Whiter at 40 Degrees

Jul 24

The stained Toontown logic of Paul McCarthy, 1995

Programming Note: I always admired the guts, risk taking, and unabashed confidence of Paul McCarthy’s work, and had been a close follower of the Post Human group of predominantly American artists who came to prominence in the early nineties. It was only recently that I was able to find a copy of Bossy Burger and see it for the first time in its entirety, and McCarthy had not shown extensively in the UK at the time of writing. I really wish YouTube had been around when I was putting these pieces together during my degree, and I’m truly envious of the modern art history student’s access.

‘In one of the early pieces I wore a clown mask and danced, and I realized right away that there was something very disturbing about that happy face.’ (1)

Framed by, and following in a legacy of performance orientated work, Paul McCarthy's practice, which encompasses photographic, sculptural and time based media, has always tended to concern itself with themes of perverse degradation and a somewhat joyous reveling in filth. In this sense, a feeling of horror when confronted with their own body is illicited from the viewer, and this issue of a constant pushing of the boundaries of what it is to shock parallels Benjamin's conception of modernity as being based on this very experience of perpetual trauma. (2)

Often employing consumerist iconography as a metaphor for bodily narratives (causing comparisons with Claes Oldenburg), he has focused upon ritualistic activities, born out of L.A. children's television, as a means by which to address the distinctly American, media saturated culture with which he appears at odds.

In this, he is perhaps following in an artistic tradition previously explored by artists such as Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, perhaps more directly, Herman Nitsch or Carolee Schneeman. Described as an 'aesthetic way of praying', Nitsch's ritualistic performances from around 1962 onwards, attempted to re-enact ancient Dionysian and Christian rites in the context of re-addressing some form of pseudo-modernity. Involving copious amounts of blood, young children and slaughtered animals (sheep in particular), Nitsch's events were born out of his concerns surrounding action painting, yet obviously with a far greater symbolic content.

‘On 4 June 1962, I shall disembowel, tear and pull to pieces a dead lamb. This is a manifest action (an ‘aesthetic’ substitute for a sacrificial act), the sense and necessity of which will become clear after a study of the theory of the OM Theatre project.

Through my artistic production (a form of the mysticism of being), I take upon myself the apparent negative, unsavory, perverse, obscene, the passion and the hysteria of the act of sacrifice so that YOU are spared the sullying, shaming descent into the extreme. I am the expression of all creation. I have merged into it and identified myself with it.

All torment and lust, combined in a single state of unburdened intoxication, will pervade me and therefore YOU. The play-acting will be a means of gaining access to the most ‘profound’ and ‘holy’ symbols through blasphemy and desecration. The blasphemous anthropologically determined view of existence in which grail and phallus appear as two mutually necessary extremes.’ (3)

In acting out these 'ceremonies', he raises a fundamental question not only as to the limits of modern taste, but also the relevance of aggressive instincts having been repressed, mutated and even 'sanitized' by the mass media since about 1930. Perhaps, by way of addressing this incredibly complex and problematic issue, these ritualized acts were performed as a means of releasing that repressed energy as well as being an act of 'purification and redemption through suffering'. (4)

Of course, these re-enactments of psychic traumas could also equally be a means of transgressing socially prohibited taboos and challenging notions of bodily stability. In the context of recent critical debate, particularly in America, this stability has often been seen as under threat from the realization of the existence of corporeal waste. These materials, particularly in artistic terms, are apt for any discussion of what might be representative of 'me' and 'not me' concurrently. In Nitsch's context, perhaps it also aspires to a notion of returning to some state of animality.

Paul McCarthy, Grand Pop, Performance 1977

‘Credit the American people with enough common sense to know that one who wallows in filth is going to get dirty.’ (5)

Whilst essentially similar in substance, McCarthy's work explores these issues in a far more sublimated manner. With the violence always rendered symbolic, masks, clown outfits, Mr. Potato Heads and sporting mascots (amongst others) all combine to produce a frighteningly disturbing picture of the unveiled America. Themes such as corruption, pollution and perversion frequently occur, although I have chosen to focus my own investigation around just one specific work from McCarthy's motorized series of sculptures entitled 'Cultural Gothic' (1992/3).

Originally shown alongside a performance / installation work named 'Bossy Burger' at the Luhring Augustine gallery, New York, 'Cultural Gothic' can be seen as a further extension of his performance based concerns. Here McCarthy has moved away from enacting the activity himself and deferred the responsibility onto the vacant limbs of the animatronic mannequins. The most famous work of this series, 'The Garden' was featured in Jeffrey Dietch's muticultural 'PostHuman' exhibition organized in 1992.

