate Factory Monnaie De Paris, 2014
Melting/tempering tanks, 36-head spinner, 225 custom plastic injected molds, chocolate, cocoa butter, windows, plumbing, AC units, 2 refrigerators, linoleum, rubber flooring, wallpaper, tables, baskets, buckets, conveyor belts, packaging,
Dimensions variable
Photo: Dylan Huig
Chocolate Santa with Butt Plug, 2007
Chocolate
10h x 5.5 x 3 inches
Installation view, Chocolate Factory Monnaie De Paris, 2014
Melting/tempering tanks, 36-head spinner, 225 custom plastic injected molds, chocolate, cocoa butter, windows, plumbing, AC units, 2 refrigerators, linoleum, rubber flooring, wallpaper, tables, baskets, buckets, conveyor belts, packaging,
Dimensions variable
Photos: Etienne Pottier
WS White Snow, 2012-13
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Photo: Damon McCarthy
Pig Man, 1980
Performance, video, photographs
American Art Performance Festival,
Theatre Circo Spazio Zero, Rome, Italy
Caribbean Pirates, 2005
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Collaboration with Damon McCarthy
Photo: Ann Marie Rounkle
Piggies, 2007
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
507 x 960 x 1023 inches
Photo: Neils Donckers
Piggies, 2007
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
507 x 960 x 1023 inches
Photo: Karin Seinsoth
Complex Pile, 2007
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
620 x 1318 x 622 inches
Photo: Neils Donckers
White Head, Bush Head, 2007
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
299 x 360 inches
Photo: Neils Donckers
White Head, Bush Head , 2007
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
299 x 360 inches
Photo: Karin Seinsoth
Bound to Fail – PM HM Sculpture on a Pedestal, 2003-2004
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, scaffolding, rigging
600 x 420 x 300 inches
Bound to Fail – PM HM Sculpture on a Pedestal, 2003-2004
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, scaffolding, rigging
600 x 420 x 300 inches
Photo: Neils Donckers
Complex Pile, 2007
Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, rigging
620 x 1318 x 622 inches
Photo courtesy of Hauser & Wirth
Tree (Inflatable), 2014
Green vinyl, fan
960 x 540 x 540 inches
Photo: Amy Baumann
Sod and Sodie Sock Comp. O.S.O., 1998
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Collaboration with Mike Kelley
Photos: Angelika Hausenblas
Excerpts from performance video Heidi, Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone, 1991-1992
Color video with sound
Duration: 62:39
Collaboration with Mike Kelley
Heidi, Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone, 1991-92
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Collaboration with Mike Kelley
WS White Snow, 2012-13
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Photo: Damon McCarthy
Caribbean Pirates, 2005
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Collaboration with Damon McCarthy
Photo: Ann-Marie Rounkle
Rebel Dabble Babble, 2011-2012
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Photo: Josh White
Gray Ghost, 1936/2001
Found object
175 x 84 x 252 inches
Collaboration with Damon McCarthy
Photo: Paul McCarthy
Gray Ghost, 1936/2001
Found object
175 x 84 x 252 inches
Collaboration with Damon McCarthy
Caribbean Pirates, 2005
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Collaboration with Damon McCarthy
Photo: Sid Duenas
Houseboat Party, 2005
Performance, video, photographs, installation
Collaboration with Damon McCarthy
Photos: Sid Duenas
Excerpts from performance video Experimental Dancer, Edit #2, 1975
Color video with sound
Duration: 23:08
Excerpt from performance video Class Fool, 1976
Color video with sound
Duration: 40:06
Excerpt from performance video Spinning, short version, 1970
Black and white video with sound
Duration: 2:01
Portrait of Paul McCarthy
Photo: Mara McCarthy
Additional Archive
Hiroshima Bomb Dropped
Sherman Grinberg Library / Getty Images
An atomic mushroom clouds spreads over the Pacific Ocean
Hearst Newsreel / Getty Images
