Paul McCarthy
Birth : 1945-08-04, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
History
While still a student, Paul McCarthy threw himself out of a second floor window in a performance/action, emulating Yves Klein's legendary "Leap into the Void." McCarthy was an influential figure in the Southern California art and performance scene for decades before achieving international recognition. His performance work in the late 1970s explored areas of Dionysian and shamanistic initiation rituals, as well as the body and sexuality. The intensity of these performances, which often included the graphic depiction of taboo subjects, eventually led to his use of video and installation as primary media. Mining the depths of the family and childhood via kitsch and pop cultural detritus, the body and sexuality, and an often outrageous theatricality, McCarthy's works inhabit a violent landscape of dysfunction and trauma. In many of his works, he adopts a performance persona that appears crazed, witch-like, or infantile. McCarthy's works often involve liquids, from bodily fluids to paint; one performance involved mixing his own blood with food, an obsessive gesture that is simulated in Family Tyranny. In the late 1980s, McCarthy began using film and television sets as elements in video/performance installations. Often these elaborate fabrications involved the restaging of culturally-charged myths and icons, such as Heidi and Pinocchio, in the context of family psychodramas, Hollywood genres, and mass media.
Donald Duck
The first chapter of a pseudo western series, a meditation on mediated violence. Donald Duck, his wife Daisy Duck, their daughter Bonkers, Nancy Reagan, Andy Warhol, John Wayne, Mini, Heidi, Poncho, and the Cartwrights abuse, torture, and kill each other.
Sound Designer
The first chapter of a pseudo western series, a meditation on mediated violence. Donald Duck, his wife Daisy Duck, their daughter Bonkers, Nancy Reagan, Andy Warhol, John Wayne, Mini, Heidi, Poncho, and the Cartwrights abuse, torture, and kill each other.
Writer
The first chapter of a pseudo western series, a meditation on mediated violence. Donald Duck, his wife Daisy Duck, their daughter Bonkers, Nancy Reagan, Andy Warhol, John Wayne, Mini, Heidi, Poncho, and the Cartwrights abuse, torture, and kill each other.
Director
The first chapter of a pseudo western series, a meditation on mediated violence. Donald Duck, his wife Daisy Duck, their daughter Bonkers, Nancy Reagan, Andy Warhol, John Wayne, Mini, Heidi, Poncho, and the Cartwrights abuse, torture, and kill each other.
Paul McCarthy's reinterpretation of John Ford's classic western Stagecoach.
Writer
Paul McCarthy's reinterpretation of John Ford's classic western Stagecoach.
Director
Paul McCarthy's reinterpretation of John Ford's classic western Stagecoach.
Director
In 1983, Paul McCarthy realised the performance Aryan Death Ship in which the artist assumed the authoritative figure of the captain of an ‘Aryan Ship of Death’. The performance viewers were expected to interact with and humour the grotesque antics of the captain, as though they were a crew subjected to his tyranny. Amplifying shipboard power relations and the violence associated with the figure of the sea captain, Aryan Death Ship is one of several of McCarthy’s performances dedicated to the subject of the ship and its occupants as the embodiment of a micro state and its un-civil society.
Drawing on the idiom and imagery of the consumer culture he grew up in, video artist Paul McCarthy distorts and mutates the familiar into the disturbing and grotesque as fairy tale narratives and foods are transformed into tableaus of abuse and violation.
Director
Out O' Actions documents Kelley and McCarthy's preliminary activities in organizing a project for the Visitor's Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles during the inaugural exhibition of "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979." Mimicking the editing structure of Kurt Kren's documentation of Otto Muehl's action Mama und Papa (1964), the documentation of Kelley and McCarthy's curatorial preparations is presented as performative activity itself.
Director
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."
Director
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.
Director
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. -http://v2.nl/archive/works/pinocchio-pipenose-household-dilemma
Director
A collaborative work based on Joanna Spyri's novel, Heidi.. The entire work consisted of a fabricated set, a group of partial and full life-size rubber figures, two large backdrop paintings, and a video tape shot entirely on the set. The set was installed at the center of the gallery (Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna)... We were interested in imitating film and television production, and exaggerating the fractured process of film. - Paul McCarthy In Heidi we toyed with this illusionary nature by treating the doubles and stand-ins for the actors as obvious sculpture, more in the manner of a puppet show than traditional film. - Mike Kelley
A collaborative work based on Joanna Spyri's novel, Heidi.. The entire work consisted of a fabricated set, a group of partial and full life-size rubber figures, two large backdrop paintings, and a video tape shot entirely on the set. The set was installed at the center of the gallery (Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna)... We were interested in imitating film and television production, and exaggerating the fractured process of film. - Paul McCarthy In Heidi we toyed with this illusionary nature by treating the doubles and stand-ins for the actors as obvious sculpture, more in the manner of a puppet show than traditional film. - Mike Kelley
Director
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’.
A man makes soup with mayonnaise and dolls. McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for one day alone and one day with Mike Kelley. I asked Mike Kelley to be the son and I would be the father. There was no written script. After taping for two days, I edited the tapes, making two separate tapes: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. They are often shown together."
Father
Experimental video about child abuse. McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for one day alone and one day with Mike Kelley. I asked Mike Kelley to be the son and I would be the father. There was no written script. After taping for two days, I edited the tapes, making two separate tapes: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. They are often shown together."
Self
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.
Writer
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. Conceived for the camera and performed alone or with only a few people present, these short performances use video to articulate both monitor and studio space.
Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. Conceived for the camera and performed alone or with only a few people present, these short performances use video to articulate both monitor and studio space.
Director
Here, the artist performs as the female protagonist of Russ Meyer’s soft-porn film, Europe in the Raw! (1963). Done up in black lace lingerie, heavy makeup, and a seductive expression, he meanders across the room, methodically exposing different body parts, accentuated by cropped close-ups. Yet the work quickly deviates from standard realms of sexual fantasy, devolving into something unexpectedly abnormal. Having thrust a hot dog up his ass and smeared himself with ketchup, he positions himself on all fours and “goes down” on a slab of glistening raw meat, burying his face in it, taking it in his teeth, drooling and spitting on it, and finally rubbing it over his body. He then adds ground beef to the mix, spreading it across the bed along with the steak, hot dogs, and ketchup and thrusting his body back and forth with increasing agitation, as if simultaneously humping and being humped by it. Such antics continue for nearly 45 minutes.
Director
Performance art piece
Performance art piece
