Art Review

Tough to Swallow: Paul McCarthy’s exhibition at Patrick Painter Gallery of photographs, videotapes and relics from performances dating from 1969 to 1983 is not always easy to stomach. The L.A.-based artist uses catsup, mayonnaise and all manner of loose foodstuffs to evoke ugly truths about social conditioning and mass-media penetration that many Americans would prefer to tune out.

One thing you can say about McCarthy--he knows how to make a mess. In tapes that document early performances, the artist seems to be locked within his own private world, barely cognizant of his audience as he smears various mushy foods and excremental liquids across his body, sometimes force-feeding himself with sausage and other phallic-looking meats. But the mess he makes isn’t that of a self-indulgent performance artiste--it’s a graphic simulation of consumerist gluttony that the majority of Americans have been conditioned to swallow in equally grotesque portions.

In these early performances, McCarthy uses dolls, costumes and freakish masks to create a polymorphous cast of monkey men, vomitus sea captains and pig-faced housewives. Childhood looms especially large in his absurdist tableaux, which are part Samuel Beckett, part Captain Kangaroo. Many of McCarthy’s pathetic buffoons seem trapped somewhere between Freud’s oral and anal stages of development, bound by an internal compulsion to perform degrading and physically painful rituals that hint at unspeakable sexual and emotional traumas.

Despite the revolting acts depicted, much of the visceral power of McCarthy’s perverse antics is inevitably lost in the translation to videotape. His repetitive actions, which a live audience might have experienced with a sense of slowly mounting horror, feel tedious and even boring when observed on a television monitor. The combination photographs and relics on display in the main gallery also lack the resonance of a performance witnessed firsthand.

McCarthy’s challenging work would be far better served by exhibiting the videotapes in a room that offered a place to sit, which would encourage audiences to watch the performances in their entirety. Then we could take full advantage of a rare opportunity to view early, infrequently exhibited work by this powerful and disturbing artist.

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* Patrick Painter Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Feb. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.