Flash Art  n.217 March – April 2001

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

PAUL MCCARTHY HAS long been a legendary figure in contemporary art. Although he has only recently returned to performance art after giving it up in 1984, Mc-Carthy is still talked about as the artist who, in the 1960s and 1970s, donned Halloween masks and smeared his body with ketchup, mustard and fudge. Viscous condiments were thus transformed into the media for scathing critiques of American culture, fixated on dysfunction and a latent propensity for violence. Perhaps such a tidy summary states the obvious about a complex and messy body of work. In truth, McCarthy’s art eludes easy characterization, as evidenced by a current mid-career retrospective of performance documents, videos and sculpture. The exhibition speaks to his influence on a later generation of artists — most obviously his disciples Mike Kelley, Jason Rhoades and Charles Ray, but also on artists as diverse as Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, and Damien Hirst. McCarthy introduced a common vocabulary that these artists now take for granted. Organized by Dan Cameron and Lisa Phillips, “Paul McCarthy” was presented at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art November 12, 2000-January 21, 2001. It is currently on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York through May 13, 2001.

GT: What did you think of the process of working on a mid-career survey? Are you often conscious of how your work changes over time, or did this exercise cause you to think about your career as one marked by distinct phases?

PM: A lot of my pieces were made but never shown. I didn’t have a gallery until 1985, and I had been in very few shows before then. I’ve been creating lists and associations about my work over the past 10-15 years. For me, going back and rethinking older work is something I’m always interested in. If I’m on an airplane, I’ll list and illustrate every piece I’ve ever made. But when you do a show like this, you do think more about your past work. Structures and forms that came up in the 90s were directly related to structures and forms from the 60s. At times consciously and at other times unconsciously. Like, in 1968 I had made this structure in the shape of an “H.” I had assumed the piece was about Minimalism and the fact that the forms of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Tony

Smith were made of plywood and were hollow on the inside. I was concerned with the

inability to see into something. In the 90s, I talked about how that piece was related to the body. I assumed that I had not thought that thought in the 60s. Then I started going through my drawings for the show, and I realized that I had titled it Dead H: H is for Human. So in ’68 I had thought about this association of the shape of the piece to the body, and I had related the body to Minimalism. In 1999, I finally made the “Dead H” big enough to get in.

GT: When you describe the hollowness at the center of Minimal sculpture and relate that to the scale of the body, it sounds like you are referring to a metaphor for a void or mystery within the body.

PM: Yes. It’s like the way that masks create this shell around you. You look out the eye

holes from the inside. The body has to do with inside and outside in that we perceive the outside from inside but we can’t perceive the inside from outside. The internal functions

of the body are housed inside this mysterious sack. The architecture of the body,

with its orifices and holes leading in, has to do with what we understand and what we

have access to. I made a piece about this, Looking Out, Skull Card (1970), which was

two eye holes cut into a rectangular piece of cardboard hanging from a string. There’s an

earlier piece from 1966, Hanging Hollow Torso, which was a limbless doll’s body hanging

from a string. You can look inside, which relates it to the Dead H. It represents the void

as inside and outside. To a degree, using dolls and mannequins in art has a funny kind of obviousness that is easy to dismiss. I mean, every college student who made art in the 60s used a mannequin. In my case, it has appeared in almost every generation of my work. In a lot of cases it’s because my work is related to the body and concerned with animate and inanimate objects. In my case it relates to a fear of the virtual, the fear of being unable to discern a real human from a mannequin. Mannequins, wax figures, robotics or mechanized mannequins create this virtual reality, and you can’t tell what is real. It has to do with the fear of the loss of sanity. I’m not sure what this has to do with any kind of “truth,” but it’s what I chose to mimic. Or to subvert.

GT: That’s also evident when you have incorporated the disused sets of television programs into your environments. The sets of Bonanza and Family Affair, which you recycled as installations for The Garden and Bossy Burger, are part of our shared dream world. When, when you take them apart, and recycle them to your own ends, you are messing with a fairly powerful mythology.

