Paul McCarthy jumps about a dimly lit
class room, his body is covered in ketchup, he is wearing a long wig.
A medium sized doll is sandwiched between his legs and he appears to
be sticking a small plastic Barbie doll up his anus. Many of the
audience caught on the video of this performance have their hands to
their mouths. No-one is smiling. As McCarthy jumps around the narrow
aisles between the rows of chairs, the floor is now covered also in
ketchup and he loses his footing and falls back surely hitting his
head. Still he gets up and continues jumping about clearly in danger
of hurting himself and possibly the audience. Class
Fool (1976) is a classic
example of the kind of performance that McCarthy became known for in
the 70s and early 80s. Dan Cameron sums this up as “the experience
of watching a fellow human being descend into the state of
provisionally non human invites a sense of the uncanny, wherein the
standards for distinguishing between person and thing, or between
living and dead, are rendered temporarily inoperable” (2000, p.
60). McCarthy's work is the product of an age when students,
intellectuals and artists questioned accepted truths about society;
it is rich with art historical influences and socio-political
references. In the following essay, I intend to discuss how
Minimalism holds an influential grip on McCarthy’s sculpture and
how themes from the Viennese Actionists and the Performance Art
movement underlie his Performance Art.
Introduced to the concepts of
Minimalism during his early university years, aspects of this
artistic genre found their way into his work, especially his
sculpture. Minimalism is a term used in particular since the 1960s,
to describe a style characterized by an impersonal austerity, plain
geometric configurations and industrially processed materials (Want,
2007).
Donald Judd who, along with Robert Morris was one of the principle
artists writing about Minimalism described it in his article Surface
Objects (1965) as a new
type of art in three dimensions that was neither painting nor
sculpture but superseded both of these (Want, 2007).
Another important element in a lot of Minimalist work is the scale.
Minimalists paintings and sculpture are characterised by a large
scale comparable to the size of the human body and in some cases
require or invite direct interaction from the viewer to show that
they occupy the same space as the viewer's body (Colpitt, 1998).
McCarthy,
P. (1968) Dead H
[galvanised steel 72 x 18 x 66 inches]. Galerie Hauser & Wirth.
All these characteristics
(austerity, geometry, materials, scale and human interaction) can be
seen in some of McCarthy's works; Dead
H (1968),
Dead H Crawl (1968/99) and
A Skull with a Tail (1975 –
78). Dead
H (1968)
is made of galvanised steel and is a six foot high capital H laid on
its back so as to be recognisable as an H when viewed from above. The
uprights of the H are made from eighteen inch square sections and are
not sealed at the top and bottom so a viewer can look straight
through them from bottom to the top and the work is installed on the
floor in a way that allows the audience to do just that.
Dead H Crawl (1999)
is a version of Dead H
that is large enough to allow viewers to crawl through the straight
tunnels of the uprights. A
Skull with a Tail (1978)
once again of galvanised steel is painted black and consists of a two
foot cube with an appendage that is a hollow, square tube 6 feet long
extending from the cube along the floor in a crooked dog leg shape.
McCarthy acknowledges the influence in
Skull of Tony Smith's sculpture Die!
(1962)
which was a seminal Minimalist work in an interview with Stiles: “At
the same time it was a cube, a minimal cube, and that were painted
black. They were almost direct references to Tony Smith's sculpture.”
(1996, p. 459). Cameron
draws a parallel between McCarthy and Minimalism in their treatment
of the work in relation to the human body: “In
his sculptures from the same period, McCarthy developed variations on
the minimalist practice of incorporating the human body in ways that
undermined the apparently objective rationalism of the geometric
vocabulary” (Cameron, 2000, p. 58). Although A Skull with Tail is
too small to climb into, Cameron refers to the importance of the
viewer's interaction with the the 'tail' and the fact that it
represents a tunnel: “By attaching an appendage which is a type of
tunnel, the work can be read as degrading the sanctity of the cube,
in favour of a culturally loaded interior space which is visually cut
off from us.” (Cameron, 2000 p. 58).
Whilst Minimalism has played an
influential role in McCarthy’s sculpture, in his Performance Art
there are noticeable influences from other performance artists in
particular Yves Klein and the Viennese Actionists.
McCarthy,
P. (1972) Face
Painting – Floor, White Line
[still image from video].
As an artistic movement, the
roots of twentieth century Performance Art began in the early 1900s
when the Futurists performed in theatres and piazzas throughout
Italy.
Performance Art arose
also among Dadaists, and at the Bauhaus school in Germany (source). A
significant driver for performance art in the 60s was artists looking
for liberation from market forces. This lead to innovations such as
circulation of art by mail, Happenings and performances. These
"Artists spaces" were thought of as more democratic than
galleries (Becker, 1994, p. 56).
