Movies: Paul McCarthy

Rocky comprises a single monitor video and fourteen related drawings. The video begins with a man, McCarthy himself, waiting before the camera with his back turned and then turning to face it. Wearing shorts and boxing gloves, he begins to address th...

In a shamanistic, quasi-sexual ritual performance, McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup-spattered classroom at the University of California, San Diego until dazed and self-injured. He then vomited several times and inserted a Barbie doll into his ...

A collaborative work based on Joanna Spyri's novel, Heidi.. The entire work consisted of a fabricated set, a group of partial and full life-size rubber figures, two large backdrop paintings, and a video tape shot entirely on the set. The set was inst...

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In contrast with McCarthy's recent projects, however, many of his older works are little short of incendiary--particularly three videos from 1975, whose now lo-fi texture and queasy saturation only add to their bad-dream quality. Here is McCarthy, in...

Performance art piece...

Out O' Actions documents Kelley and McCarthy's preliminary activities in organizing a project for the Visitor's Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles during the inaugural exhibition of "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Obje...

In Painter, the mythology of the artist as hero is attacked in a grotesque, parodic performance that unambiguously points to the abstract expressionists. Performing as the painter, McCarthy undermines pre-packaged ideas about the creative process by ...

Paul McCarthy's reinterpretation of John Ford's classic western Stagecoach....

A man makes soup with mayonnaise and dolls. McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for...

Drawing on the idiom and imagery of the consumer culture he grew up in, video artist Paul McCarthy distorts and mutates the familiar into the disturbing and grotesque as fairy tale narratives and foods are transformed into tableaus of abuse and viola...

Following the piece Heidi, a loose interpretation of Joanna Spyri’s novel by the duo of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Kelley performed four dances with just an apparently innocent basket as a prop....

Paul McCarthy, with the mask of Mad Magazine icon Alfred E. Neuman, prepares a meal – makes a mess – in the set of the America soap ‘Family Affair’....

In 1983, Paul McCarthy realised the performance Aryan Death Ship in which the artist assumed the authoritative figure of the captain of an ‘Aryan Ship of Death’. The performance viewers were expected to interact with and humour the grotesque antics o...

On the influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artist...

Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. Conceived for the camera and performed alone or with only a few people present, these short performances use video to arti...

Here, the artist performs as the female protagonist of Russ Meyer’s soft-porn film, Europe in the Raw! (1963). Done up in black lace lingerie, heavy makeup, and a seductive expression, he meanders across the room, methodically exposing different body...

Experimental video about child abuse. McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for one d...

With his Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma, Paul McCarthy shows that interfaces don't always have to be a complicated business. Contact with the world of this American artist is established by dressing in red & yellow coveralls, enormous red plast...

Artists McCarthy and Kelley re-stage classic 1970s performance pieces by Vito Acconci, with a decidedly ironic Southern California sensibility. States McCarthy: "[The piece] is a reference to art now, to a resurgence of the 1970s and an interest in y...