Paul McCarthy, Daddies Ketchup Inflatable, 2001 Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London. Photo: Per-Anders Allsten/Moderna Museet

Some of the works

The Caribbean Pirates project

The Caribbean Pirates project (2001 – 2005), which Paul McCarthy realised together with his son, Damon McCarthy, was inspired by one of the most popular attractions at Disneyland – Pirates of the Caribbean. It consists of three huge installations, masses of drawings and sculptures, thousands of photos and many hours of video. The project includes the installations The Houseboat and The Frigate, which in turn comprise the videos Houseboat Party and Pirate Party (2005) and a series of carbon fibre sculptures – Pirate Heads (2001 – 2005) and Mechanical Pig (2003 – 2005). The Pirate Party video, which was filmed in McCarthy’s Los Angeles studio with eight cameras during more than a month, is almost entirely improvised. Paul McCarthy himself plays the part of the first mate, and the other actors develop their characters in the course of the filming. Pirates, soldiers and other “men among men” who rape, torture and pillage to their own content, out of sight in distant places, is a recurring theme. The parallel with today’s global capitalism and imperialist invasions is striking.

Pirate Party

Paul McCarthy
Pirate Party, 2005
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

Bossy Burger

Bossy Burger (1991) is one of Paul McCarthy’s more famous works and a milestone in 1990s installation art. Not only was it his first large-scale work, but also his first work for which the sets used in the original performance have been kept as a sculpture/installation. The shabby and besmeared sets, bought second-hand from the TV sitcom Family Affair, bear obvious traces of his cavorting. In the video documenting the performance McCarthy appears as an infantile buffoon, an educational host for a children’s TV show. The situation quickly gets out of hand. McCarthy is wearing a chef’s outfit, clown shoes and an Alfred E. Neuman mask. Like practically all McCarthy’s characters, he appears to be trapped in the setting – even if he himself seems unaware of this predicament. The work explicitly incorporates a critique of both the fast food culture and the role of TV as childrearer in the western world.

Bossy Burger, 1991

Paul McCarthy
Bossy Burger, 1991
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

Bunker Basement

This is the first time Paul McCarthy’s installation Bunker Basement (2003) is shown in its entirety; only the film has been shown previously. The film was shot in McCarthy’s studio outside Los Angeles, where he built a replica of the bank’s vault. We see Usama Bin Ladin in a turban resembling the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the British Queen Mother with a pink globe for a head, George Bush jr and others, in an exceedingly cruel and violent drama set in the tightly sealed architecture. The roles and the setting are redolent of world politics and the financial sector. But the spectator is not served a coherent explanation to global events. Instead, the figures behave childishly and the whole situation rapidly degenerates into a food fight. In McCarthy’s universe everything is grotesque, humorous and grossly exaggerated. Even though we can easily see that it is staged, he induces us to experience it as frightening and unpleasant.

The Trunks, Propo, Human Object and The Three Boxes

In 1983 McCarthy stopped doing live performances in public. He stuffed the remaining the props he had used in performances in 1973 – 1983 into six trunks and closed them. These trunks became a sculpture, The Trunks (1984), which featured in several exhibitions – always with the trunks closed. In 1991, he opened them and photographed the props inside: rubber masks, ketchup bottles and mayonnaise jars, knives, toys, kitchen utensils, mutilated dolls, and so on. The photographs, Propo (1992 – 93), were then presented together Collectionwith The Trunks. On top of the trunks he placed a sculpture, Human Object (1982), his first attempt at replacing himself as a performance actor with a sculpture. Together, the pieces form a unity, a settling of accounts. Nowadays, these three works are always exhibited together. The Three Boxes (1984) is based on the same principal and consists of three boxes filled with video tapes from McCarthy’s performances. The boxes can be seen as paying homage to the minimalist cube, although McCarthy’s boxes are more common-place and have something inside – they are filled with history.

The Garden, Bavarian Kick and Rear View

Like many other artists in Los Angeles, Paul McCarthy has periodically earned a living by working in the Hollywood dream factory. He often employs the same techniques and special effects as those used in the film industry. The Garden (1992), for instance, features sets from the American TV series Bonanza from the 1960s. What appears at a distance to be an idyllic forest glade, turns out on closer inspection to be an artificial representation of nature being raped by two mechanical male figures – an upright “father” and a reclining “son”. Bavarian Kick (1987) is McCarthy’s first mechanised sculpture. Two spiky metal figures in innocuous Tyrol costume each raise a large jug of beer. The simple mechanism only allows a small repertoire of movements, resembling the way that McCarthy in his performances manically repeats certain movements and phrases. The mechanical figures replaced McCarthy when he stopped doing live performances to audiences. Rear View (1991 – 92) is a plaster torso with a shining rectum revealing a view of an idyllic village in a Swiss miniature landscape. What do we know about what is hidden inside? Up and down, inside and outside, often change places in McCarthy’s works.