My subsequent discussion will initially expand upon some of the themes raised by 'Cultural Gothic', and then attempt to situate these concerns within the wider context of a collective ritualistic pattern.

Footnotes

McCarthy, Paul: In conversation with Marc Selwyn in Paul McCarthy - There's a big difference between ketchup and blood, Flash Art - May / June 1993
This idea is explored in greater depth in Abject Art - Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Whitney Independent Study Program, 1993
Nitsch, Hermann: Quoted by Adrian Henri in 'Environments and Happenings' Thames and Hudson, 1974
Goldberg, Rose Leeìí: Performance Art - From Futurism to the Present, Thames and Hudson, 1988
Keating Jr., Charles H. : Quoted by Simon Taylor in The Phobic Object - Abjection in Contemporary Art an essay in Ref. 2

‘’In American horror films, your car runs out of gas in the middle of the woods and you go to the farmhouse where this crazy inbred family cuts you up. There is this fear of rural life. In Switzerland, you run out of gas and you really do meet Heidi, this sweet young girl or this sweet grandfather who takes care of you. Heidi becomes Americanized in a sort of dysfunctional horror film. (1)

McCarthy's 'Cultural Gothic' consists of a large, turfed platform, upon which are placed three animatronic, motorized figures - a stout male adult, a young boy, and a goat. The mechanism installed into these characters causes them to repeat the same actions over and over again. The cycle begins with the boy turning to look up at what one might assume to be his father, who in turn looks back endearingly and gives the boy an encouraging and reassuring pat on the shoulder. Noticeably, the adult's face has been cast from life whereas the boy's is certainly taken from a prefabricated mannequin. After the adult's reassurance, the boy then proceeds to sodomize the goat for a short while, after which the cycle begins again.

Going against all artistic assumptions of passive and desirous contemplation, this work plays upon a notion of an abrupt defamiliarization of subject matter, but one which perhaps always existed upon the fringes of the sociological subconscious. In exploiting this facet, one might argue that the work is itself concerned with an aesthetic repulsion, an assault upon existing ideas concerning identity, system and order. In some respects, there appears to be a desire to plumb the depths of early human experiences.

Aside from the somewhat obvious theological interpretations of the work concerning either the importance of there being three characters or the symbolism of the goat, I feel as if the title of the work may provide an interesting viewpoint of investigation. Certainly within an artistic legacy, the title bears close relation to Grant Wood's often plundered 'American Gothic' (1930), which may even have a similar aesthetic as McCarthy's work.

However, as a depiction of something resolutely regionalist, 'American Gothic' tends to play upon (certainly within the contemporary context) the notion of the puritanically rustic as something distinctly perverse and certainly other. This may parallel the ancient sociological fear of the countryside with which McCarthy appears to hold such fascination. (2) It's also quintessentially white art, and enforces an assumption (perhaps created by city dwellers?) of the country as being a place of unease, both socially and perhaps even morally. One cinematic example exploring this underlying notion would be David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks' which discussed the eccentricity of certain inhabitants of a provincial American town, although McCarthy appears conscious to avoid any such comparisons with Lynch. (3)

This perverse, almost subliminal fear of the rustic, enforced through cinema, particularly American cinema, is subsequently transposed here by McCarthy into the vocabulary of patriarchal inheritance. If we are to assume that the adult is the young boy's father (although of course there is no reason to believe this), then here we are confronted with a visualization of an almost perverted patriarchy, characteristically reassuring the young boy, whom he seems to be initiating into some strange ritual. This theme of the corrupt father leading his children into the moral abyss is also a fundamental theme of Lynch's 'Twin Peaks'. (4) Why might we see this as morally corrupt in the first place? As if symbolic of some degree of stability (conforming to Kristeva's notion of the father), the adult's induction of the child becomes in a sense, legitimate and perhaps, in a strange way, acceptable. Does the viewer also feel the father's reassurance? The work is therefore a perverse way of visualizing the sanitized manner in which there is an emotional passing of rituals (through whatever form this may take) through generations, whereby the children are often unconsciously initiated into strange rites. In this sense, the theme of the dysfunctional family as equated with a strong ability to perform these rituals is associated with the provincial by McCarthy, enforcing his conviction against the stereotyping of American cinema towards the provincial.

