Paul McCarthy's disturbing videos - his Kilkenny show was shut temporarily after complaints to the gardaí this week - depict the artist using mayonnaise, ketchup and mustard in one orgiastic, scatological fantasy, writes Aidan Dunne.
Every festival needs a good old-fashioned controversy, and if anyone was going to provide one for Kilkenny it was surely Paul McCarthy; an exhibition of his video work was shut for a number of hours on Wednesday after complaints to the gardaí that it did not have a film certificate. Not to be confused with his near namesake the ex-Beatle, McCarthy is a Californian artist with a long track record in taboo-breaking. An influential, highly regarded cult figure in the world of performance and video art, he is now in his late 50s. Since the mid-1970s his scatalogical imagination has run riot over some of the most hallowed institutions of American consumer culture, gleefully subverting the squeaky-clean, Disneyfied world of family entertainment.
It is clear that McCarthy's antipathy towards what he regards as the hypocrisy of social, political and commercial institutions is genuine and runs deep. But it is conveyed in the form of bleakly funny dramatic performances, videos and sculptural objects notable for their scatological, bawdy and farcical content. However, much of his output already seems of its time, pre-dating, that is, such phenomena as reality TV and gross-out teen comedies. Still, that he can inspire such entirely justified caution with works made using everyday materials such as tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, simple novelty-shop character masks, and a few rudimentary domestic props is surely a tribute to his subversive ingenuity.
But it is largely because his work is so rooted in the everyday, in the squeaky clean world of US children's TV, family values and anodyne fantasy that it is so disturbing. Largely, but not entirely. There is also the fact that he does have a weirdly unsettling imagination, and that he engages in such taboo-breaking endeavours as engaging in sexual acts with raw hamburger meat on camera.
The Butler show marshals a compendium of early pieces from the 1970s, as well as his notorious Sailor's Meat, Sailor's Delight (1975), Rocky (1976), and Painter (1995).
Things can get pretty messy in a McCarthy video. He uses prodigious quantities of processed foods, notably mayonnaise and ketchup, plus mustard. All of these usually end up thickly smeared all over him and everything else in sight, in the course of intense, rambling actions that zero in on bodily activities including eating, drinking, urination, defecation, masturbation and violence, all mixed up in one orgiastic, scatological fantasy.
Just as condiments stand in for bodily fluids, in McCarthy's fluid morphology, so sausages can be sausages, penises or excrement. His own sexual identity is as unfettered. In the course of one video, Baby Boy, he cuts off his prosthetic penis and dons a vagina through which he gives birth to a doll. In Sailor's Delight, he is pointedly androgynous and goes through what might be described as a process of long, ritual self-abasement. In Painter, he spends a great deal of time trying to hack off one of his vast prosthetic fingers with a cleaver.
All of these actions are accompanied by masses of ketchup and other fluids. To a large extent the imagery and actions are cartoon-like, patently unreal. But they are also disturbing and, in terms of the sheer physical messiness involved, often fairly disgusting.
The earlier performance video pieces are close to conceptual and performance conventions in that they generally consist of McCarthy engaged in some obscure, often physically or emotionally demanding, task in a committed, concentrated way. The emphasis is on the physical and mental immersion in the task. In one, he flings paint around in a version of a Jackson Pollock Action Painting without the focus of the actual painting. While these pieces fit into a recognisable aesthetic context, McCarthy does bring his own unsettling intensity to them.
This moves up a notch because of a particular feature of his work, which was his adoption of a persona. That is, rather than just being an artist per se performing some action, he increasingly came to inhabit a character who does these things. But also he seems not so much to act as to become this strange, shambolic character, a kind of self-absorbed idiot figure who mutters incomprehensibly to himself as he goes about his bizarre activities.
Where many performance artists, including Herman Nitsche's notorious Orgies, Mysteries, Theatre, made a timeless appeal to archaic Dionysian rites, and had a shamanistic or cathartic rationale, or at least could be interpreted in that general way, certain details of McCarthy's performances and videos militate against this classical positioning. Specifically, his extensive use of popular cultural references and props. Rather than a quasi-spiritual gravity, these lend his work a brash vulgarity. As he said: "My work is more about being a clown than a shaman." His work is rooted very much in his time and culture, in conventional, religious, patriarchal American consumer culture. In one of his best known and best pieces, Bossy Burger, wearing a chef's uniform and a grinning Alfred E. Neuman mask, he hosts an imaginary television cookery show that, predictably, descends into utter, filthy chaos. His sculptures include grotesquely sexualised figures of cuddly cartoon animals neutered by the entertainment industry for family consumption.
Such contemporary references don't preclude comparisons with ritualised performance activities from other ages, but it substantially distances what McCarthy does from the high art pedigree of the more earnest performance artists. Despite their shock tactics, there was always the sense that what they were doing, and your observation of it, was in some way good for you. McCarthy, by contrast, seems dead set on implicating the viewer in a voyeuristic mess, offering no cathartic pay-off but rather prodding us inexorably towards acceptance of an abject nihilism. Abject is a peculiarly appropriate term in relation to his work. His body imagery, ambiguously gendered, awash in fluids and dirt, recalls psychoanalytical theories of infantile development. And it has often been linked to Julia Kristeva's influential ideas on the "abject body", that is, evoking a condition by which the notion of bodily integrity is threatened or thrown into crisis through defilement and transgressions of accepted boundaries, definitions and rules.
One of the most disturbing aspects of McCarthy's video performances is his demeanour. While he has on several occasions rebutted suggestions that he is in a trance-like state when performing, he does seem to be at one remove. In Rocky, for example, equipped with a pair of boxing gloves, he systematically and idiotically pummels himself. An archetypal sad clown, even at his most frenetic he seems on the verge of succumbing to ennui and despair.
Is he acting out something that actually happened to him? "I think that in part my work does refer to my own private, forgotten or repressed memories and that I seem to replay them out unconsciously in my actions," he replies. But no sooner has he opened up this possibility then he immediately steps back from the implications: "Are they specifically my traumas, or someone else's that I have witnessed either directly or through the media?" In other words, is it art or pathology? Certainly, despite the elements of fantasy, it is gruelling and to that extent, real.
He gave up live performance in 1984 in favour of video because, among other reasons, it was so psychologically trying. And, while his parodic targets are recognisably cultural codes and institutions, and despite the role that humour plays in his work, his vision is ultimately bleak. Or, as he puts it himself: "I find existence itself bewildering, overwhelming, inexplicable."
Paul McCarthy is at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, until October 6th. It is now showing under club status and visitors sign a book at the door. The gallery has expressed concern about the wider implications for the exhibition of art in the medium of film and video in Ireland regardless of content.