President George W. Bush lays out his 2006 priorities in his fifth State of the Union address
AP Archive
Atomic bomb named ‘Gilda’, first bomb in US Operation Crossroads
Sherman Grinberg Library / Getty Images
Atomic weapon test Baker, Operation Crossroads
Internet Archive- Footage / Getty Images
Queen Elizabeth II attends remembrance service
AP Archive
The Gout
James Gillray, 1799
British Museum
Petit souper, a la Parisienne; -or- a family of sans-culotts refreshing, after the fatigues of the day
James Gillray, 1792
British Museum
The monster going to take his afternoons luncheon
James Gillray, 1790
British Museum
Billy playing Johnny a dirty Trick
James Gillray, 1796
British Museum
Tha apples and the horse-turds; -or-Buonaparte among the golden pippins
James Gillray, 1800
British Museum
Welcome to Utah Sign
storiestold / Getty Images
The gold statue Moroni atop the LDS Salt Lake Temple
Stock Footage, Inc. / Getty Images
Aerial Utah Salt Lake City
Guillaume749 / Getty Images
Golden Gate Bridge 1972
pronto8000 / Getty Images
Canted time lapse traffic on Golden Gate Bridge
Mr. Time Lapse / Getty Images
Beverly Hills Palm Trees
LPETTET / Getty Images
Driving Under Palm Trees
simonkr / Getty Images
The Monnaie de Paris unveils a new exhibition called ‘Chocolate Factory’ by U.S artist Paul McCarthy
AP Archive
McCarthy exhibits chocolate versions of his sex toy sculpture
AFPTV / Getty Images
Rabelais (deuxième planche)
Print made by Félix Bracquemond, 1868
British Museum
Rabelais présente Gargantua
Gravure de Gustave Doré
Frontispice de l’édition de 1854
Illustration of the Prologue that appears in book 1
of Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
Published in The Works of Rabelais, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty
and Peter Antony Motteux, 1894
Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel ou sont contenues plusieurs figures de l’invention de maitre François Rabelais
François Desprez, 1565
Published by Richard Breton
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(CC0 1.0)
Schetsboekblad met een studie van een reus, kleine figuren en drie schetsen van gezichten voor een illustratie uit François Rabelais’ Gargantua en Pantagruel
Henk Henriët, c.1936 – c.1940
Rijksmuseum
(CC0 1.0)
Gargantua
Gustave Doré
Sketch of Two Grotesque Faces with Gaping Mouths
Gustave Doré
The Morgan Library and Museum
Purchased in 2000
2000.52:2
‘Grandgousier’ staand, schreeuwend
Henk Henriët, 1939
Uit een reeks illustraties bij F. Rabelais, Gargantua en Pantagruel
Rijksmuseum
(CC0 1.0)
Gargantua (with baby)
Gustave Doré
The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra)
- 37, Esto es peor (This is worse), Harris.157
- 39, Grande hazana! Con muertos! (A heroic feat! With dead men!)
Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1810–20, published 1863
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(CC0 1.0)
“More Pigs Than Teats”,–or–the New Litter of Hungry Grunters, Sucking John-Bull’s-Old-Sow to Death
James Gillray, 1806
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(CC0 1.0)
The Pigs Possessed:–or–the Broad Bottom’d Litter Running Headlong into Ye Sea of Perdition
James Gillray, 1807
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(CC0 1.0)
Giant balloon dog welcomes visitors at Frieze art fair
AP Archive
Paul McCarthy titled “Complex Pile” in Hong Kong
LAURENT FIEVET / Getty Images
‘Tree’ By Paul McCarthy – Monumental Artwork at Place Vendome In Paris
Chesnot / Getty Images
Giant Inflatable ‘Tree’ By Paul McCarthy Damaged at Place Vendome In Paris
Chesnot / Getty Images
Errol Flynn in Captain Blood
John Springer Collection / Getty Images
20th Century Fox Logo
20th Century Fox / Getty Images
Interior of MGM Studios
Hulton Archive / Getty Images
‘Paul McCarthy’, Hauser & Wirth
Harmony Korine, ‘Paul McCarthy has plenty of shock left in him’, Interview Magazine, 19 June 2019
Mark Rappolt, ‘Paul McCarthy’, ArtReview, September 2015
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