Paul McCarthy’s Art is Offensive
2009
Paul McCarthy, Mechanical Pig
For a long time my window gave onto a cabaret painted half green and half bright red–a sweet torture for my eyes. –Charles Baudelaire (Salon of 1846)
Paul McCarthy’s art is not for everyone. Viewer beware–caveat spectator! We’ve known this for a while now. He’s been as distasteful back in the 70’s as he is now. Who needs to remember his prurient ketchup, the sleazy masks, the unfortunate dolls & the horrible sexual affronts? We’ll avoid detailing all the other petulant paraphernalia, gooey performances, cheesy props & whatever-else, for the sake of saving the appetite.
His work is often spoken of, in relation to Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject: the revolting other that threatens to intrude on the boundaries of the self. The self is threatened by the offending abject-object, often not to be admired, nor given an audience. McCarthy’s aggressive subversion seeks to undermine these barriers. The fear of filth, for example, makes our porous bodies vulnerable. But knowledge of the fear doesn’t mean we’ll be rescued from it either. The profane continues to unsettle us in whatever form it takes. It unsettles us because abjection is within us, hard-circuited into our psyches. The abject is always present, especially as we recoil and push it away. McCarthy tests the boundary, pushes us nearer to the precipice of our subconscious fears. His art demands that we face our own disgust & revulsion. He knows that few will understand his insistence, his churlish advances.
Okay, so he’s hated, or reviled. Moving from there we’re left wondering why he’s liked at all. He obviously has not run out of ways to annoy. McCarthy wants you to at least hate his work; maybe then you will consider his profane art. The Dadaists wanted this too. The ribald methods of Tzara, Schwitters, Duchamp &c. anticipate McCarthy’s offensive performances, corrosive humor, & perverse cynicism. We’ve had artists behaving badly in the name of art before . . .
Many of McCarthy’s Pop themes give little relief. His over-clichéd Santa Claus acts out an excessive psycho-drama we’d be happy to forget. Art often employs a currency of symbols & signs, and McCarthy’s art is no exception. Fast food in excess constitutes the vulgar. McCarthy’s Bossy-Burger shoves all this along till it’s no longer food, food as an eruptive side-effect. Along with the inane packaging, he forces us to see what’s been rejected from the inside, now spilled & vomited on the outside.
Disgust is one reaction that hasn’t been absent from the sphere of contemporary art, nor from the spheres of our own personal lives. Who has the audacity to play the McCarthy fool, the jester who shamelessly reveals an interior hell, the repressed hell of popular culture, just slightly hidden below the glitzy or commercial surface? Comedy can offend; McCarthy’s offense is that he makes art. His art takes aim at our taboos; we’re judging him, but he’s also judging us. Why shouldn’t we consider the abject, then? Perhaps this horror-pleasure is instructive. The squeamish who can’t stand to look won’t change the picture.
McCarthy’s value is that he’s not a liar—the fool unveils an important truth. This darkness we recoil from is buried within us, and when it surfaces it’s often disguised. Threatened by waste and vileness, we are likely to imagine an ideal purity.
Pestilence in art will keep the purists away, but it will also open & introduce the initiate to understanding. McCarthy’s art suggests that the baneful has a place in understanding culture, & that it doesn’t need a make-over either. How honest are we really, when we can’t face our own impure selves? How faint-hearted are we, when we ask art only to be pleasing, easy & sweet?
Paul McCarthy’s art is offensive—that’s why we look.
Aurelio Madrid is an observer and fan of art theory and history, whose intellectual and artistic enthusiasms ignite through experimentation with art’s contradictory possibilities across multiple genres. He is an autodidact who discovered his talent early on. Madrid prodigiously creates art, while he continues to question its mysteries and ideas all the same.
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Recently she has begun exploring freehand typographical illustrations.
The stories he created as a child are still present in his paintings.
I see my practice as a ‘call to the wild’ and an attempt to return to a perennial wisdom of imaginative insight that potentially restores us to our own true selves.
Don Stewart received his BS degree in Biology and Art at Birmingham-Southern College in 1981.