Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy once inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum during a performance, copulated with raw meat dressed in lingerie, and put on shows involving ketchup-covered genitals. Now, he spends much of his time pondering Christmas trees with no needles. Video artist, sculptor, painter and interventionist Paul McCarthy apparently has very few inhibitions. His work analyzes, criticizes and mocks contemporary culture. Particularly, the bits that seem to deserve it the most, which he focuses on to highlight the hypocrisy and oppression inherent within them. In speaking with him, it quickly becomes clear that McCarthy is less interested in shock for its own sake than in the strange logic of memory itself. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Tania Ketenjian:
When Paul McCarthy first started working as a performance artist in the mid-1970s, he was inspired by the Vienna Actionists, performers who used blood and excrement in their work. McCarthy himself did several pieces in which he replaced blood and excrement with ketchup, mayonnaise, and chocolate sauce. In a piece titled Penis Painting, McCarthy paints with his penis, and in others, with his head and his feet. He poured ketchup on his genitals and had them disappear between his legs in a piece called Sauce. And in Sailor's Meat from 1975, he copulated with raw meat dressed in lingerie. In Class Fool, McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup-spattered classroom and inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum. Some people may claim, what is artistic about that? But the essential foundation of work for McCarthy is that it change your perception. And these pieces surely changed the immediate perception of one's existing environment. One would never guess when looking at McCarthy that he chose to push boundaries in this manner.

He stands at about 5 foot 8, a long white beard, rounded fingers, jeans, and a fleece jacket. He's a grandpa, and he uses Santa Claus in his work. But there's nothing square or reserved about the sculptures and performances McCarthy has been involved in. When the Wattis Institute approached McCarthy to do a show, he decided to create a group show that reflected the memories he had of his early work. The exhibition Low Life Slow Life Part 1 has opened at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, and it is based on a series of lists McCarthy had compiled over the years—lists of artists, works, and events he valued. In its entirety, it'll ultimately include the work of 35 artists from such well-known Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Marcel Duchamp to seemingly more obscure artists such as Paul Cotton, John Hartfield, and Allan Midgett. Part 1 looks at McCarthy's early years, investigating his student years in Salt Lake City to his early career in the Bay Area during the 1970s. In 2009, Part 2 will address his work from the mid-'70s to today. My name is Tania Ketenjian, this is Sight Unseen, and I spoke with Paul McCarthy at the Wattis Institute the day after his opening. Here he talks about how he came up with the idea for Low Life, Slow Life. See if you can recognize the sounds playing behind him throughout the interview, and please stay tuned.


Paul McCarthy:
When they asked me to do a show, at first I was thinking of doing some sort of theme show, and I had a couple of ideas, and I'd curated shows before, but over the last 20 or 30 years, I've made lists. I kind of, I make a lot of lists. And I had made lists of artists. When I was teaching, I made a lot of lists. And then I would make, so teaching, make lists, and then make lists to try and understand or position them maybe like, when did I first know about them? What did they have to do with my work? Did they have something to do with it? How did they? And so over the years, I'd made a lot of lists of artists, and I'd also made lists of my own work that way. Like, I would make lists of my own work and lists of people I know. So this kind of list thing going on. At one point, I was thinking about doing some sort of theme show. Then I made a list. I made a spiral. And it kind of was like I was thinking about what was the first artist that I remember. And I knew that I had remade a Henry Moore, probably in '58. It's maybe the first international artist that I— contemporary international artist or modern artist. I mean, probably, you know, like, who knows when I knew who Vincent van Gogh was, or who knows when I knew who Leonardo da Vinci was, but it's somewhere in '58 I know who Henry Moore is, to the point that I remake one, and at that point I'm probably 13, 14 years old.

I had made a big sculpture, an inflatable around that piece for a Whitney Museum of American Art show, oh, maybe 6, 7 years ago. So on the list I wrote Henry Moore, and then I knew that, about that same time I had discovered Edvard Munch. And so the list sort of starts there and it wound its, And it was the line or the list took the form of this spiral heading towards the present. And it got up to— from '58 to 1970 is the period where I was living in Salt Lake City and then had moved to San Francisco in the late '60s. And then after 1970, I went to LA. And the list kind of got divided at one point right at 1970, so there was sort of a break there. And it also was a break for me. I moved to LA, but that's also the period when performance— I had been involved in happenings and then had done performances in the '60s, but by 1970, the word performance and body art sort of between '69 and '70, there's this kind of break for me and probably— and it's kind of in a way more my generation in a way, or how it's, you know, the age group of the artists that I knew kind of come into prominence where we're the same approximate age. So there was a break-off at '70.


