It’s also a way of lampooning the pretensions of monumental public sculpture generally, as Claes Oldenburg did almost 40 years ago when he created that giant steel clothespin for Centre Square in Philadelphia. So Tree is one more example of McCarthy’s standard operating procedure. (McCarthy has a thing about desanctifying Disney characters.) There was also an unspeakable act involving a roast chicken. Last year he mounted a giant multi-character performance art and video production in Manhattan in which a woman playing Snow White was sexually abused by demented versions of the Seven Dwarfs.
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Like Karen Finley, the performance artist who mobilized cultural conservatives in the early ‘90s by smearing herself with chocolate and having intimate relations with a yam – and who surely knew McCarthy’s work - his videos are full of himself and his collaborators performing acts intended to gross out the viewer and violate taboos. His life’s mission is to facilitate the return of the repressed. (Mission accomplished!) McCarthy’s motives have always been more complicated. For Manzoni, canning his own bowel movements - if that’s what he did - was probably his way of satirizing the art market. Why would an artist go there? For Warhol, pissing was probably a way to satirize the macho mystique of the Abstract Expressionist art that Pop Art had overtaken. That would turn their expensive artwork into… well, you know. He claimed that each of them contained just that, though no one really knows, since they soon made their way into the international art market at high prices and no one is willing to open one to see what’s inside. In 1961 the Italian artist Piero Manzoni issued 90 sealed cans that carried the words Merda d’Artista – meaning Artists’s Shit.
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Andy Warhol and his studio assistants made his series of Oxidation paintings by urinating on copper plates. That’s what heavy rains will do to a pile of poop.Īrtists have been fooling around with our bodily wastes and nether regions as the final frontier of the forbidden for a long time.
When it was displayed last year as part of an outdoor sculpture show in Hong Kong, it deflated in a sudden downpour. A few years ago he produced another inflatable sculpture, sometimes called Complex Pile, that’s an unmistakable mound of the stuff.
One thing we’ve known about him since his earliest videos in the ‘70s is that the man has absolutely no fear of ketchup. A well-known Los Angeles-based artist, now 69, he’s made a career of violating taboos, opening the lid on dark boxes and wallowing, sometimes literally, in bodily fluids and excretions, or at least things that look like them. McCarthy is used to being at the center of them. Places, everybody - it’s time once again for an episode of that venerable social tradition, the art scandal. A week earlier, when the work was officially inaugurated, someone at the scene slapped the artist in the face and ran off. By that time the sculpture, which was installed as part of Fiac, an annual Paris art fair, had become a cause célèbre on right-wing French media, where it was described as a deliberate affront to French culture.
Soon the tree toppled and had to be removed from the august plaza. The term has now entered the lexicon of millions of people who didn’t know it just a week ago, largely because McCarthy’s sculpture made international news over the weekend when vandals disconnected its air supply and then cut the cables supporting it. In the Place Vendome.”įor those of you just entering the conversation, “butt plug” would be the term for a variety of sex toy the purpose of which is easy to figure. Then I noticed the artist’s name, and I thought: “Oh, it’s by Paul McCarthy, so it’s actually a giant butt plug. high (24 m.) in the Place Vendome in Paris, I thought it was an abstract version of your basic conifer – a Christmas tree reduced to its simplest signifier, a triangle-shape, like one of those pine-scented cardboard air fresheners that hangs by a string. The first time I saw a picture of the inflatable sculpture Tree, standing 79-ft.
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