He considers the idea silently for a minute, then his thoughts bubble over. Even now. Like, what is going on? There are no conclusions, no hard facts, just questions and experiments. But to do it the way McCarthy has always done it — with sex, violence, bodily fluids and sick humour — is a tricky thing in Few artists today do performances as in-your-face as his 70s works such as Class Fool, where he stuffed a Barbie doll up his backside and vomited over a ketchup-covered classroom.
Few artists today are making installations as shocking or ambitious as Rebel Dabble Babble. Contemporary Art , Sculpture. Pudding , Composition Gallery. Brancusi Tree silver , Ass Hole , The Skateroom. Exon Boy , Oil Man , Let us know. Kitsch is the German word for trash, and is used in English to describe particularly cheap, vulgar and sentimental forms ….
Abject art is used to describe artworks which explore themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety …. Jonathan Griffin. Kate Macfarlane. Steven Connor. In Gertrude Stein wrote that in a painting there should be "no air As Steven Connor …. Marie de Brugerolle. Main menu additional Become a Member Shop. In Tate Britain. He takes me to the next room where a series of increasingly elaborate maquettes reveal what the finished forest will look like.
An initial small model is rough, abstract and spontaneous, but a larger version already looks like a very spooky film set. Fir trees made of foam tower densely in a woodland straight out of a Germanic fairytale.
In the middle of the forest stands a cottage. Who lives there? Outside, the LA traffic whirrs by and the California sun shines. In here, a small gathering of people stand transfixed as McCarthy explains how his forest will grow from this model to fill the studio, and will then be the set for a film. I feel nervous for his cast. The forest is genuinely creepy, the witch's cottage deeply worrying. It gets in your head.
In a video he made in the s, McCarthy wears a woman's silver wig and cavorts naked in his bathtub. As he moves about in the bath, he begins to apply various sticky organic substances to himself. He picks up a handful of raw sausage meat and tries to eat it. He gags, but keeps it in his mouth. Then his throat jolts and his face bulges with the effort not to vomit. Again, he keeps his mouth closed. Eventually, he is violently sick.
He shoves another dollop of raw meat in his mouth, goes on plastering his genitals with kitchen sauces and bathroom products. This was the city founded by the Mormons who trekked westward in the 19th century in search of their own brand of religious freedom, but he denies it was any different from other western cities as a place to grow up. His mother was a Mormon and his father was part Mormon but, he insists, his upbringing was not particularly religious. In fact his mother was a civil rights activist and his parents were delighted he went to art college.
But it led him to a penniless and marginal existence. McCarthy's studio is, among other things, an index of his recent stupendous success. Only an artist whose works are selling very well indeed can afford to work on this scale, with a large staff who circulate merrily between computers and maquettes. But this is truly a rags to riches story; a Hollywood story, even, complete with the world's most unexpected happy ending.
McCarthy began his art career in the late s and has been here in Pasadena for most of it. But he did not sell anything until about , he tells me. Until then, he was basically just a guy covering himself in ketchup in performances and videos that were made on a shoestring and seen by a handful of people. Perhaps the surprise, the thing to be explained, is not how he got ignored by the mainstream art world for so long but how he ended up rich and famous without once compromising or simplifying his disturbing, shocking, confrontational art.
In the s, bodies, death and disease became the most potent themes of contemporary art. From Damien Hirst 's work A Thousand Years, in which live flies feed on a cow's head, to Lucian Freud 's portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery , art rediscovered the flesh, the stuff of life. In the wake of this rediscovery, attention fell on McCarthy, who had been making body art since the s and who was suddenly recognised as a contemporary master, whose influence can now be spotted everywhere from the Chapman brothers to Matthew Barney to British artist Nathaniel Mellors.
Yet it was partly because he was so broke earlier in his life that he started using household materials to make art, McCarthy says. Originally he wanted to be a painter. That still pervades his art: paint is a liquid, and so is sauce.
As money got scarce in the s, he found himself "switching from making paintings to using whatever I could fuckin' find. Ketchup is cheap. Food also lent itself to grotesque bodily symbolism.
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