Schooled For Scandal

PURVEYOR OF SCANDAL-FOR-SCANDAL'S-SAKE OR SCREAM THERAPIST PURGING THE PATIENT? MOST OF US DON'T KNOW PAUL MCCARTHY WELL ENQUAH TO SAY: THE WEST COAST PERFORMANCE LEGEND HAS MANAGED TO ELUDE THE RETROSPECE RADAR IN AMERICA. THE THAT CHANGES THIS MONTH, AS A THREE-DECADE SURVEY OF MCCARTHY'S WORK, ORGANIZED BY THE NEW MUSEUM OF ON CONTEMPORARY ART IN NEW YORK, OPENS IN LOS AGGELES AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART. ON THE OCCASION, TOM HOLERT EXAMINES A UNIQUELY SPLIT ARTISTIC PERSONALITY.

Shortly before his 1994 book Extension du domaine de la lutte (published in America under the perhaps felicitous title Whatever) earned him a reputation in cultural circles in France as "scandalous," Michel Houellebecq embarked on a lecture tour of French art schools, addressing the relationship between quality and talent, as well as sexual failure. While in Avignon, he happened to witness a video in which an artist stuck his penis through a hole in a sheet of plywood and, with a piece of twine, moved it around like a marionette. Houellebecq's reaction: "It made me very uncomfortable. The atmosphere of decay, of tragic failure attached to today's art ultimately gets stuck in your throat."

Curiously, the view on an artist's preoccupation with his own penis did not shock the writer; it depressed him. What he saw made him sad, he wrote in the Paris magazine Les Inrockuptibles, because of its "almost intolerable precision." Far from sensing an art scandal, Houellebecq commented on these images of sado-masturbatory experiment with an abject memento mori: "I dreamed of trash bags welling up with coffee filters, fruit and vegetable rinds, meat with gravy. I thought of art as the act of skinning, and of pieces of flesh clinging to the skin."

Like Houellebecq's unfortunate performer, Paul McCarthy's list of ingredients includes a "member," "plywood," "a hole," and an "atmosphere [...] of tragic failure." He too occupies himself intensively and repeatedly with his penis. In addition, he has made a show of his anus (e.g., Painter, and stuck his head into a wail(Plaster Your Head and One Arm into a Wall, 1973). "I perform on myself"--so read the notes to the 1974 performance Meat Cake, in which McCarthy sat on a table, his head deformed by adhesive tape and covered with butter--"[and] include my dick working carefully with it."

In this grotesquerie, the body of the artist (which seems to mutate into a body without organs, or one with too many) is both prop and stage. Crucial expressive operations are carried out by way of liquids, pieces of clothing, furniture, dolls, masks, odors, and noises. The whimpering, mumbling, wailing, and wheezing turn the performer into a prisoner of a world with too many authors (or perhaps none at all). Any attempt by the various protagonists to escape this polymorphous environment only entangles them even further in its grip. The line between autonomy, authorship, and autism dissolves; ostensibly unleashed, viscous masses (ketchup, mayonnaise, Vaseline, chocolate) and low-culture references (B movies, porno flicks, canceled soap operas, pop psychology, and abandoned amusement parks) are put into circulation. They contaminate each other literally and semiotically. Remnants of the aimless play and desultory fights between masked performer, body parts, and stand-ins for bodily fluids are observed amid th e ruins of an abandoned architecture haunted by the ghosts of TV shows past.

Since the late '60s, Paul McCarthy has redirected the course of his production again and again: from conceptually inspired body-art performances to mechanical-motorized sculptures to ever more lavish multimedia video installations. Regardless of the approach, however, he has dedicated himself to the construction of atmospheres and spaces in which he pursues the constructive devaluation of cultural hierarchies. The claustrophobic character of these architectonic and performative environments can be traced back in McCarthy's case to the fact that nothing stands outside mediated representations and social constructions. Everything is always already entangled in significations that one doesn't have to comprehend in order to be aware of the enormous pressure they exert. For McCarthy, even "unmediated" feelings and the rawest of objects cannot escape the influence of association and metaphor. But this unavoidable inscription of meaning is understood not as edifying but as degrading, absurd, and compulsive.

The key word is desublimation. It is absent from few articles written about these works, which have a reputation for being not just difficult but scandalous. Outside the precincts of the art world, McCarthy is seen above all as a notorious breaker of taboos, an artist who sets up diorama-like constructions in which automated mannequins hump stage trees.

But in recent years high-volume art of the drastic and shocking kind has led, if anything, to an inflation of desublimation strategies. Shows like "Sensation" and "Apocalypse," with their putatively blasphemous and amoral elements, have made it necessary to more fully characterize the status of McCarthy's visceral jolts--in both historical and contemporary terms. How the retrospective organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, which opens this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, addresses this situation in relation to McCarthy's achievements should prove interesting. The comprehensive exhibition, covering more than three decades' worth of the artist's output, will no doubt reveal the overwhelming range of his articulations of dysfunctionality and compuisive repetition. But a permissive culture--as diagnosed by Houellebecq and others--has certainly modified, if not restricted, the potential power and appeal of McCarthy's practices. In today's cultural panorama, which stre tches from Harmony Korine's Gummo to Jake and Dinos Chapman's mannequins, from the Jerry Springer show to Takeshi Kitano, and where more and more the fringes come to occupy the center, where does McCarthy fit in?