ROMANTIC NIHILISM, Paul McCarthy at MOCA (2001)

Two Weeks Before 9/11

Note: I knew I was missing an important article from the list I included in yesterday's Chapter 10, Is a Modern Renaissance Possible? I looked for it everywhere online and couldn’t find it anywhere; the one link to it was to a defunct site. But I did find it in my Word files. It is important for me to republish it. Romantic Nihilism is a review of the very disturbing works of Paul McCarthy.

This 2001 review, from an in-person visit to the contemporary museum MOCA, was written two weeks before 9/11. My belief is that art, for good or bad, is a harbinger of things to come. The show was so fucking disgusting, but an important reflection of where American culture was at and where it was going. And who knows, maybe this show acted as a catalyst for nefarious terrorists, whoever they were, to follow through?

Warning: You might really not want to read this; you can’t unsee or unthink it.

Romantic Nihilism

Paul McCarthy
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, MOCA at The Geffen Contemporary
November 12, 2000 to January 21, 2001 Curated by Paul Schimmel, chief curator.

by Michael Newberry, August 28, 2001

The Paul McCarthy exhibition at L.A. MOCA at The Geffen Contemporary documents three decades of the artist's important works. The media he employs, either separately or in combination, are sculpture, drawing, photography, performance, video, and installation. In many of the works, the artist acts as the subject of the performance pieces that are documented by photography or video.

Upon entering the exhibition, a sign warns: "Viewer discretion advised. Some material in this exhibition may not be suitable for young viewers." Though the first sweeping impression of the museum and the exhibit seems innocent enough; large-scale puppet figures abound, large dollhouse-like sets, scattered monitors projecting cartoon-like characters prancing around, and right in front, a life-sized sculpture group, Cultural Gothic (1992), of dressed suburban father and son, and a goat.

But after taking a closer look at Cultural Gothic, the innocent element dissipates along with your psychological bearings and comfortable viewing space. The Gap-clad boy is motorized, and he is humping the goat. The cycle is simple. The boy and the goat look back to the father for approval, the father nods with his hands resting good-naturedly on the boy's shoulders, the boy begins gyrating, then the father nods his concluding approval.

In the Italian movie, L'abero degli scocci (1974) by Ernanno Olmi, there is a bestiality scene of boys copulating with chickens, which seems funny and strangely innocent. In Cultural Gothic, the innocence is replaced with foreboding. The father's bearing is genuinely supportive as he offers quiet guidance. The boy's earnest looks complement the father's. It is as if they were watching whales offshore or a golfing demonstration. The incongruent aspect of the tidy bestiality undercuts the appearance of the blessed state of familial closeness, forcing us to consider either the normality of bestiality or the evil that lurks behind paternity. Neither of which is easily contemplated.

The shocking element of the piece is not limited to its literal description but is related to our internal iconography, to our wish to share intimate moments with our fathers. With one thrust, our core belief of idealized paternity vaporizes into illusion, leaving us with a sincere though psychotic father and a child who will equate bestiality with his father's glowing approbation.

McCarthy, Cultural Gothic, 1992-3. Photo credit Luhring Augustine Gallery

Unaffected photography and video documentation of ephemeral performance pieces have a significant role in this retrospective exhibition. In Sailors Meat (video, 1975), the naked artist is donning a blond wig, and he is gyrating against various deli meats with a hotdog inserted into his rectum. In Hot Dog (1974), Cibachrome, he stuffs his mouth with large hotdogs and embellishes the theme by placing his penis in a hot dog bun. In both these pieces, he is showing us the frustration associated with sexual desires. The blond wig is symbolic of the sex appeal of the Hollywood bombshell, but the ugliness of the scene obliterates any excitement of our passions. The over-abundance of phallic devices implies that one or once is never enough. Though the ideal of sexual gratification is only implied, by the blond wig and depiction of the need to be fulfilled, he is making the point that the thought of sexual excitement is a fallacy and that the actualization of this wish will only bring debasement of absurd proportions.

McCarthy, Hot Dog, 1974, Performance, Pasadena. Video, color photographs. Photo credit: Philips.

Painting, Shit Face, Shit Painting (1974), is a series of black/white photographs that document a performance piece in which the artist had smeared an excrement-like medium (lumpy chocolate or the real thing?) on a white canvas and all over his bearded face. The subject of the performance is about the expressionist mode of creation, that art is something that freely emerges from the guts of the artist. Because of the medium of excrement, there are negative overtones about painting. This piece is analogous with Duchamp's Fountain (1917) in the sense that the message coming through is "art is something you piss on." In McCarthy's piece, a similar message comes through: "art as well as artists are something you shit on." But there are significant differences between these two pieces. Duchamp had brilliant deftness for harmonizing his nihilistic method with his absurd subject matter, wrecking epistemological devastation on society's conceptions of art and consequently redefining art in history. McCarthy's methodology, though performance art, is narrative and appallingly realistic in the sense that he is really doing these things.

