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| Paul McCarthy is an American sculptor, performance artist and video artist. After attending the University of Utah, he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA, 1969) and then studied film at the University of Southern California (MFA, 1973).Initially influenced by Allan Kaprow and Yves Klein, McCarthy first developed a mode of violent performance painting, before he emerged as a performance artist in the early 1970s with a series of now notorious works. Interested in the parallels between American mass culture's pervasive infantilism and contemporary society's means of civilizing young children, through toys and educational TV shows, he attempted to blur all the boundaries between childhood innocence and adult knowledge and sexuality. Hot Dog (1974; see Rugoff, pp. 42-4) had McCarthy stuffing his mouth with hot dogs, binding his face in gauze; in Sailor's Meat (1975; see Rugoff, p. 47) he dressed in women's underwear and donned a blonde wig, while once again improvising with ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard to suggest bodily fluids.
In the 1980s McCarthy began to concentrate on found object sculpture, exhibiting many of the props used in his performances (as in the case of The Trunks, 1984; see Rugoff, p. 54) and making kinetic sculptures. He gave up live performances in 1984 but continued to produce performances on video. In the 1990s he produced more realistic mannequin-like figures which continued to explore taboos surrounding sexuality and the nuclear family. During this period McCarthy also began to make a series of static figurative sculptures reminiscent of theme park figures, mascots and consumer architecture. Spaghetti Man (1993; Montpellier, Fond. Rég. A. Contemp.) a large figure with a rabbit's head and a long spaghetti-like extension substituting for genitalia, demonstrates his continuing dependence on subversive humour, tastelessness and sexual subject matter to elicit a strong response. A retrospective of McCarthy's work was shown at Tate Liverpool in 2002, and his inflatable scupltures Blockhead and Daddies Bighead were installed outside Tate Modern in 2003. Bibliography With text from Morgan Falconer 10 December 2000 |
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פעם ראשונה שנתקלתי ממש בעבודות של מקרתתי היתה נסיעה לברלין לפני כמה שנים, במרכז התצוגה של הביאנלה של ברלין היתה הצבה מרשימה במיוחד של מקרתתי מין חדר בנוי מחלקים שנפתח ונסגר באופן מכני תוך טריקה של הקירות שמתפרקים ומורכבים, נסגרים ונפתחים, החוצה ופנימה , כאילו הבית המושג בית הוא יצירה חיה שיכולה בכל רגע להשתנות .
הבלוג של מיכאל - בלתי תלוי 
