Paul McCarthy

Starting in the early 1970s in Los Angeles, Paul McCarthy gained a reputation for creating grueling, psychologically charged events in which suggestive foodstuffs--including ketchup, mayonnaise, and hot dogs--and intimations of bodily functions played important roles. Largely improvised, his performances and works spare neither the taboo nor the sacred cow, desecrating everything from the family to colonialism to painting. Like other performance artists of his generation, such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, McCarthy has tested limits that often seemed as much physical and social as aesthetic. His work explores notions of artifice and spectacle through aberrant behavior that has little obvious political, cultural, or psychological purpose. His transgressions can also act as a tool, however, to provoke viewers to examine the ties between the sacred and the profane, politics and leisure, morality and decadence. Let's Entertain features several dozen photographs from an ongoing series, Documents (1995-1999), in which the artist photographed seemingly innocent amusement parks and Las Vegas architectural elements and juxtaposes these images with Nazi-era city plans and Nazi memorabilia actively collected but often hidden from public view. In McCarthy's viewfinder, these elements congeal into an ambiguous, slightly surreal, re-presentation of the heretofore familiar. As we confront these varied, often disturbing, images of Americana, we come face to face with the alienated spectacle of the American dream. He is also represented by the video Fresh Acconci (1995), a collaboration with Mike Kelley.