Paul Mccarthy

📘 About This Book

Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids. These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist. This is the first comprehensive survey of over twenty years of work by a profoundly influential artist whose work is in the collections of the world's most important museums. Ralph Rugoff, curator, critic and author of Circus Americanus, has created an important critical framework for contemporary West Coast art. In the Survey he identifies key themes in McCarthy's oeuvre and sets them within a broader cultural context. Expert on live arts and co-editor of Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Kristine Stiles talks with the artist about his performances. Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, celebrated for his writings in Flash Art and his curating of public art projects in Italy, focuses on McCarthy's Pinocchio Pipenose Householddilemma, a nineteenth-century tale told in a post-Disney world. For the Artist's Choice, McCarthy has spliced together various fragments from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, creating his own non-linear rendition of this classic existential novel. The book also includes interviews and previously unpublished notes and poems towards sculptures, performances and videos.

📖 Summary

Published in 1996 and spanning 168 pages, this comprehensive volume offers the first major survey of over twenty years of work by the Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy. Born in 1945, McCarthy is renowned for creating Disneyesque installations, unsettling sculptures of animal, vegetable, and human hybrids, and chaotic slapstick performances that act as a visceral purge of the American national subconscious. Through these striking creations, the book explores the deep psychological and sexual desires, as well as the pervasive anxieties, that are continuously induced by mass media and the built environment of contemporary America. McCarthy's provocative artistic vision is vividly captured in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs with everyday condiments that cleverly stand in for bodily fluids. Throughout the survey, readers witness how these works have been variously deployed across different mediums, ranging from early live actions often documented on video to more recent, outsized figures and artificial rural environments combined in overtly sexual and jarring ways. While McCarthy's work clearly echoes the historic traditions of European artists such as Joseph Beuys and the Viennese Aktionistes, this monograph highlights how he successfully reinterprets action art with a distinctively dark, postmodern twist. The book serves as an essential visual and critical documentation of an artist who fearlessly confronts the underbelly of consumer culture, pop iconography, and societal norms. By examining the evolution of McCarthy's performances and installations up to the mid-1990s, the monograph provides art enthusiasts, scholars, and critics with a thorough understanding of his uncompromising methodology. It maps out how slapstick humor and bodily excess are transformed into a serious critique of modern media landscapes, making it a foundational text for anyone seeking to understand the provocative intersection of performance art, sculpture, and contemporary psychoanalysis.

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