Tania Ketenjian:
It's interesting, lists are such a controlled sort of— they're a way of really understanding your environment, of kind of, you know, people write lists, to-do lists, to control their day and to really grab hold of, I guess, their memories or whatever it might be. And yet your work is so uncontrolled in so many ways. It's an interesting contradiction.


Paul McCarthy:
I mean, and even the show, it's— It appears to be a show that goes from possibly '58 with Henry Moore up to '70 with, I don't know what, maybe the last artist on the list maybe being Al Payne. That's a chronology of names. When I actually came to making the show, the show itself, It doesn't stay to that chronology. Like, I was interested in this one, this artist here, this one here, which was Doyle Strong. And I knew he was a teacher I had in 1965. And I remember we had a student show and a number of— I showed a cash register and there was another artist that showed a door, a car door as a sculpture or as a painting. Doyle Strong had, I think, a pretty large effect on a number of young— and I still know, you know, a number of those artists from '64, and we were young, you know, young college students. And it was quite early, just to— it was like a ready-made, the car door hung on the wall. And when it came time to find his work, we couldn't find Doyle Strong. He had died. He wasn't a well-known artist, but a super interesting person. I tried to find his work, couldn't find it. Then eventually, and I was looking for these cement paintings that he had made in the '60s, and eventually I end up with these two oil paintings done from 19— in the '70s. One might be '69, the other one's probably '74. They're not really like what I remember at all. I never saw these paintings before. They're the only two paintings that we know of that exist. And when I found them, we found them through a university, and they said, "Oh, we—" I said, "Do you have any of these paintings?" They said, "Oh, we have these two that are back in an old shed, and they're really ugly." And they said, "You really want us to send them?" And I said, "Yeah, of course, send me the paintings." And so it's— they're not paintings— this one's '74, so this is not in the date range. And this piece here, the Christmas tree base, was only made a few years ago.

So you have this sort of list of individuals, but then when the show actually came together, I wasn't too concerned that I couldn't find a piece from the '60s. I was kind of looking that way, but— so the list just falls apart. And then at one point, I'm even looking I start putting pieces together and connecting art, like the Paul Cotton in there. I didn't know Paul Cotton until the mid-'70s. The piece is from the late '60s. I made this, I made a choice which wasn't a choice based on any kind of logic. It was out of the logic. To include a piece from the '60s from an artist that I didn't know until the '70s. And so although there was a list, and the list continues, and I've worked on the list, and the list got— what happened is it's a spiral, and then there were several lines, like I would— I made this, you know, the list got up to over 100 artists at one point all the way up to the present. And then I started making lines outside of the spiral, which were artists that I all of a sudden had forgotten about, but yet at the time I think were really interesting to me. Like in the other room, there's that piece on the crate, and that's a Robert Mallory that I saw— I graduated from high school in '63, and I remembered that piece in a magazine called Location. And I had a copy of the magazine. It's tuxedos soaked in resin and then hung. And then, but they— it forms a real bulbous looking object hanging from these like legs and sleeves. You don't really— it's hard to determine that they're tuxedos really. Unless you look at it, you don't know what that black thing is, you know. And the piece I remember from '63, but there was— I had no idea what I'd ever find. And we— I found one piece at a museum in Texas, and there was a piece at Museum of Modern Art, and there was— and I never thought that I could find that piece. And then I found it, and it was in an old building, which was his studio. Lying on the floor.

It had been there since he had died, and the piece is from 1960. But it's the piece I remembered, so it was weird to find the piece. Then we shipped it here, and it's supposed to be hung, but it's so fragile that we couldn't hang it, so I just laid it on the crate because if I picked it up, it would break. It's covered in the dust from his studio, you know, like it's— so I didn't clean it. And then when I was doing that, I found this map of America was in the studio too. And it's probably '60. And I'd never seen that piece before. But it was— and then what— it was so strong. It was such an incredible thing. And it's broken, but it's so amazing. Then I'd already decided, I knew the Wally, when I was in college I'd seen the Wally. I went to the San Francisco Art Institute in '68, '69 and he was teaching there. I remember a show at one point of one of these big black circle paintings. He painted over his paintings that he had made previously, he painted them black during the Vietnam War. And then he continued to paint them black as each war happened, whether it was Iraq or— so the paintings have, on the back it says Vietnam and it has the date. But he painted all of these paintings black. And I remember seeing these black paintings in '68 and remembered them being these paintings about Vietnam. And then I went to find one of those. And at the same time, I knew that Wally Hedrick had made this American flag painting in 1953 and wrote "peace" on it. It was a— it had to do with the Korean War and a protest of the Korean War. And I— or right after the war, I guess. I had— I decided to put those two paintings in together, the Hedrick Vietnam painting and the Hedrick flag piece painting.

