It’s Not Shocking to Him

What with mayhem and corruption being regular fodder for the evening news, one might not think an artist could stir up much of a fuss with the odd painting or sculpture. Nonetheless, Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy is willing to give it a try.

Using robotic figures, stuffed animals, discarded sets from defunct TV series and videos of his own provocative performances, McCarthy composes sculptural installations that stretch all the boundaries. There are depictions of what used to be called private parts in these works; there are all-American condiments like ketchup and chocolate sauce that stand in for bodily fluids; there are enactments of murder, abuse and dysfunction, and all manner of really not-ready-for-prime-time material.

Some of it is darkly humorous--a video of a performance that parodies TV cooking shows, with McCarthy as chef in an Alfred E. Neuman mask, and which ultimately turns into a grisly, ketchup-coated, hamburger-flinging “massacre.”

Some of it is wildly distasteful--the bucolic story of “Heidi,” reenacted on videotape, as an NC-17 horror story, with McCarthy as a perverted version of the grandfather character, artist Mike Kelley (McCarthy’s frequent collaborator) playing Heidi, and a wax dummy in a Madonna mask as Heidi’s crippled friend. Dysfunctional domesticity is played out in McCarthy’s installation of a Swiss chalet melded with a re-creation of Modernist architect Adolf Loos’ American Bar in Vienna.

All of the work is disturbing. As McCarthy once said, “I’ve always had an interest in repression, guilt, sex. . . .”

His subject matter has not made him popular on the U.S. museum circuit. While his installations have received international acclaim and solo museum shows throughout Europe in the past decade, he has never had a major U.S. exhibition. Until now. His first U.S. survey, featuring 100 pieces from the past 30 years, opens Nov. 12 at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in the Geffen Contemporary. It then travels to the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, which organized the show.

The New Museum’s director, Lisa Phillips, who co-curated the show with senior curator Dan Cameron, is adamant in defending McCarthy’s art work. The show will carry an advisory for the squeamish, but that doesn’t diminish its importance.

“It is visceral and confrontational,” Phillips admits. “It summons our primal fears and deals with sexual and societal taboos. It is loaded material, which I think is its strength. It is often misunderstood or denigrated as adolescent misbehavior when it is so much more.”

Paul Schimmel, chief curator at MOCA, agrees. “The hard part [of McCarthy’s work],” he says, “is confronting the dark, troubled moral issues it brings up.”

It’s probably fitting that MOCA should be the opening venue for McCarthy’s new show. In 1992, it was also the site of his first breakthrough. His installation “The Garden” debuted at “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” MOCA’s 1992 show that brought international attention to the edgy art of Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Nancy Rubins and other L.A. artists. McCarthy’s piece seemed nearly bucolic by comparison--a life-size landscape constructed from tree trunks once used on the set of the TV series “Bonanza.” Yet slightly concealed among the trees, bushes and rocks, two partially clothed mechanical male figures bump their hips suggestively against a tree and the ground.

Schimmel, who was curator of that groundbreaking and much respected exhibition, explains, “The graphic content of the work is the hopelessness. Metaphorically, it’s man banging his head against the tree. There are no genitals on view. It’s not erotic in any way.”

As for McCarthy, he knows the work is difficult, but he concentrates on what he says it’s about: the dark side of contemporary culture, the end of innocence in a world consumed by entertainment values and materialism.

“I think of the work as a critique of society. I realize that to some people, the work may have to do with it being shocking. But to me, the intention is not to shock. At the same time, it does ride a certain edge, a certain kind of confrontation. It’s not so easy to dismiss.”

McCarthy seems mildly bemused by whatever mainstream acceptance he’s found, and sometimes he’s downright concerned by it.

Consider the latest incarnation of “The Garden.”

The piece, now in the hands of New York art advisor and dealer Jeffrey Deitch, reemerged publicly last month in a fashion magazine as the setting for a staged photo of art world luminaries in black clothes. Although many artists would be thrilled by such attention, McCarthy sounds genuinely tortured when he describes his reaction.

“When I saw it, I almost had a heart attack,” he moans. “That was never the intention of the work.”

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McCarthy and his wife, Karen, who has assisted with much of his work over the years, live in an airy, wood-frame house in a San Gabriel Valley suburb. A giant pine tree shades the yard, and their dog, Yogi, lies in a patch of sun on the porch. Many of McCarthy’s most shocking pieces are “at-home” dramas. But this hardly looks like the crucible of art that alludes to depravity.

McCarthy, 55, sits with his coffee at the kitchen table, poring over a stack of catalogs from his European shows. His gray hair is receding but worn shoulder-length, his blue eyes intense behind boxy tortoise-shell glasses, and he wears a rumpled black Levi shirt, cargo pants chopped at the knees and beige suede slippers. The phone rings frequently with questions from his son, Damon, 27, who is helping to install the show at MOCA. His daughter, Mara, 21, is away at college.

Asked about his post-Freudian concerns with sex and violence and bodily functions, McCarthy chuckles slightly and says, “I certainly seem to be obsessed but I don’t really know why. “

Still, in a time when so many behaviors are laid at the doorstep of childhood experiences, it’s hard not to look at his personal history for clues about where the art comes from. McCarthy is a native of Salt Lake City. His father worked in a grocery store while his mother was a homemaker, the “artistic and liberal” member of the family. She encouraged McCarthy in his art.

Utah is Mormon territory and McCarthy was raised in the faith. So how about religious repression or rebellion as an explanation for the art?