'The Evil Dead - Dead by Dawn' (5) or 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' (6) are symptomatic of this genre, whereby either flesh-eating zombies or a strange alien presence (metaphorically parallel to the country's inhabitants?) slowly 'reclaim' the so-called normal teenagers and turn them into one of their own breed. The veiled violence of McCarthy's work, directed at films of this nature (whose appeal may in fact be built on the weak character structure, which pales into insignificance against the special effects) and also the Disney aesthetic (who are also associated with the use of animatronic figurines), attempts to restructure the viewer's ideas as to these absolute symbols of American culture in its most caricatured form.

‘We come face to face with the horror that individuality - if not identity itself - has found its apotheosis of re-representation in a post-Disney fantasy of cartoon reality. (7)

In some respects, this work borrows from a European vocabulary (the 'Heidi' analogy, the Eurodisney approach, the Gothic etc.) as a means of critiquing American culture. McCarthy's practice perhaps enforces a contemporary notion, a stereotypical schema that American culture encourages stupidity, exploitation, laziness, cynicism and violence with, on the other hand, a European culture that was pacifistic, romantic in its traditions and related by intellectuals. (8) It could be argued that in distancing itself from this European tradition in order to define what it was 'not', American popular culture found itself craving for the very history it had separated from. As embodied in programs such as 'Beavis and Butthead', 'Married with Children' and even 'Baywatch', the equation of failure and mediocrity with American society is easily made. Of course, this is a rather Eurocentric view, but there seems to be something symptomatic of the current era which delights in intellectual impoverishment.

‘Today, we seek out both the inspired and insipid varieties of stupidity, and there is no longer much question that we probably depend more on the entertainment industry (as opposed to the visual arts) to remind us of just how addicted we’ve become to the idea that our collective mediocrity is exemplary. (9)

Therefore, Cultural Gothic explores a fundamental notion proliferated through American culture, that of equating not only the rustic with stupidity (as in 'The Beverley Hillbillies' or Robert Zemeckis's 'Forrest Gump') but also the patriarchal with the perverse. To practically visualize this, illicits disgust and repulsion, perhaps because it is a stereotypical idea of something which we know to be perpetually reinforced, yet without any substance whatsoever.

Footnotes

McCarthy, Paul: In conversation with Marc Selwyn in Paul McCarthy - There's a big difference between ketchup and blood, Flash Art - May / June 1993
An excellent discussion of this issue was explored in Simon Schama's 'Landscape and Memory' BBC2, 1995
'I intentionally didn't see 'Twin Peaks' or 'Blue Velvet'. I liked it when he appeared at the edge, but 'Blue Velvet' became less interesting, and after 'Twin Peaks' it became almost like a formula. It's almost as if it is too simple, something to get away from now. Maybe we know that already.' Ref. 1
'Twin Peaks' (Lynch, 1992) centers upon the death of teenager Laura Palmer and her dysfunctional family, who, it is revealed, was murdered by father Leland Palmer, who was possessed by some strange and rustic mystical spirit.
Raimi, 1987
Seigal, 1956 (Original) Kaufman, 1978 (Remake)
Decter, Joshua: 'Stupidity as Destiny' Flash Art - October 1994
Troncy, Eric: 'The Wonder Bra(in)?' Flash Art - Summer 1995
Ref. 7

‘While the subsequent creative input of the video game has unarguably been of Japanese origin, the ‘beat them all’, ‘shoot them up’ approach has been systematically presented as symptomatic of a typically American culture where stupidity is directly translated into terms of violence. (1)

So what might we conclude from this discussion? It would appear that McCarthy's 'Cultural Gothic' certainly seems to be exploring something distinctly American in substance, though perhaps through a European vocabulary. I would argue that in this context, the more serious cultural issues inherent in the media-saturated American culture appear to be somehow mediated in terms of stupidity and violence. In this, the American horror film as critiqued by McCarthy becomes somewhat of an absolute symbol, a visual manifestation of this idea.

McCarthy's work attempts to tap an archaic, unconscious source of ritualistic behavior by way of re-addressing the emphasis placed upon such stereotypes. This he does through a process whereby a sense of overflowing, excess physicality (to the point whereby it perhaps becomes perverse) alludes to a desire to enter some state of primal animality. This tends to parallel the loss of self invited by television and cinematic media.

Therefore, in using metaphorical substitutes to discuss these issues, such as the motorized figures, McCarthy not only emphasizes an awareness of the cyclical nature of this ritualistic, unconsciously perverse activity, but also blurs the existing distinction between what we might know as 'desirable' and 'repulsive'.

Footnotes