Paul McCarthy's art since the late 1960s defies all taboos and taboos through noisy and provocative humour, with deliberately coarse sexual and scatological connotations. His early performances, related to Body Art, led to videos in the late 1980s in which the artist, in grotesque scenes, appeared dressed in masks of "innocent" characters such as Pinocchio, Snow White, all drowned in ketchup, mayonnaise or other ignoble liquids. Beyond a desire for provocation, the McCarthy approach is a reaction to the spectacle society and the blind consumerism of his fellow citizens: "For me, Heidi or the Snow White dwarves are just skeletons that I use to reveal what society is all about. »
Wishing to take a break in the early 1990s, McCarthy embarked on the creation of sculptures. As he explains, he wants to work on forms with "fetish finishes", taking an interest in "Disney as a utopia, Disney as a manufacturer of a perfect sculpture. "(Christophe Kihm, interview with Paul McCarthy in "Paul McCarthy retrospective", Art Press, n° 336, July-August 2007, p. 36). The sculpture Tree, an inflatable tree nearly 25 metres high that only stayed three days on the Place Vendôme in Paris, is particularly emblematic of this trend: where innocent spirits have only seen a stylized Christmas tree, others have discovered the existence of anal plugs. These sex toys can be found in many of McCarthy's small-format sculptures, preferably associated with naive and good-natured figures, such as Santa Claus (Santa sac, black, double head, 2 butt plugs, sac butt plug with stick, 2004-2006) to whom he devoted a special place in the exhibition "Paul McCarthy et la Chocolaterie" at the Monnaie de Paris in 2014.
Lot 84 - Paul McCarthy (born in 1945)
Santa sac, black, double head, 2 butt plugs, sac butt plug with stick, 2004-2006
Uréthane, tuyau en laiton, époxy
Annoté sur le plug anal "Doc Johnson"
Pièce unique
28 x 16.5 x 24 cm
How did McCarthy come up with the idea of integrating these objects into his artistic repertoire? "When I was a student one day, I don't really know how, I ended up with one of these objects in my hands. And immediately he reminded me of a modern sculpture, by Jean Arp or Brancusi. So I started doing some funny plays with that. Later, I was given a porcelain Santa Claus, and by chance I put a plug on the tree, and it fitted perfectly. That's just one of those coincidences that makes you think" (Paul McCarthy quoted by Emmanuelle Lequeux in "Monnaie de Paris : Paul McCarthy et la chocolaterie", Le Monde, 24/10/2014). Through insolent and not necessarily unfounded formal analogies, Paul McCarthy demonstrates here that perversion and abstraction do not always go hand in hand.
