02 pm interview aw mm.indd 4 23/11/2015 15:04...artist s choice 103 alice notley, the invisible...

02_PM_Interview_aw_MM.indd 4 23/11/2015 15:04

MANNEQUIN HEAD AND SQUIRREL, 1967

STUFFED SQUIRREL, MANNEQUIN HEAD,

CARDBOARD

59 X 42 X 28 CM

INTERVIEW 007 Kristine Stiles in conversation with Paul McCarthy.

SURVEY 037 Ralph Rugoff, Mr. McCarthy’s Neighbourhood. FOCUS 089

Massimiliano Gioni, Pig Island. ARTIST’S CHOICE 103 Alice Notley, The

Invisible Organ Presence (extract), 2001 (104); Alice Notley in conversation

with Laynie Brownie (extract), 2013 (107). ARTIST’S WRITINGS 109

Instructions, 1968–78 (110); Meatcake, 1974 (116); Sailor’s Meat Vented,

1975 (132); Grand Pop, 1977 (134); Contemporary Cure All, 1979 (137);

Heidi, Midlife Trauma Crisis Trauma Centre and Negative Media-Engram

Abreaction Release Zone, 1992 (138); Saloon, 1996 (140); Substance

Substitute: Hummels, 2009 (142); Rebel Dabble Babble (Invite), 2011–12

(144); Snow White White Snow, Scene One, The Animals, 2012–13 (148);

White Snow, 2012–14 (153); Grumpy, 2013 (154); Punishment, 2013–14

(157); Pandora’s Box, 2014 (158). UPDATE 161 Robert Storr, Why? Because

We Like You. CHRONOLOGY 207 Bibliography (234).

CONTENTS


007 INTERVIEW

Kristine Stiles in conversation with Paul McCarthy


8 INTERVIEW

WHIPPING A WALL AND A WINDOW

WITH PAINT, 1974

PERFORMANCE, PHOTOGRAPHS,

VIDEO, PHOTOGRAPHS

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

previous pages,

DRINKING PARTY, WHITE SNOW (WS),

2012–13

PERFORMANCE, VIDEO,

PHOTOGRAPHS, INSTALLATIONPAUL McCARTHY: I started making videotapes in the early 1970s. The frst ones

were around perception and illusion. The camera was upside down, or I’d use mirrors,

things like that. But I also started making pieces that were performances in the sense

that I would be in front of the camera. I would work in the studio primarily by myself

with the camera. There was not much in the room. I would do some things and record

them. They were often repetitious and intuitive. Ma Bell was one of the frst actions

that I did which involved liquids, in this case, motor oil. I had not planned to make

the piece. It was spontaneous. It was the frst tape where there was a persona.

KRISTINE STILES: This aspect of performance is illusive. For although the actions are

experiential and being produced for sensations, they are also part of the object being made.

What does it mean when an action is equally an object? You arrive at ‘something’ that

you’ve been waiting and looking for – but also not waiting for (because you have also just

been doing actions for the sake of the action itself) – and you then try to recover it

by recording it.

McCARTHY: In those situations, I would most likely work in the studio alone.

There wasn’t much else in the room, maybe a few objects that would become props

for a tape. I would begin the actions. I would try a number of things. All of a sudden

I would key in on what it was, or I would recognize something in it. I was pretty aware that

I was actively trying to fnd something, to put something on the videotape machine.

I was experimenting – experimenting with the camera in the room, with the mind,

with the props and the actions. I was experimentative when something seemed to

happen. Then I would repeat it, refne it. The refning usually meant heightening the

experience. I was interested in spinning, and I would often spin in front of the camera.

I got to a point where I could spin for 30-40 minutes, I would bang my outstretched

hands against the wall, that helped me from getting disorientated and dizzy. The

intuitive action that I kept returning to became an involvement. I still make actions

and sculpture that relate to spinning.

STILES: The action I found most interesting in the Basement Tapes was Whipping a

Wall with Paint. Some quality in that is present in all of your work and comes through

in that particular tape. It is a lurking violence, a presence just on the verge of being

unleashed, some kind of horrifc terror or force.

McCARTHY: There were actually two tapes, one which you call Whipping a Wall

with Paint and a second version which was Whipping a Wall and a Window with Paint.

Passers-by viewed the action from the street, on the other side of the window.

I splattered paint against the window for about an hour and in the end the windows

were covered. There’s paint everywhere – on me, on the foor. I would dip a big blanket

into a large bucket of a mixture of paint and motor oil, pull the blanket out and slap

it against the wall and the window. It was exhausting. The splattering of the paint, or

the residue of ketchup as in Bossy Burger or other pieces, seem to suggest that an act

of violence has happened.

