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16/11/2000

Paul McCarthy

Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA, Los Angeles

Paul McCarthy is the first U.S. survey of the work of this pioneering Los Angeles-based artist. Spanning over 30 years of the artist's varied artistic production, the exhibition will highlight McCarthy's fusion of sculpture and performance, which is defined by often controversial combinations of pop culture clichés, social taboos, and art historical references.

Organized for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, by Lisa Phillips, director, and Dan Cameron, senior curator, the exhibition features more than 100 works, including drawings, videos, sculptures, and installations, that present McCarthy's exploration of the effects of media and consumerism on the subconscious. His work often holds up a mirror to a range of taboos ignored by American popular culture through the use of the body as a repository of society's fears, obsessions, and conflicts. One of the most influential yet under-recognized artists in the United States today, McCarthy engages in social critique through outrageous theatricality and a violent landscape of dysfunction and trauma.

During the 1970s and 1980s, McCarthy's early performances employed cross-dressing, cartoon characters, and B-movie effects. References to children's shows and stories help to frame his focus on sex and violence within childhood and family situations. He incorporated toy-like objects and artifacts, plastic prosthetics, and processed foods in performances that confront social conditioning by the family and mass media.

Though McCarthy's last performance was in 1984, he continued to produce taped performances that were edited and exhibited as videos. His three-dimensional work such as The Trunks (1984) were an extension of his performance work. This stack of well-used trunks contained the soiled props from ten years of performances. He later exhibited the trunks with their contents revealed.

Sculptures in the 1990s again mixed pop culture images with sexual content. Works such as Spaghetti Man (1993) and Tomato Head (1994) are animal, vegetable, animal hybrids that show the confusions of childhood resulting from fantasy and entertainment. The human body, rabbit head, and fifty-foot urethane penis of Spaghetti Man evoke excess and surrealism despite its toy-like attributes. Likewise, Tomato Head resembles a Mr. Potato Head, a classic toy that features an uncommon combination of vegetable and human has been subverted by exchanging already incongruous parts for a potato for even more disparate body parts.

In the 1990s, McCarthy's work moved away from performances into three-dimensional scenarios such as the full-scale staged environment The Garden (1991-92), seen in 1992 at MOCA's Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s. The installation discloses its "secret" only after the viewer is in close proximity to the raised grove of trees and rocks. With The Garden, motorized mannequin-like figures echoed the movements seen in the artist's own performance work. Cultural Gothic (1992), which confronts the taboo of bestiality through an instructional lesson, revisits the father and son relationship seen in The Garden.

McCarthy has continued to expand the technical components in his work, seen in the complex installation Bossy Burger (1991), which is constructed with cast-off sets from the defunct television series Family Affair. The first of a series of video and stage set installations that include Pinocchio Pipenose Householddilemma (1992) and Heidi (a 1992 collaboration with Mike Kelley), Bossy Burger is a destroyed set that includes video monitors replaying the cause of destruction. He transformed a cooking show into a demonstration of increasingly violent and erotic stunts reminiscent of low-budget horror films. In Pinocchio Pipenose Householddilemma, McCarthy inverted the set so that the house sits upside down. He also dissolved the line separating audience and performer by asking that viewers wear Pinocchio costumes and masks that duplicate McCarthy's outfit in the video.

Born in Salt Lake City in 1945, McCarthy studied at the University of Utah. Although initially trained as a painter, he began experimenting with film in 1967 and produced a large number of photographs through the late 1960s and early 1970s. He received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and continued his studies at the University of Southern California where he received a M.F.A in 1973.

Currently a professor in the fine arts department at UCLA, McCarthy has influenced successive generations of West Coast artists. He is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York and Patrick Painter in Los Angeles. In addition, his work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including the 1995 and 1997 Whitney Biennials.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication co-published by Cantz Editions that includes essays by Anthony Vidler, Amelia Jones, and New Museum senior curator Dan Cameron, and an introduction by New Museum director Lisa Phillips. This fully illustrated 264-page catalogue includes 299 color images and 187 black and white images.

Following its presentation at MOCA, which is coordinated by chief curator Paul Schimmel, the exhibition will be on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (February 22 to May 13, 2001).

MOCA's presentation includes the screening of excerpts from influential B-movies, television shows, experimental films, and McCarthy's early videos in the Gilbert B. Friesen Visitors' Gallery.

Funding for this exhibition is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Producers Council of the New Museum. The Los Angeles presentation is made possible in part by Eugenio Lopez, Ursula Hauser, Manuela and Iwan Wirth, and The Flick Collection.

The Museum of Contemporary Art 250 South Grand Avenue · Downtown Los Angeles

The Geffen Contemporary 152 North Central Avenue · Downtown Los Angeles (in the Little Tokyo district)

Telephone: 213/621-2766 Fax: 213/620-8674

Tuesday through Sunday: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The museum is closed Monday and on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day.

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