PM: In those cases, as with Bossy Burger, which was based on the Family Affair set, the

set formed a sort of maze architecture, an enclosure that had a boundary — which is different from the way sets are normally built, with one side being open and accessible to the camera. In the pieces I’ve made, the sets are a kind of enclosure. There’s been a real attempt to darken the outside, to expose it as a kind of void, to make an association with the idea that we exist on a planet surrounded by a void. A lot of those pieces were set up as islands. 

GT: Your continued interests in the artifice of films and television must have been relevant to the fact that your career has been based in Los Angeles. I mean, others might discuss popular culture, but you have taken good advantage of an access to its effluvium. Well before Baudrillard, you were exposing the simulacrum at the heart of the entertainment industry. How have you seen your career in Los Angeles vis a vis New York?

PM: I once did this piece in San Francisco on the topic of intercity rivalries. I was required to do a performance as a broadcast, so that I would perform in one room, and the audience would sit behind a wall and see what I did on monitors. I hired a 300 pound bodyguard, and he would repeat whatever I whispered in his ear. I had him say that San Francisco is the shithole of the universe, where the women stink and the men are skinny and stupid. “I’m from L.A. and I’m here to kick your ass. San Francisco is a European imitation of a real city, a little toy town, and we’ll fuck you over really fast. If you had balls at all, you’d come over the wall, you chicken shits!” Then every now and then I would go still, and this clapboard would come on that read “San Francisco: Shithole of the Universe, Scene 1, Take 2.” And I’d start over. I redid the scene for over an hour, and

wouldn’t shut up. Later I went to Europe, where I was supposed to do two performances.

I bought this mask of Jimmy Carter in the airport. Someone told me how people from Florence hate Rome, so I did this piece in Florence where I came on as Carter and told them how beautiful the Uffizi was, and how grateful I was to be in Florence because Rome was just a whorehouse that we should destroy through a great revolution. As President of the United States, I promised them military advisors and all the weapons they needed to declare war on Rome. And then I went to Rome and did the opposite. The next day I was contacted by the Red Brigades — they wanted to interview me for their newspaper! That’s about the time that I declared that I would never set foot in Manhattan,

and so I didn’t for about five years.

GT: And yet here we are today, talking in Luhring Augustine Gallery, on 24th Street in

Chelsea, New York. As I walked over, I passed exhibitions by Matthew Barney, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst. This is entirely coincidental, but worth noting, because one can easily draw parallels between their work and yours. I’m not proposing lines of influence, but you have all worked on similar themes, and in some cases, there are influences back and forth.

PM: Well, I’m interested in each of those artists’work. It’s difficult for me to know

how their work has influenced mine, or vice versa. I actually believe very much that art

is a kind of dialogue between artists, and I pay attention to what other artists are doing.

Charlie Ray and I are close friends. We’ve talked about art and our work and what we

are doing. But I wouldn’t know if my work has influenced him or not. The most clear connection is about scale. I remember that when Charlie was making his toy fire truck enlarged to full size for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, I was trying to recreate a table with a mirror that had been in Meat Cake #1 (1974). The table had been stolen from my studio, and I decided to rebuild it. Someone had offered to me these huge mirrors, five feet by eight feet, so I thought I might remake the table to a larger scale with one of these mirrors. For me, this shift in scale had to do with how something becomes abstracted. I’m sure that the thought of enlarging the pieces did not come from Charlie, or vice versa. They are completely separate thoughts, but simultaneous creations.

There are certain things that appear in Matthew Barney’s work that also appear in mine — the body, the visceral material, the idea of a tunnel space, a birth channel or stomach. But I can’t speak specifically to his new work. Speaking of Damien Hirst, I have a story about his large sculpture of the anatomy figure in the current exhibition. While I was setting up my show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, I had to go to this weird department store to buy some stuff. I’m standing in line, and there’s a pile of old toys, reduced in price, old chemistry sets and other things they were no longer stocking. I’m looking at the table, and there’s the exact anatomy figure that Hirst enlarged. So I bought it. I’m thinking of sending it to Charles Saatchi for his signature.