It is interesting to note that the philosopher Kant in The Critique of Judgement (1790) qualified the limits of his sublime-nihilism: "One kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust." But that doesn’t protect Kant’s aesthetic legacy from leading to McCarthy’s Hot Dog, Sailor's Meat, and Painting, Shit Face, Shit Painting.

Spaghetti Man (1993) is an 8-foot tall fiberglass sculpture of a semi-dressed, doll-like humanoid with a proportionately large furry rabbit head, red tube-like plastic lips, no eyes, and sprouting a 40-foot urethane rubber penis. Spaghetti Man has a strong similarity to the live larger-than-life Mickey and Pluto characters that parade around Disneyland. But our innocent associations are short-circuited because we never expect those characters to have genitalia! The ridiculous proportion of the penis is comical and not the least bit offensive, but it does attach grotesque associations to the over-sized, stuffed toy animal. On deeper reflection, a significant theme arises from this piece: the innocence inspired by childhood icons is unsparingly replaced by warped adulthood.

McCarthy, Spaghetti Man, 1993. Photo credit: Peuple Casino Luxembourg.

Plaster Your Head and One Arm Into a Wall (1973), a performance, is documented by photos showing the artist literally plastering his head and left arm into one side of a wall, and, seen on the other side, the emergence of the artist's head and hand. The view of the disappearing head conjures up the ancient death sentence practice of walling up prisoners alive. Seeing him actively self-inflict immobilization is compelling. On the other side, you see his head and hand emerge, though the rest of his body is trapped in the wall. Symbolism of enslavement abounds: the mind and hand of creation are free but they are shackled. The body without a mind is forced to be submissive. One hand desires freedom, the other erects walls of incarceration.

The McCarthy aesthetic is rife with fascinating contradictions. His subject matters are romantic, in the sense that the works are thematic and, simultaneously, they are nihilistic, in the sense that the themes represent the tearing down of human values. Similarly, his methods originate with postmodernist tools: literal and psychological perceived space, temporal states, the combination of concrete means and the body as a tool, and historical and psychological connotations. He then uses these tools as a romanticist or as a tragedian in the sense that he holds up icons of childhood, of painting, of sexuality, and shreds them of meaning until he projects catatonic schizophrenia.

Michael Newberry

Postscript (2024)

In 2013, there was a very dull interview with MOCA’s chief curator from 1990 to 2012, Paul Schimmel, who oversaw the McCarthy exhibition. I say dull because he simply sounds normal, speaking in platitudes: “I could always start with an object and really have an impression that I own … I fell in love with the sheer audacity … I’m working for the artist … a lot of shows I’ve done, especially historical exhibitions, have had a huge and significant impact on the secondary market.”[1]

But nothing in the interview touches on the psychological import of pathological, disturbing means and content. You would think a curator would be proud of both the content and means of the artworks they are curating, no?

One interesting thing Schimmel said: “Clement Greenberg was in the ’60s. This is a brilliant man, one of the great writers of all time, and at a certain point his vision, and his language became so dominant that it literally hijacked the art world for a period of time.”[2]

Clement Greenberg was the greatest cheerleader for Abstract Expressionism and received funding from the CIA and the US government through his associations with Partisan Review and Commentary.[3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Clement Greenberg praised Immanuel Kant (the key source for redefining the Sublime and turning into its antithesis, nihilism)[8]: “I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist.”[9]

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[1] Paul Schimmel Interview by Charles Desmarais (2013)  https://www.sfaq.us/2013/09/paul-schimmel/

[2] Ibid.

[3]   “In 1940, Greenberg joined Partisan Review as an editor. He was associate editor of Commentary from 1945 until 1957.” Roger Kimball, Collected Essays and Criticism, by Clement Greenberg, edited by John O'Brian^, Commentary, December 1987. [LOL, I didn’t know Kimball wrote for Commentary, I have disliked everything he had to say about aesthetics. Now I wonder if Kimball’s New Criterion and its publisher, Foundation for Cultural Review, was covertly funded?]

[4] “…of the Partisan Review, Commentary, and the other “little magazines.” Then, as part of the cultural consortium put together by the CIA (with or without their knowledge), they suddenly acquired an international audience. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The New Press. Kindle Edition.

[5] “In art, Partisan Review is perhaps best known as the publisher of Clement Greenberg, who contributed over 30 articles from 1939 to 1981.” https://hyperallergic.com/112296/partisan-review-digitizes-70-year-archive/

[6] “In December 1950, Greenberg joined the government funded American Committee for Cultural Freedom. The CCF was funded by the CIA, as well as the ACCF (via the CIA officer James Burnham and front organizations like the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Greenberg

[7] “By subsidizing American journals, the CIA was acting in breach of its own legislative charter, which prohibited support of domestic organizations. In the case of Partisan Review.”

Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (p. 136). The New Press. Kindle Edition.

[8] My video, 2:17 min discussing Kant’s Sublime. https://newberryarchive.wordpress.com/2019/10/30/ep-6-kant-qualifies-the-sublime/

[9] Modernist Painting (1960) published by the Voice of America.