Paul
McCarthy
Tomato Heads
1994
Tomato
Heads
(detail)
installed at the New Museum
Paul
McCarthy
Grand Pop
1977
Performance
props, including a mask of Alfred E. Newman, at the
New Museum
Performance
residue
at the New Museum
Madonna
mannequin
Cultural
Gothic
1992
Paul
McCarthy's
The Garden
1992
opening at Deitch Projects
The
Garden
(detail)
|
Backdoor
Man
by
Jerry Saltz
Mayor
Giuliani may react with shock to artworks, but it's
rare for those in the art world to be shocked by
art. Startled is usually the best we can do. Either
we're the most well-adjusted crowd around, or we're
out of touch. But as I walked through Paul
McCarthy's spotty, bang-up retrospective at the New
Museum, I was shocked -- not only at how abject and
totally sicko his art can be, but at how few people
seemed offended by it, and how many appeared
mesmerized.
For those
of us who have spent years fending off McCarthy's
blitzkrieging blend of sculpture, performance,
photography and Freudian regression; who have
wondered whether his messiness mightn't just be an
artsy version of David Letterman throwing tubs of
mayonnaise off buildings; and who consider his
gross-out mechanical animations little more than
dirty Disney, March and April will be cruel months.
That's because McCarthy is all over the place --
literally and figuratively.
His
retrospective fills the New Museum, and his giant
1991 installation, The Garden -- a dystopic
animatronic landscape of earth- and tree-fucking
weirdos -- occupies Deitch Projects (18 Wooster
Street, through Apr. 7). Also at Deitch is
Saloon #1, his id-wrenching video starring a
bottomless bar babe on all fours talking incest.
The Box, a full-scale tilted rendition of
his studio, can be seen in an uptown office atrium
(590 Madison Avenue, at 56th Street, through Apr.
20, sponsored by the Public Art Fund). And if
that's not enough, at Luhring Augustine (531 West
24th Street, through Apr. 7) there's Santa
Chocolate Shop, his contribution to the 1997
Whitney Biennial, a large, tipped-over cottage with
video projections of a red-nosed reindeer humping
an elf and a demented Santa shitting chocolate into
the mouth of a female helper.
These
shows reveal -- in at times excruciatingly
nauseating depth -- an artist who has to be
considered and learned from, if not exactly
embraced. McCarthy's art is hardcore and hard to
take. It's bitter, monotonous, histrionic and
juvenile. His stories have no moral, his
performances barely any structure. There's little
variety or nuance to his art, and his babbling,
nincompoop characters are often psychos. In many
ways, all his performances are one performance, and
this ur-performance can feel limited, hammy and
vicious.
Still,
McCarthy's art has a lot to give. Although his
expressionism feels dated in these cleaner, more
cosmopolitan times, he's proof there's a dark side
to modernism. A sort of amalgamated reincarnation
of Egon Schiele, George Grosz, Ed Kienholz and Pier
Paolo Pasolini, he's a corrective to art history's
fondness for -- in Celine's acerbic words --
"shitless epics." McCarthy's art is nothing if not
full of shit.
Like
Gilbert & George, and unlike a number of
equally or more talented conceptualists, McCarthy
has found ways to make his work both visceral and
visual. Although many of his objects are clunky,
and his leftover performance sets often read like
evidentiary fragments, his videos abound in a
backdoor, Rabelaisian beauty. His color is
voluptuous, and his mixture of exaggeration,
entertainment, food and flat-footed irony is
consummate. McCarthy is the anti-Walt Whitman of
postwar American art -- an artist who sings the
body horrific, whose schizoid song of himself is as
caustic as it is dogged.
A
paradoxically mild-mannered barbarian, a sort of
sad-sack Charles Manson, he makes concrete
Whitman's vow to "speak the password primeval."
While Whitman savored "the scent of these arm-pits,
an aroma finer than prayer," McCarthy desecrates
that prayer and cannibalizes himself, his smells
and his bodily fluids. A prickly, uneven artist,
McCarthy's a gargoyle on the cathedral of
modernism, a hobgoblin of icky excess. As a nonfan,
I don't like McCarthy any more or less after this
recent immersion, but I respect him much
more.
Now 55
and looking like the demented geezer he often plays
in his videos, McCarthy is an amazingly original
American voice who probably wouldn't have happened
at all if he hadn't happened in Los Angeles. Having
settled there in 1969, he displays an unmistakable
anti-New York, West Coast skepticism in many early
photographs of his late-'60s- early-'70s "actions"
(the more genteel term performance wasn't
yet in wide usage). Here, McCarthy jabs at Abstract
Expressionism: He plasters his head in a wall,
whips paint-soaked rags around a room, smears
himself in excrement, and uses his face as a
paintbrush.
By the
mid '70s, he was doing live performances for tiny,
embarrassed audiences or executing activities alone
in his basement. These performances might feature
McCarthy, often dressed in women's panties or
slips, spreading ketchup or saliva all over his
otherwise naked body, having sex with his bed, or
just beating the crap out of himself. In
Tubbing (1974), wearing a wig, he performs a
kind of self-rape, jamming sausages into his mouth
and ass. All this is pretty scurrilous, probably
misogynist, fairly funny, and somewhat
hypnotic.
With his
themes of bestiality, sodomy, birth, and
masturbation in place -- but his art still lacking
-- McCarthy steps things up in the '80s. He evolves
a cast of characters as well as a number of
primitive protonarratives. He dons grandfather, sea
captain and Nixon, Reagan and Carter masks; later,
he wears animal getups. However, had he stopped
making art in 1989, I suspect, there'd be no New
York McCarthy fest, and he most likely would have
slipped between the cracks into the realm of the
merely kinky.
But
McCarthy goes for it in the '90s. His 1991
breakthrough video installation, Bossy
Burger, is a lunatic ballet of food and sex
enacted on the discarded sitcom set of Family
Affair. A powerful and powerfully perverted
work, Burger is a porno-kitsch farce /
burlesque / psychodrama / cooking show; in it,
McCarthy channels the first of many characters from
American fantasy life: Alfred E. Neuman.
For me
his high point is Painter. In this 1995
one-hour video, he gets depravity, degradation and
vulgarity to sync perfectly with pathos, plot and
character. We see McCarthy, pantless, dressed in a
painter's smock, a bulbous nose and a blond wig,
enacting primal scenes of creativity: painting with
huge brushes; dragging around giant tubes marked
"Red" and "Shit"; muttering, "I can't do this";
murmuring, "De Kooning, de Kooning." He rants at
his female dealer, hacks off his fingertip, looks
miserable sitting next to art collectors and stoops
as an art critic sniffs his rear. Painter is
so uncannily accurate it should be required viewing
for every art student.
Using
actors -- as he does in Painter, Santa and
his so-so collaborations with Mike Kelley,
Heidi and Fresh Acconci -- is a great
idea for McCarthy. It expands his art, gets him
beyond narcissism and allows him to plumb other
ids. But after 30 years of shtick, McCarthy's work
still feels stuck in its own devices,
paraphernalia, and pseudo-rituals.
Judging
from the looks of his gigantic public sculpture,
The Box, McCarthy thinks so, too. In this
huge, upended replica of his studio with more than
3,000 objects attached, the artist is in extreme
search mode. A whatever-it-takes work, The
Box is a grandly self-abnegating bulimic
gesture -- a total sculptural purging. Its
bluntness, bravery, and desperation suggest
McCarthy's search may yet bear fruit.
JERRY
SALTZ is art critic for the Village
Voice, where this text first
appeared.
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