McCarthy vehemently denies a connection. “It’s too easy to say that it is the Mormons. I don’t think it was different from any other small community in America. I grew up in a place that was intentionally isolated, surrounded by mountains, and in a way, it resembled a kind of Shangri-La. I compare it to Disneyland. Was it sexually repressed? Probably not much more than other towns in America in the ‘50s.

“I’ve kept the issue of the Mormon Church out of my art because it was too much a way of pinpointing [my background] as opposed to what I think about issues of conditioning and consumerism in America.”

Schimmel, who knows McCarthy personally as well as professionally, speculates, “In a funny way, because he has such a whole life with great family pleasures and a strong sense of community, he is in a position to explore areas of the darker parts of the human psyche that in a way someone less stable and normal would be unable to do.”

And in fact, McCarthy’s biography is pretty straightforward.

He studied art in high school and continued at a small agricultural college for one year in Salt Lake City. In 1965, he transferred to the University of Utah, where he was encouraged to pursue performance art and filmmaking. Even painting was one-part performance. He applied black paint to canvas with his hands, then set the works on fire.

During that time, McCarthy met Karen; they married in 1966 and moved to San Francisco. “It was partly because I was interested in the Beat Generation artists, but mostly, it was to go to a bigger city,” he recalls.

He completed his bachelor of fine arts degree in 1969 at the San Francisco Art Institute, then moved to Los Angeles to study film at USC. Working in the interdisciplinary art and film program, he graduated with a master’s degree in fine arts in 1973.

At the same time, McCarthy was hanging out at CalArts at the invitation of Happening creator Allan Kaprow. McCarthy’s evolving performances grew out of that environment. In the early ‘70s, many of them were simply repetitive actions that already involved gooey liquids. He would dip a blanket in paint and motor oil, and spin around a room flinging color against the walls and windows.

Yet his consistent interest in film has been the primary influence on his art. “I think that to a degree almost all the work is related to a kind of time orientation,” McCarthy says. “Even my photographs and drawings are done in series and there is an element of moving, or time changing.”

Time passing shouldn’t imply a clear narrative, however. The performances, he says, “have a kind of narrative. Though from the viewer’s point of view, it’s nearly impossible to understand. The objects and personas change character and the narrative is fractured.”

Art critic Carlo McCormick once observed that “there was something intangibly L.A. about [McCarthy’s pieces], a way of using the hidden tropes and agendas of the mass entertainment industry as the basic vernacular for the sickest kind of art making. . . .”

McCarthy concurs. “Parody and mimicry of Hollywood styles, especially B-movies, horror and porn films, are certainly part of it. “

By the mid-’80s, he was exhausted by his starring role in the performances and began to think about creating surrogates for his ever-more-elaborate events. He says that studying the dummies at wax museums and the animatronics at Disneyland was something of an inspiration.

By the early ‘90s, his live performances had given way altogether to sculptures like nude mannequins with large tomatoes as their heads or stuffed animals altered in provocative ways. When he performed, as in the “Heidi” piece, it was done only in front of a camera for screening as video art or inclusion in an installation.

Around the mid-’80s, something else changed. McCarthy was hired to teach performance and video at UCLA, where he still works, and he began showing at Rosamond Felsen Gallery. The income and the opportunity to show led to more ambitious installations. But his career received a major boost from “Helter Skelter.”

“What changed after that was the fact that I was able to afford to make the work, as pieces started to sell,” he recalls. “I was part of the alternative art scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and I thought that way. I had tried to [get] a gallery, but no one was interested before Rosamund. And Schimmel was the first curator to come forward and give me a shot.”

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Art critic Michael Duncan wrote in Frieze magazine that among the L.A. artists labeled bad boys, “McCarthy must be considered some sort of dysfunctional father figure.”

Schimmel stresses the fact that McCarthy’s work bridges the interests of two generations of artists. “Paul’s relation to the art world is quite unique in that he for the most part entered into national and international attention in the ‘90s simultaneously with a generation that was 30 years his junior, like [controversial sculptors] Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst and Jason Rhodes. Those younger artists are looking at performance-based work of the ‘70s and mining that territory. Paul, however, relates to his own history in the ‘70s, which informs his work in a very unique way.”

McCarthy says, “The work does relate to my own history as an artist. For example, ‘Heidi’ was something I was interested in during the ‘70s. I wanted to remake the story of “Heidi” as a film, but the money never came through. Then, in the early ‘90s, with Mike Kelley, I did the ‘Heidi’ installation for the Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna.

“ ‘Heidi’ has a series of themes that I’m interested in. It’s a kind of moral story with the purpose of conditioning children to good and pure things.”

He has returned to the subject yet again. His show at Patrick Painter Gallery in Santa Monica is composed of recent blown-up film stills and magazine covers that conflate Heidi Fleiss, the Beverly Hills Madam, with Heidi in braids. Titled “Heidi File,” it is on view though Nov. 28.

“For me, she [Fleiss] represented a kind of Heidi in this land, with a kind of strange innocence to her,” he says. “[The piece] was a way of deconstructing media culture, like People magazine, within the theme of Heidi.”

“There is this thing about consumption, consumerism, use of a fantasy figure, how it permeates our culture as a spectacle or a conditioner,” he says. “I point that out through the use of these characters, such as Heidi, figures [that] are fabrications. They are all about the culturalization of innocence.”

That process, he says, is “generational, passed down. It becomes you. You are it. Culturalized into absurdity. I’m in it too.”

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“Paul McCarthy,” Nov. 12-Jan. 21, MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Admission is $6 for adults, $4 for students and senior citizens, free for children under 12 and MOCA members. Admission is free every Thursday from 5 to 8 p.m. (213) 626-6222.