Deviations on a theme - works by Paul McCarthy

ArtForum, Oct, 1994 by Ralph Rugoff

As they excavate pop culture's repressed fantasies, Paul McCarthy's demented mock-instructional videos, AudioAnimatronics-type sculptures, Hollywood-style sets, and mutant figures look like distorted family entertainments more than the objects of art history. At once eerie and comic, his bestiary teems with robotic goat-fuckers, giant furry skunks with human genitals, psychoactive human/vegetable hybrids, and mannequin legs afflicted with multiple personality disorder. Looking like mutants from a theme-park slum, they allegorize the traumas of consumer culture in the terms of sexuality, identity, and body-boundary confusion.

Spaghetti Man, 1993, a composite figure with a furry Bugs Bunny head, a humanoid body, and a 50-foot polyurethane penis, stands at a height of ten feet, dwarfing the adult viewer, whose perspective become that of a child. One feels vaguely threatened by this eyeless grotesquerie, as if menaced by a bad Oedipal hallucination. The gloss of the work's Imagineering-style manufacture is emotionally contaminated, ruptured by its incompatible fantasies.

On one level Spaghetti Man appears to parody male obsession with penis size. It has the ironic humor of the fairy tales in which wishes are granted with mischievous results: the desire for a big organ is answered with a monstrous excess. On closer inspection, however, its status is uncertain: the coiled noodle emerges from an orifice that approximates the location of a vagina, and it culminates not in a proper head but an abrupt cut--raising the question as to whether having a 50-foot penis would mitigate or amplify castration anxiety.

The unstable humor in this work, as well as its dumb pathos, characterize many contemporary esthetic exercises in desublimation, but while McCarthy wreaks havoc with childhood's idealized images, he's less concerned with transgressing taboos than with examining the perverse nature of authoritarian hierarchies. Instead of being about "killing the father," as in the avant-garde wish to shock authority, his work obsessively returns to the scene of paternal violence. The trauma of cultural conditioning in the consumerist family is McCarthy's great motif; his performances and videos from the '70s and '80s are rife with allusions to children's TV shows, with McCarthy often taking on the persona of a buffoonish male authority enacting a deranged educational program.

The figure of a perverse patriarchal instructor returns in such recent works as Cultural Gothic, 1992, an Animatronic-like tableau, rendered with Disneyland realism, in which an adult male coaches a young boy who is humping a horned goat. The figures' wholesome TV-family appearance makes the scene an unsettling take on middle-class propriety, as if it laid out an allegory of the developmental "norm," an initiation ceremony into a power structure based on domination and sexual mastery. You do it because you want Daddy's approval, and that's the way he did it.

Garden, 1991, offers another theme-park-like educational scene turned to the ends of a perverse sexual pedagogy: on a large bucolic set, an older male mannequin fucks a tree, a younger one a hole in the ground. Their robotic thrusting parodies a machinelike, indiscriminate sexuality; in screwing a sham version of Mother Nature, these lovers of the great outdoors also conjure a heavy death drive--fucking not only anything that moves, but even things that don't.

Images of men screwing inanimate objects crop up throughout McCarthy's work; for a segment of Sailor's Meat, a 1974 video, the artist wore makeup and wig while humping raw meat in a hotel room. The viewer of Garden likewise becomes a voyeur of a mindless compulsion to repeat. The two figures move as if in a trance, a state suggested by automatons and AudioAnimatronic figures in general (and echoed by McCarthy in his performances). By placing these zombielike rapists in a Hollywood Arcadia, McCarthy links our culture's obsession with virgin fantasy-spaces to a perverse and traumatizing male sexuality.

It's an idea brilliantly worked out in Rear View, 1990, a piece that pointedly recalls Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnes . . . , 1946-66. McCarthy's installation, which features a headless and limbless plaster body slopped across an institutional folding table, at first glance suggests an autopsy. But the curious viewer, drawn by a light inside the body, peers through the asshole and discovers a miniature Swiss village, a model of theme-park perfection. As with Etant donnes . . . , the viewer is engaged in a hallucinatory voyeurism, but McCarthy has reversed Duchamp's terms: instead of peering through an architectural construction to see the body desired, we gaze through a bodily orifice at an architectural fantasy, a sanitized vision of order. With this wry twist, McCarthy underscores the anality of the simulacrum, and stresses its vampiric relationship to the life of the body, now fated to existence as a hollowed-out thing, an eviscerated theater.

Violated bodies are scattered like casualties throughout McCarthy's oeuvre: dwarfish, armless mascots and eviscerated robots lie stretched out as if victims at a crime scene. Poignantly freakish, these creatures appear as emblems of pain and loss, anxiety and horror. To the theme-park esthetic they add the perfume of sexual violence, calling to mind the Surrealist legacy of hybrid figures: Max Ernst's human/bird composites, Hans Bellmer's recombinable poupee. As Hal Foster has pointed out, these monstrous hybrids spoke to a cultural anxiety over the mechanizing and commodifying of body and psyche alike.(1) McCarthy's work marks a different crisis--the confusion between media images and embodied experience. His cartoony anatomies are typically ruptured, penetrated, reformulated by an invasive Toontown logic.