I thought about Cindy Sherman while working on this show. I was looking back on

Sailor’s Meat (1975), which shows me in a kind of Marilyn Monroe pose based on a film still from Europe in the Raw. Like Sherman at about the same time, I was basing a piece on a film still of a female character. I bought film stills then, and I had stacks of them. I was into this figure, which had the erotic pose that I’m imitating. The bizarre thing is, two or three years ago, I was looking through a book about Russ Meyer movies, and there was Europe in the Raw. I had no idea it was his film, as it was never released. I can’t say I’m really interested in film, but I recently had to deal with Alfred Hitchcock for a show, and so I became aware of his camera as a lens into peepholes. In a way, I didn’t make the connection to Hitchcock, and then all of a sudden, you start breaking down the movement and position of the camera. Or Russ Meyer, he might add a voiceover because

an actor missed a line, and the dialogue becomes a collage, like a scab on the narrative.

It is clearly disjointed, and serves as a kind of voice from inside the brain.

GT: Your art must be hell for museum registrars. I was struck by this when I saw Painter in the Sydney Biennale. The installation featured a video about a painter who creates large abstract canvases using sixfoot tubes of paint marked with various colors and

hues including “blue” and “shit.” The installation also included performance props and the cheap set. In Sydney, it also included enlarged copies of faxes and emails relating how the set had been damaged in transit. Although the work was obviously composed of cheap and casually used materials, the correspondence lent the installation the precious aura of artifacts, as it addressed the outrage and dismay of yourself and the collector who lent it.

PM: That installation was never properly crated when it was shipped to Australia, so it

spent two or three weeks just bashing around in wooden boxes. It was destroyed by the

time they opened the container in Sydney. Everything was unpacked and photographed

for insurance purposes, and I wasn’t allowed to touch it. Then two or three days before the opening, I was asked what I wanted to do. So I chose to blow up photographs of the container and the things on the floor, and we set up the walls that were okay.

GT: Entering the space, the first thing you saw were the enlarged correspondence and

damaged containers. Then you saw this video about the fetishized relationship of painters and collectors before going back to read about the frustrations of an artist and

a collector about the shipping of this piece. It created this queer coda to the work. This concern about the conservation of the installation seemed ironically incongruous with its content.

PM: It becomes very convoluted, because you didn’t know whether you were being

asked to look at the video or the set, which was once its housing. Around that, you have

the whole situation about the destruction of the piece. So you are seeing the same objects in the video that are now destroyed on the floor and referred to in the letters. It became a dialogue between the owners of the piece and the insurance company about who was responsible. I just sat there waiting to tell them what it once was. The piece itself deals with collectors and dealers, so there was this strangeness to it all.

GT: What was the ultimate fate of Painter?

PM: It’s in the traveling show as a video projection, without the set.

GT: You seem to take this as an unremarkable turn of events, perhaps due to your

background in creating ephemeral performances. How has your attitude toward documentation changed over time?

PM: I was recently on a panel on this subject with Allan Kaprow and Vanessa

Beecroft. There were obviously generational differences of opinion on this topic, different views of what performance is, and what documentation even means. There’s always that old question about photographing performance that gets into the meaning of representation. The questions addressed to Allan, for which he has set answers, as this stuff has been rehashed and rehashed, those questions might apply to me. And then

along comes Vanessa Beecroft, and all of the sudden the old questions don’t even apply.

GT: What’s the main difference between the way you have approached documentation,

and the way younger artists like Vanessa Beecroft document their work?

PM: My work goes back to the 60s, and the notions of Conceptualism, Fluxus and

Happenings. The whole basis for those attitudes was political. Photography was

frowned upon to a certain degree in the 60s, more so than in the 70s. There were some

like Yves Klein who arranged to be photographed, but a lot of artists from the 60s

— the Viennese Actionists, Allan Kaprow, the Japanese Gutaj — weren’t photographed,

or don’t own their photographs. Among the Actionists, Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler wanted to do it, but this idea of refusing to photograph your work was part of that mentality. By the time the 70s hit, a lot of performance artists were controlling their photography. Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneeman.... In the 60s, I didn’t photograph everything. By the time I hit the 70s, my work took a change at one point when it became more involved with narrative, with the personages. There was an attitude to mimic Hollywood — to set up the camera and lights. The performances were done for the camera. It wasn’t a matter of getting one iconic image, as with Burden’s work. It was about photographs in series. It was more cinematic. There wasn’t a question of photography as a consumer object, as something to sell. And it wasn’t a question of trying to represent the performance. I viewed the photographs as closer to painting than to performance. To me, there was a real difference between performance and photography. I was making these actions, and the actions produced a photograph or a video. The context could never be repeated. If you missed the action, you couldn’t go back. So I had this attitude of wanting to make a lot of images of an action.

