“Artists are seen as one step above criminals”
Paul McCarthy on his B-movie early ambitions, art schools, the pressure to move to New York and why he’ll never leave LA
By Charlotte Burns From issue 228, October 2011
Published online 30 Sep 11 (Features)
Paul McCarthy has been a subversive and provocative presence throughout his career, attacking traditional family values, undermining notions of masculinity and inverting the ideals of the American Dream.
Born in Utah in 1945, he moved to Los Angeles in 1970, and has remained there ever since. He was initially known for his performances—which were usually wild, messy and experimental (and for which he rarely earned any money). He staged around 50 between 1970 and the mid 1980s: from early works, in which he used his body as a paintbrush, to 1974’s Whipping a Wall with Paint, which satirised the machismo of the Ab-Ex artists, his work has become steadily more sexual, violent and dark-humoured. His interest in absurd disorientation is evident from video footage of his 1976 performance Class Fool, where the naked, ketchup-smeared artist maniacally spins and falls around a university classroom while hugging a doll between his bare thighs. The piece concludes with him vomiting.
He then focused on sculpture, creating works including mechanised pieces that could perform on their own. McCarthy continued performing, though now for the camera rather than a live audience, staging works including Painter, 1995, in which he plays a hysterical artist who, after heaving giant tubes of paint and throwing tantrums, uses a cleaver to hack off a finger from one of his massive fake hands.
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