Influenced by the German Bauhaus
school, Allan Kaprow was one of the
instigators of the Happenings and would become a teacher and friend
of McCarthy. Kaprow described Happenings as “spatial
representations of a multileveled attitude to painting”. (Goldberg,
2007). McCarthy met Kaprow at the San Francisco Art Institute and
they remained friends throughout Kaprow's life. McCarthy drew
inspiration from Kaprow and well before this time had been introduced
to all the major art movements, including Gutai, the radical group of
Japanese painters and performers from the 1950's, Destructionist Art,
Performance Art and film during his undergraduate studies in Salt
Lake City (Rush, 2001).
Performance has been a common element
of McCarthy's work throughout his career beginning with early works
such as Mountain Bowling
(1969)
in which he carried a bowling ball to the top of a mountain and
bowled it down three times. In the 1970s and 80s he presented solo
performances like Class Fool
(1976)
and Death Ship (1983)
and more recently more comprehensive productions such as Santa
Chocolate Shop (1997)
which featured a cast of
6.
One of the concepts that McCarthy
adopted from earlier performance art was using the body to create
paintings in which the action of painting is more important than the
product. Artists such as Yves Klein explored this idea in
Anthropometries of the Blue
Period (1960)
in which he had nude models covered in blue paint writhing on canvas.
(Goldberg). Parallels can be seen in McCarthy's Face
Painting – Floor, White Line (1972)
where he tipped a bucket of white paint on its side and inched his
way along the floor face down to produce a smeared white line along
the floor. McCarthy later performed Penis
Brush Painting (1974)
in which he dipped his
penis in paint and used it to cover a piece of glass. This was the
first of many works that would feature the male sexual organ in a
lead role.
Another group of
performance artists influencial on McCarthy was the Viennese
Actionists. Obvious parallels can be drawn with the fact that both
make performances that feature lewd acts and bodily fluids although
McCarthy is at pains to point out that he is not driven by the same
traumas as the Viennese actionists and while the actionists use real
blood, McCarthy uses ketchup and to him “it really is about the
ketchup” (Rush, 2001).
Beyond their
cosmetic similarities, both McCarthy and the Viennese Actionists
share a desire to use performance to therapeutic ends. Otto
Muehl was one of the founders of this group and said that the artist
has the responsibility to change himself and society as well.’ In
this he was reiterating one of the central tenets of Aktionismus,
that art should have a cathartic, curative function within society.
His aim in such works as SS
and Jewish
Star Aktion (1971)
was a form of social therapy through an act of self-abasement for the
Nazi period, a liberating reinterpretation of the self and society
(Wilson,
2007).
Engaging in a cathartic process was
also one of McCarthy's reasons for adopting performance:
“[Performance] allows me to intuitively act out unconscious and
conscious dilemmas in a character.” (Stiles 1996, p. 455). These
performances in which McCarthy takes on a character began with Ma
Bell (1971). The artist
usually begins by donning a mask or covering his face with something
and removing some or all of his clothes. Also crucial as mentioned
earlier is the use of fluids such as ketchup, chocolate and
mayonnaise to represent bodily fluids. Chanting primitive words such
as “mommy” and “fuck” he performs repetitive actions:
“there's this aspect of getting into something repetitive, going
with that repetition to the point of discovery, and then sort of
letting go in that space” (Stiles, 1976, p. 452).
After 1983 McCarthy moved away from
live performances and instead recorded performance on video which
became part of installations such as Bossy
Burger (1991), he also used
mechanised sculptures to perform in his works in place of a person as
in The Garden
(1992), a forest scene which on close inspection has a mechanised man
rubbing his groin up against a tree with his pants down.
While McCarthy's work is highly
original and distinctive it is clear that he draws on a range of
artistic influences. I have provided examples which demonstrate that
the geometric shapes, the materials, the scale and the opportunities
for human interaction or the consideration of possibilities of human
interaction were important elements that McCarthy brought into his
work from Minimalism. McCarthy later went on to develop and evolve
these elements. The cube became a recurring theme throughout his
later works with new layers of meaning added on, while the
relationship between the space of the art work and the space of the
body can also be seen as a central concern of much of his work. As
performance had been a popular choice for artists who wanted to
challenge the establishments of society and the art world since the
beginning of the twentieth century , McCarthy had many predecessors
to draw on and in this arena I have shown that while he didn't always
stick to the live aspect of performance art, he shared a desire to
challenge the conventions of what constitutes art and took
inspiration from artists local and international both for his bloody
aesthetic and his aims of going beyond existing painting modes and
surfacing of societal dilemmas.
References
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C (Ed.) (1994) The
Subversive Imagination – Artists, Society & Social
Responsibility.
London, Great Britain: Routledge
Cameron,
Dan. (2000) The
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Goldberg,
R. (2007) Performance
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