Then a theme of America began to happen, and about America that is kind of throughout the show, this— that I didn't see right off the bat, along with the theme of this sort of of a penis, which I didn't see coming either, you know, whether it was the Eldridge Cleaver or the Wally Henderson or these kudos. And then there was this thing of the Christmas trees. And I had remembered seeing a Wally— I thought it was a Wally Hedrick, which was a Christmas tree with no needles. I remembered there was a photograph of a Joseph Beuys Christmas tree at his studio with no needles. At one point, I had made a Christmas tree, which is that one, and I had kind of referred to it as a Wally Beuys, kind of where I'd kind of put these two together, Joseph Beuys and Wally Hedrick, and these two Christmas trees. Then I said, well, you know, we need to try and find an image of this Christmas tree. And that— well, there was— I got the image of the Joseph Beuys from the estate of Joseph Beuys. And then we went to find the Christmas tree of Wally Hedrick. And there was the mechanical Christmas tree that Wally Hedrick had made, but I couldn't find the Christmas tree with no needles.

And then one day I was looking through the book of Jay DeFeo, and I was looking at the window where they'd taken the large rose out. And in the window was a Christmas tree with no needles. And I knew that Jay DeFeo and Wally Hedrick had been together, and I thought, wow, that's amazing. And maybe that's the tree, or maybe it's Jay DeFeo's tree. And then we started looking at other trees that Jay DeFeo had in her studio, and there were several with no needles or had been cut— branches had been cut off. And I— so then this theme of the Christmas tree sort of unraveled, and I had the two trees, one with the limbs cut off and then one with no needles that were mine. And then I had made this thing here, which was a thing I made for my grandkids, which was a mountain where the train went and the tree was in the middle. And then I had thrown it in the back of the studio and I just kept adding stuff to it. And all along I thought of it as some sort of recycled piece. And so when this came up, this idea of the Christmas tree formed. And I never knew whether— I have no idea whether I— I don't know whether I remember whether the tree with no needles was Wally Hedrick or not, but somehow I tied it to Wally Hedrick. And so at this point, I don't know, which, you know, still nobody's told me. But I have all these images now of these trees, and it seems to be— something I'm kind of working on, and like it's spinning, you know.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, it's like this amazing treasure hunt of the mind. I mean, you know, you— it reminds me of two things. It's almost like looking for, say, your blood family if you were adopted. You know, you're looking, you've got these clues, but you don't know what you're going to find, and then you get very excited. You want to hold on to whatever you might find, like this piece, for instance. And it's this treasure chest too, of one thing moving to another to another, like this beautiful painting moving to the America.


Paul McCarthy:
Yeah, the flags, all of a sudden I get this painting and there's the flags on it and I thought, "Wow, that's weird." And it kind of made its way, you know, the sh— and then I almost think this, like this Christmas tree pile and then this pile here, you know, and the two of them being next to each other. Those things begin to happen.


Tania Ketenjian:
Did you learn, suddenly learn things about yourself that you just didn't expect as you were bringing this project together? Suddenly ways that why you might have done things in the way that you had?


Paul McCarthy:
I, um, well, things did happen. There was a series of Al Thune drawings. I'd also seen one Al Thune drawing in a magazine in '66 or '67 or something. And it was one of these— Al Thune at that time was pretty famous as an abstract California painter. But he made a lot of these drawings. And I was interested in the paintings, but I was more interested in the drawings. And there was these drawings where he'd used an airbrush and then there was where he had drawn women or animals, young girls and animals, and I was pretty interested in the drawings. And I had been doing a whole series of these paintings in the '60s, which I didn't talk much about and have never really shown, where there was like a bird or animals, birds and animals, and these drawings of women usually lying on a bed or something like that. And I had— and the drawings were always taken from Karen, who was my wife, and we were together then. And I hadn't connected the Altun drawings with the drawings I'd made at that time. They seemed quite a ways away. And then over the years, I've made a series of sculptures and drawings, and then in the last few years, I kind of returned to this subject of these sculptures of women, and I began to see— for a long time when I did performances, there was— the pieces were so much about the buffoon of men. And I think the performances were— in a way, a kind of critique of men, or the male.