The Garden, 1992

Paul McCarthy
The Garden, 1992
Courtesy Collection of Jeffrey Deitch, New York, N Y Foto: Douglas M. Parker Studio, USA

Peter Paul and Dreaming

Bodies – his own and other people’s – are an essential element throughout Paul McCarthy’s oeuvre. Since the 1990s, he has been using his own body in yet a new way: as a mould. The sculptural group Peter Paul (2001 – 02) consists of two hollow figures shaped after McCarthy, along with their freight packaging (coffins?). McCarthy’s physiognomy also figures in the manufacture of pirate masks, heads, hands, feet, etc. Dreaming (2005) shows McCarthy in natural size – an identical copy of the artist in silicon, reclining in the gallery.

Dead H and Ketchup Sandwich

On the surface, McCarthy’s art appears to be the veritable opposite of minimalism – reduction and purity are hardly what we associate with his oeuvre. Nevertheless, several of his early works bear obvious references to minimalism, and on the idea level it is present in everything he does. The most famous example is Dead H (1968), a sculpture in galvanised steel shaped like the letter ‘H’ (as in Human) lying on the ground. It is open at the ends and it is possible, in other words, to bend down and peer into the sculpture, except for the middle section joining the two legs. This inperceptibel part of the sculpture, which is also an element in other of his works, McCarthy calls “the intangible inside”. Ketchup Sandwich (constructed in different versions between 1971 – 2006) consists of sheets of glass stacked to form a cube. Inbetween each sheet of glass is ketchup. This is the first work in which McCarthy uses ketchup to symbolise paint, commodity and blood, a feature that has later come to be something of a trademark for him.

Performance

From around 1970 until 1983, Paul McCarthy worked mainly with performance art. This was a pivotal period, and many of these works are now legendary even though they were only ever seen by a handful of people. It was during this period that McCarthy developed his artistic individuality. From the very start, he emphasised painting as action rather than as product, by linking the very act of painting to performance. In several of his early works that were taped, for instance, Face Painting – Floor, White Line (1972), he appears in the role of an action painter – making a minimalist painting, but with his own body.

In his early performances, he operated alone, and the artist’s own body was the main focus. McCarthy frequently uses ketchup, hand lotion, chocolate syrup and oil in his performances. These coloured liquids resemble body fluids while being ordinary consumer products. His performances often suggest ambiguous sexual identities. In Sailor’s Meat (1975), for instance, McCarthy is dolled up in a blond wig, eye shadow and underpants in a shabby motel. McCarthy sees the photos taken at his performances as works of art in their own right, rather than as documentations of the event.

Sculptures

In the 1990s, Paul McCarthy created a number of sculptures inspired by pop art. Bear and Rabbit (1991), Spaghetti Man (1993), Mutant (1994), Tomato Heads (1994) and Apple Heads on Swiss Cheese (1997 – 99) are large works resembling overgrown toys or teddy bears, and can be interpreted as parodies of innocent, cute playthings. The style evokes the simple, distinct and brightly coloured figures sometimes found in amusement parks such as Disneyland. References to pop are also evident in the series of sculptures parodying Jeff Koons’ famous portrait of Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee Bubbles. Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1999) was produced in several versions, with the shiny fibreglass surface painted in gold, black or white. McCarthy has also made Michael Jackson sculptures in bronze and carbon fibre, as well as distorted versions such as Michael Jackson Fucked Up Big Head (Carbon Fiber Blue) (2004).

Spaghetti Man

Paul McCarthy
Spaghetti Man, 1993
Collection du Fonds régional d´art contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon (FRAC)

Ketchup

The artist behind this 9.5-metre tall, inflatable ketchup bottle is Paul McCarthy. He lives and works in Los Angeles, and has lately come to be one of the world’s most prestigious and famous artists. In his work McCarthy has the ability to reveal the dark, ominous side of consumerism. The inflatable ketchup bottle could perhaps be seen as a symbol of western society. Large and monumental on the surface, but full of hot air. Ketchup is probably the first thing that springs to mind when we think of American food, and Daddies is a common brand found in American supermarkets. The title, Daddies Ketchup Inflatable could also be an allusion to the world’s mightiest man: the president of the USA. In his art Paul McCarthy uses the most commonplace, dirty objects and materials. But they are always about life. Ketchup appears in many of his works, often as a symbol for blood.

Daddies Ketchup Inflatable, 2001

Installation of Daddies Ketchup Inflatable, 2001
Photo: Per-Anders Allsten/Moderna Museet

Paul McCarthy
Daddies Ketchup Inflatable, 2001
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

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