STILES: Well in fact an act of violence has happened.


INTERVIEW 9


10 INTERVIEW


11INTERVIEW

McCARTHY: Even the ketchup in Bossy Burger – the motor oil and the ketchup – both

refer to the splatter of blood splatter, and also to paint.

STILES: It’s not the direct, obvious, accessible metaphors that interest me so much in

your work. What’s more compelling to me has to do with what isn’t there, this latent

violence – the manifestation of which is unclear as to what it will become. It may not

become violent at all. It could become whimpering or sobbing or laughing. But it never

quite gets expressed. I identifed it in early and late work: in Whipping a Wall with Paint,

in Bossy Burger and in Painter. This latent quality occurs most strongly when you are

going in and out of doors, and around tables, and in between architectural settings. At

these moments you seem to be meditative, almost performing a mantra-like action; latent

with explosive material which may or may not be violent. So the metaphors of blood and

all that are not so interesting to me. It’s what is just on the verge of being expressed, but

never is expressed. This is why I wanted to think about the question of beauty in your

work, to move from the manifest to the latent centre of your work.

McCARTHY: There is a kind of self-hypnosis involved in going from space to space or

from menial action/task to menial action/task. I think that this work ‘latency’ implies

that something is not resolved, but I do think that there are moments of resolution

in my actions. Maybe symbolic resolution. They could relate to forgotten memories

– my traumas or possibly someone else’s traumas. I seem to have a strong interest in

placing the action in architecture and in using furniture: rooms connected to rooms,

doors, windows and hallways. The house itself and the action of going in and out of

its rooms. I always use tables; tables being a pedestal, something for me to stand on

where I become fgurative sculpture. The table is also a kind of altar, or a place for food

preparation. I think it has to do with the search for a very basic kind of activity.

STILES: The world is ordered by those actions and those objects, and when I say ‘latent’

I don’t mean to imply a lack of resolve but a potential still dormant in the action that is

compelling, in some ways terribly frightening, but also absurd, humorous and something

that asks for empathy but is never overtly expressed.

PAINTER, 1995

PERFORMANCE, VIDEO,

INSTALLATION, PHOTOGRAPHS


12 INTERVIEW

McCARTHY: It refects a kind of order, or cultural order. The action of the altar is

primal; it involves the body. The altar becomes the place where the sack is cut open –

the human sack is cut open – the body sack or the animal sack, the sack meaning the

skin. We search for what can’t be gotten at in the interior of the body, cutting open

the body to peer inside. In my work there’s a kind of theatre of that, and by theatre

I mean the use of representation. The object becomes the body – it doesn’t need to

be me, or even another human. I operate in a kind of theatre. I use objects to represent

things, to represent thoughts and feelings. The objects don’t necessarily have to

relate to themselves, they can be a symbol for something else. Ketchup can represent

blood, it’s not necessary that it be blood. There were pieces that I made in the early

1970s where there was a sort of emphasis on concrete performance. Performance as

a concrete reality, where you don’t represent getting shot, you actually get shot. That

defnition of performance as reality – as concrete – became less interesting to me.

I became more interested in mimicking, appropriation, fction, representation and

questioning meaning.

STILES: I’d like to go back to the role of architecture in your work because your actions

within certain kinds of architectural settings suggest some personal memory of an actual

experience that is no longer recoverable, but which comes through most powerfully in

architectural spaces.


13INTERVIEW

SANTA CHOCOLATE SHOP, 1997

PERFORMANCE, VIDEO,



15INTERVIEW

SANTA CHOCOLATE SHOP, 1997

PERFORMANCE, VIDEO,

PHOTOGRAPHS, INSTALLATION

previous page,

THE BOX, 1999

WOOD, ENTIRE CONTENTS OF

THE STUDIO: TABLES, SHELVES,

CHAIRS, VIDEO EQUIPMENT,

TOOLS, DRAWINGS, WORKS

IN PROGRESS, SCULPTURES,

SEWING MACHINES, BICYCLE,

HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS,

REFRIGERATOR

579 X 402 X 1539 CM

INSTALLATION VIEW AT THE

NEUE NATIONALGALERIE,

BERLIN, 2012


16 INTERVIEW


17INTERVIEW

McCARTHY: I think that in part my work does refer to my own private, forgotten or

repressed memories and that I seem to play them out unconsciously in my actions. It

is from those repetitions that I recognize them as existing, but I am not sure how they

relate to me. Are they specifcally my trauma, or someone else’s that I have witnessed

either directly or through the media? But the defnition of performance as only being

real or performance as reality is limiting; psychologically or perceptually I found

myself giving it a new reality. At one point I said that ‘my face on the foor is my face

on your stomach’. It has to do with the view of performance as a reality. I’m proposing

that reality itself can fuctuate. The bottle of mayonnaise within the action is no longer

a bottle of mayonnaise, it is now a woman’s genitals. Or it is now a phallus. I suspect

that that suspension of belief does exist within viewers, even though they cling to the

conscious interpretation that ketchup is ketchup. I suspect that they’re disturbed when

ketchup is blood.

