The road to the foothills of fame hasn’t been easy. “When I did something like 13 or 14 performances in three months all over Europe in the late 1970s,” McCarthy says, “my hold on reality got to be a little tenuous.” But he gave up live performance in the early ’80s (everything’s been for videotape since then), not because of the looming nutso factor, but because “[for other artists] performance became cabaret.”
Though McCarthy looks a little wild with shoulder-length gray hair and a long prophet’s beard, he lives in a nice house in suburban Pasadena and has been married to the same woman for more than 30 years. McCarthy is also a professor in UCLA’s star-making art department. He has a filmmaker son who joins him on the road as technical assistant for the more mechanical pieces–such as the hilarious “The Garden,” 1992 (which for space reasons is being shown around the corner from the New Museum at the Deitch Projects gallery). Made in part from an old forest set for the TV program “Bonanza,” it features two motorized male mannequins gaining carnal knowledge of a redwood tree and the woodland earth. The work looks like it was made by one of Disney’s “imagineers” who imagined he was Philip Roth.
But what is “The Garden”–and the rest of the 30-odd drawings, installations, photos and videotapes in the exhibition–about? Conservative critics (and probably much of the public) think it’s blatant sensationalism calculated to shock the bourgeoisie again. Theory-addled art-world insiders have concocted rationales along the lines of (to quote one of the catalog essays) “the site of homoerotic penetration, the site that must be denied in order for heterosexual masculinity to retain its illusory claim of coherence.” (Hey! Come to think of it, there was no mom on “Bonanza.”) McCarthy himself says, “Sometimes it’s about how we can’t really leave where we are or who we are.”
Our opinion is that while McCarthy may be one of the uglier artists around, he’s as absolutely necessary to our times as, say Hieronymous Bosch was to his. Sixteenth-century spiritual torments were depictable in complex oil paintings. Plumbing the depths of our own contemporary nightmares, on the other hand, is generally unconvincing on canvas. (Francis Bacon is the exception.) To be effective–McCarthy’s work says, and most of the time it’s right–a contemporary artist has to resort to gross acting-out, or raunchy motorized parody, or both. When asked if the large fiber-glassy sculptures he made in the'90s mean his work is gradually waxing toward cleanliness, McCarthy says, “No. The sculptures have always been something of a sideline. I’ve got some big pieces in the works now that involve liquids again.” We’re glad to hear that. Psychosocial purging is a dirty job. Somebody’s got to do it.