At one point in the late 70s I began to perform for bigger audiences, and the camera

was still a big part of it. I stopped doing performances in public in ’84, and when I

started doing performances again, I wanted to make the situation in which there was a

set, a camera, and an action. There was an audience, but it was on the outside, looking

in on something being filmed. In a way, the action was for them. But the assumption was that they were watching an action being made for a camera.

GT: So even if they were present, audience members were acutely aware of the camera, as with the taping of a television program.

PM: The camera was in between the action and the audience. The action was always

directed to the camera, as on a soundstage. There was this whole thing of the disorientation of sets — where the door is, where the front is, where the back is. By the late 80s and 90s, the work became about sets. Setting up a situation in which it appeared as if a film was being made, and in which a film was actually being made.

The distance between my work in the 60s and the 90s is an interest in representation,

a focus on some notion of the virtual, which does have something to do with what Vanessa Beecroft makes. It’s unfair to say that her work is primarily about the documentation. I think she’s very much interested in the performance.

GT: When a viewer sees your work, either in person or in a documentation, there’s no

getting away from a visceral response. No matter what else is going on in the work, it

never fails to get you on a gut level.

PM: It is physical. I think you’re affected physically. People often ask me, “Aren’t you concerned with the audience? What do you want the audience to walk away with?” It’s not that I’m not interested in the audience, I just take them as a given. I don’t actually

think about them.

GT: That comment is about their effect on you and not about your effect on them.

PM: Their effect on me is about me affecting them. But because I don’t perform in

public situations very often, most of what I do is not related to audiences. For the most

part, when I think about pieces, I may think about the viewer’s position, as in The Garden, where it is important that you walk around it. It’s designed so that you have to

turn your head to look at it through the trees, and there’s a voyeuristic level to it.

There are pieces designed so that positioning the viewer is the thing. Usually it’s

about me — I’m the viewer. My work has as much, or more, to do with me as with the

viewer. At any rate, the question of viewer and audience has so much to do with the

difference between pieces. I don’t think about the viewer in the same way with each

piece, and I’m not always thinking of the viewer. Sometimes I’m shocked by the responses of viewers. I don’t always see the responses coming.

Grady T. Turner is Director of Exhibitions at The New-York Historical Society, and an

art critic whose work appears regularly in Flash Art.

Paul McCarthy was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Selected solo shows: 2001: Deitch Projects, New York; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; 2000: MoCA, Los Angeles; 1999: Blum & Poe, Santa Monica; Studio Guenzani, Milan; Hauser & Wirth, Zurich; 1998: Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles; Luhring Augustine, New York; 1997: Hauser & Wirth, Zurich; 1996: Tomio Koyama, Tokyo; Air de Paris, Paris; Luhring Augustine, New York; Drantmann, Bruxelles; Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; 1995: MoMA, New York; Art and Public, Geneva; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

Selected group shows: 2000: “Le jeu des 7 families,” Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; “Dialogos con la fotografia,” Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid; Biennale of Sydney, Sydney; Patrick Painter, Inc., Los Angeles; “Video Works,” Lisson, London; “Around 1984: A look at Art in the Eighties,”, PS 1, New York; “Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy Collaborative Works,” The Power Plant, Toronto; 1999: XLVIII Venice Biennale, Venice; 1998: “Sod and Sodie Sock,” Secession, Vienna; “L.A. Times,” Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; “Out of Actions,” MoCA, Los Angeles/MAK, Vienna/Museu d’Art Contemporaini, Barcelona/Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; 1997: “Alpenblick,” Kunsthalle, Vienna; “Dramatically Different,” Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (France); “Display,” Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen

(Denmark); Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju (South Korea); “Sunshine & Noir,” Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen/Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg (Germany)/ Castello di Rivoli, Turin/Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York; 1996: “Everything that’s interesting is new,” Dakis Jannou Collection, Athens; 1995: “Raw,” Postmasters, New York.