STILES: I don’t think so. I never lose sight of the names and functions of the objects

that you use. I’m not disturbed by your work; I’m touched. You’re suggesting that there’s a

suspension of belief, that it works metonymically: ketchup is red and viscous, and therefore

it has a phenomenological continuity with blood.

McCARTHY: Yes.

STILES: I have no argument with this. But the effect of your action hasn’t so much to do

with the symbolic meaning (or transference of meaning) as with a connection to the fact

that you actually do the action. The question then is: what does it mean for Paul to make

an action that transforms a bottle of ketchup into a vagina?

McCARTHY: For me the actions go in and out of affecting me differently. It is this

quality that I feel again and again when I watch the tapes, even from the beginning up

until now, for 25 years of tapes. There’s this aspect of getting into something repetitive,

going with that repetition to the point of discovery, and then sort of letting go in that

space. I never get involved specifcally with the actual materials or making those kind

of metaphorical or metonymical connections. Or transformations or representations

of materials.

STILES: But you use the same materials repeatedly, so clearly the repetition in the

performances is signifcant. But it’s not where the content of your work lies for me. I think

the repetition, the objects, the characters, the bodily fuids are all a kind of camoufage,

a mask, but more than a mask. They function as a smoke screen that detracts the viewer

from the latent content in your work.

McCARTHY: The repetition lets you know that they are specifc to the actions.

I’ve often thought that the actions between 1972 and 1993 were dependent on liquids.

I’ve often thought that particular types of objects – holes, bottles – appear all the

time in my work. Architectural references are all obsessive in the same way. And the

masks. The mask in the sense of it being an environment, almost an architectural

environment. When my head is inside the mask, I’m peering out of these holes which

are an inch or so away from my face. My voice changes inside the mask; it’s hard to

breathe. I also make this connection of the mask to a camera. The eye hole of the

mask is similar to the lens hole of the camera or the frame of the picture. You can’t

see beyond the frame of the hole. I’ve made this hole metaphor as a metaphor of

cultural control, what you can see and what you can’t see. That wasn’t something that

TUBBING, 1975

PERFORMANCE, VIDEO,

PHOTOGRAPHS


18 INTERVIEW

I recognized at the beginning but which grew out of performing. I started doing those

performances and constructing pieces around the eye, the idea of a hole, of looking

through something. This was both a cultural metaphor and a personal or private

metaphor. And that was one of the things that was interesting to me about Duchamp’s

Étants Donnés, that you look through the two holes and you can see only what he

wants you to see. You can’t see anything beyond the frame of the hole. You can’t see

what the object looks like above or below the frame of the hole. You can only see what

the hole allows you to see. My early black paintings, from 1967, were done as doors.

I understood all Western art in relationship to mirrors, windows and doors. Painting

has always had a reference to architecture.

STILES: A lot of your activity goes on in between architectonic space. This discourse

is one of framed space, but a frame (unlike the hole) that is certain. Curiously, it is also

a space where you do a lot of talking. For example in Painter, you say things repetitively:

‘I can’t do it’; ‘I think I will’ and so forth. At the same time it seems to be a space of

contemplation for you.

McCARTHY: It may have to do not only with my conscious and unconscious

memories but also with my diffculty in accepting something versus nothing, existence

versus the void. They may be related, they are related. The use of architecture is

associated with constructing a place, framing, objectively and existence, ordering,

substitutes, necessity and absurdity.

STILES: You’ve told me in other conversations that Beckett is really important to you.

There are many similarities between Waiting for Godot and aspects of your work.

McCARTHY: In Waiting for Godot and in Bossy Burger there is a sense of being

trapped, having no way out. When I did Bossy Burger, I did drawings during the actual

performance and during the taping session. I made aerial views of the set – pathways

through the set going into one room, down the hall, through the door into another

room. I am making a sculpture now of three buildings – a saloon, a bunkhouse

and a tepee – with animate characters in each building. Before I placed the inanimate

fgures in the saloon, I made a flm inside with actors. The flm has no precise

narrative; it is a series of shots, repeated scenes.

