It’s been a weird week. For some reason I decided to choose Paul McCarthy to research for my class on installation art. It’s not like I didn’t have some idea of what I was subjecting myself to—my wife and I randomly ended up at one of his installations back in 2000, winging a date night in Manhattan. But now, after a few days of refreshing my memory, I can’t help but feel uneasy about…everything, the food I eat, condiments, my body odor and especially my material consumption.
For those of you who don’t know him, this artist, with a career spanning the late 60’s through today, uses grotesque installation environments and performances to expose the violence, artificiality, and absurdity hidden beneath American entertainment and pop and consumer culture. Well, what do I mean by grotesque?
During our visit to McCarthy’s installation, some 26 years ago, I remember paying our fee for entry and immediately being assaulted by the overwhelming scent of excrement. Then my wife and I entered the exhibit proper and came face to face with a child humping a goat. MANNEQUIN! It was a mannequin, but still, it was a bit of a shock to twenty-six-year-old me. McCarthy has spent the last half century fixated on transgressive actions in art through the use of low quality food products, bodily fluids and poop.
This image is one of McCarthy’s least graphic, at least visually—conceptually its shock value is haunting. The installation, and resulting photos for this piece are meant to evoke a combination of dark humor, nausea, extreme discomfort and a stark reflection on masculine routines as they pertain to ritualistic habits fathers pass down to sons. In much of McCarthy’s work, the patriarchy is on trial since the artist sees men as instrumental to western consumption. In his own words when speaking to a group of gallery patrons, “…essentially this is a piece about male conditioning—the older man teaches the younger man how to fuck up nature.”
More importantly, anyone who knows me knows about my aversion to condiments, so I’ll stop here…but let’s just say, this man uses mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise like Jackson Pollock used enamel…but but more violated…and he drank a bottle of ketchup at least once…gotta go, I’m going to hurl.
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