Then in the last 10 years, the subject of women has come back into the work again, as it did in the '60s. Then I connected the Altoon drawings to a lot of the subjects that I'm dealing with now. I don't see it as an influence, the Altoons, but I think now that I put these drawings in this show, they could become critical to how I'm thinking. I'm now thinking about them, where before I don't think I was, and it wasn't subconscious. I think I was really— it's now like I kind of think what I'm thinking about can encompass the Altoon drawings. I've been thinking about it, and now it can encompass it. That happened. There was this Michael Henderson paintings, the two large, really brutal paintings, and I remember those paintings. I remember a series of large heads that he painted when I was at the Art Institute in San Francisco. And I remember at one point, I mean, I was really amazed by those paintings and liked them a lot. And so when I went to do the show, I said, I have the— and I had a photograph from some, and I said, I want to find these paintings and I don't know where Michael Henderson is, but I want to find them. It turned out that the main painting, the paintings were burnt and these are the only two left. One of them is partially burnt. They're really pretty tough, pretty strong paintings. And he and I were talking the other night, and he was talking about what we did in San Francisco, and I told him that I had painted newspapers all silver, and I'd painted the walls silver. And then he said, "Oh, I painted everything silver." And then I have this recollection of that. It kind of, as soon as he said it, I kind of remembered this, you know, that he painted his shoes silver. But in a way, I have no idea, looking back.

I never, I know that I never, I painted everything silver, not because of Warhol's Factory. People have said that to me, "Oh, you got that from Warhol." I said, "No, I didn't." I never connected painting newspapers and rooms silver, cardboard boxes silver. I was painting cardboard boxes and dirt silver. I'd fill dirt, fill cardboard boxes with dirt and paint it all silver. And there was a particular aluminum paint that you can't get anymore. It's like, you know, it's illegal now, but it was like mercury almost. And it was really an incredible paint. It would cover anything. You poured it on the floor, it covered everything. It was actually a paint they used to stop bleeding on the walls if you're painting something and the red keeps coming back. You just cover it with the silver and that's it. But it was pretty interesting that he had painted everything silver. It could very well have been that I knew that work because he painted things silver. I have no idea. But it's like those connections, and it— but it really triggered a memory where I remember his shoes being silver. It was like, oh God, like it came back like that, you know. There's been a number of things, especially in the books or the writings or the magazines. I have a lot more material, you know, and the show could have been quite a bit larger. We just— at one point this was— and then we decided to like show photographs in some cases because we couldn't get the pieces. And it was also interesting because in a lot of ways, I knew this work through photographs. I didn't know it through actual pieces, you know, like the art world, you know, comes to us through photographs or magazines. And so it seemed completely consistent to show them as magazine pages or, you know, so some of the work is like that.


Tania Ketenjian:
Yeah. I don't know if you can even answer this. It might be really hard to answer it, but if you were to come to this show objectively and see this body of work together, what would you think of the artist? What would that inform you about the artist?


Paul McCarthy:
I— well, I don't think it's about— you mean, is it about me? I think it's— I think the show, to a degree, would be a little difficult to figure out. And I think it's like you would really not know how to make certain connections. Like, they become obscure, which is interesting to me because you would kind of look at maybe these tables that have these books and you would just think, what are these? And what are they about? And I think that part of it is where— or like why when certain things happen, like what is the show? What is it? Where's the direction of the curating and how does it connect? And I think it's somewhere between a work of art and a show. But I don't think of it as a work of art in the sense of my own work. I didn't think of it that way. I didn't— it was just about putting these things together and I made these connections and a lot of the connections are And it continues, and the one thing I've thought is I do another part, maybe 3 parts, or whatever, I keep it going. And then at one point, I show it all. And then maybe another type of connection begins to happen, and by that point, I might have a better sense of how to frame it. Right now, I think it's a little tricky to get a grasp, but I don't think it's tricky to— as a human being to feel something about these pieces. I don't, you know, like, on one hand, you could have preconceived ideas of why a Christmas tree with no needles or why a piece that looks like that is even worth looking at, but I think those are preconceived, or that pile of Christmas, I think those are preconceived ideas of what art should be. And I'm not looking, in one way, I'm, oh, you know, if somebody looks, I think they see something. So it maybe operates differently than the way that a show is normally, or the convention of how a show is curated. And in other ways, it's very conventional.


Tania Ketenjian:
Oh, I just have one final quick question. This sound that we're listening to that's behind, that has been behind you, What sound has that been?


Paul McCarthy:
There's a John Cage and a Karlheinz Stockhausen, and they're albums that I had in the early '60s. And they both, one of them, the jacket is on the table or underneath the glass. And they were, it kind of really, a lot of the show's about the, you know, a change in perception from someone growing up in the '50s to the realization of what art might possess.


Tania Ketenjian:
Those were the words of Paul McCarthy speaking about Low Life, Slow Life Part 1, currently at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco. To learn more about the exhibition, please visit wattis.org. My name is Tania Ketenjian. This is Sight Unseen, and you're listening to Resonance 104.4 FM, the UK's first radio art station.