In Bossy Burger, the Alfred E. Neuman character never leaves the architecture.

I envisioned him as an entrapped person, trapped within the architecture. And

the house represents a trap; the earth is a trap. He may stick his head out but he

immediately pulls it back in. He uses the door to spank himself. When I was doing

that piece I was really aware that he would not leave the architecture, and that the

architecture existed in a void. And in Pinocchio Pipenose Householddilemma, Pinocchio

never leaves the house. The house is the dilemma: the dilemma is our inability to

understand. The dilemma is so alien that it smells of insanity. Paranoia and psychosis

breed in this sort of pool of milk, a pool of milk as a metaphor for this existential

dilemma. It becomes very much associated with the reality within a house as absurdity.

The construct of reality as absurdity.


19INTERVIEW

HOLLYWOOD HALLOWEEN, 1977

PERFORMANCE, PHOTOGRAPHS


20 INTERVIEW

BOSSY BURGER, 1991

MARKER PEN ON PAPER

(DRAWN DURING THE

PERFORMANCE)

EACH 76 X 56 CM


21INTERVIEW


22 INTERVIEW

STILES: I think you told me that Alfred E. Neuman, for example, in Bossy Burger,

was the image of how you saw yourself as a child. Sailor’s Meat referred to your dad…

McCARTHY: Not only references to Alfred E. Neuman but to Howdy Doody and

Charlie McCarthy. I shared similar characteristics with them. I identifed with

puppets and cartoon characters. The Alfred E. Neuman mask was bought the day

of the performance. I went to the store and out of 20 masks, I just picked that one.

And the same with the chef ’s outft: I went to buy pots and pans and just bought a

chef ’s outft too. The character/persona of Alfred E. Neuman as a chef was unexpected

and is related to chance and coincidence. Most store masks are in one way or another

a personality, a stereotype of a flm character or a politician.

STILES: There’s clearly a parody and critique going on (through all your work) of

culture, popular culture in particular. I always laugh because of the farce. In Bossy Burger

it’s of the Galloping Gourmet; in Painter it’s of de Kooning. When I thought of asking you

about your notions of beauty, or where that concept fgures in your identity as an artist,

it was because of the very critical position that you take in your art vis-à-vis Hollywood,

Disney, television sitcoms, do-it-yourself entertainments. Something really cynical and

angry becomes funny and ironic in your work. Your analysis of mass culture has to have

a corollary with some quality you imagine that might be different from the corruption you

ridicule. In order to understand something as abused, one has to be able to imagine how

it would be if it weren’t abused. Your work is about corruption, a discourse on everything

that corruption is not. That’s why I’m trying to fnd a way to talk about – to talk through

– your smoke screen. We both acknowledge that we understand that the words we use for

beauty have no value. That’s why you create another language, a language of abuse used

to discredit the language which has been abused.


23INTERVIEW

PINOCCHIO PIPENOSE

HOUSEHOLDDILEMMA, 1994

PERFORMANCE, VIDEO,


McCARTHY: I mistrust a lot of what has been conjured up in this culture. At one

point I mistrusted reality completely. It occurred in 1971–72, when suddenly the

experience of being confronted with my existence was overwhelming. And that

experience lasted for over a year. I was confronted with nothingness, why was there

anything, why was there something, an object, an inanimate or animate object?

STILES: Why is it that performance seemed to be the best medium through which

to engage yourself with those questions?

McCARTHY: It is a physical process, making an object while in character, in persona.

It is related to everyday life, the passing of time. The mediums of action/performance

and object/sculpture get confused. I am interested in images produced during the

performance. My photographs of performances are more about painting than

performance; they are images in rectangles to be placed on the wall or in a book.

They are not the performance.

STILES: But why does performance engage you more directly in the question of

nothingness than object-making? Even as you speak about painting, you’re suggesting

it was performative for you anyway. I think performance revitalized bodily discourse

(corrupted by nineteenth-century academic representation and twentieth-century social

realism) as one of the only authentic ways to address human experiences.

McCARTHY: It allows me intuitively to act out unconscious and conscious dilemmas

in a character. In some cases the character reverts to a kind of dumbness, a sort of

numbness. Also, my concerns are not always in relation to the viewer. I was also

involved with auto-actions, semi-private actions, the camera being the primary


02 pm interview aw mm.indd 4 23/11/2015 15:04...artist s choice 103 alice notley, the invisible...

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