SAN FRANCISCO — "It's not clean," says Paul McCarthy.
The L.A. artist is talking about his autobiographical exhibition at the California College of the Arts' Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. He's just filling in some background information while sitting on a bench in the institute's entryway, but the statement strikes a resounding chord.
Although he is explaining the muddled chronology of "Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life: Part I" -- mostly a roundup of works by other artists who influenced him in his formative years -- he could be referring to the process of dredging up his past or the gritty nature of the art on view. He also could be describing his entire body of work.
This is the guy who has done grotesque sendups of Santa Claus, Pinocchio and Heidi; the artist who has slathered himself in slimy foodstuffs during scatological rituals; the one who has constructed a creepy forest where a male manikin copulates with a tree. Today his bad boy image seems ludicrous -- at 62, McCarthy is a soft-spoken eminence of the international art world who taught at UCLA from 1984 to 2003 and whose work was the subject of a major exhibition at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2000-01. The message and the messenger are two different things, of course. But in the first installment of a two-, maybe three-part project, he seems to have as much curiosity about his artistic roots as a naif who bumps into McCarthy's work in a gallery and wonders, "Where did this guy come from?"
Salt Lake City, as it turns out, but McCarthy doesn't delve into his childhood here. Invited to do a show at the Wattis, he decided to curate an unconventional retrospective, one that would examine artworks, ideas and impulses that shaped him. The first chapter focuses on the 1960s, when he studied art at the University of Utah and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Instead of comparing his early work with that of mentors and colleagues, as might be expected, McCarthy has created a milieu of the provocative themes, unconventional materials and inventive approaches that captured his imagination and fueled his youthful passion. "Unclean" as it is, the show is a rare opportunity to get inside the head of an artist -- in this case, one who evolved from an unruly Action Painter to a performance artist known for ravaging the American dream. "Part 1" also raises questions about what came before and after that period.
"My mother's relatives were Mormon pioneers," McCarthy says. "My father's were Irish Catholic and Mormon. A lot of people focus on that, but I lived in a suburban, rural area. My mother was really liberal and maybe wanted to be an artist. . . . I decided to be an artist quite early. My parents encouraged me. . . . When I went to the University of Utah, there were very progressive artists in Salt Lake, and the university had an experimental film department. I jumped out of a window in the sculpture department in a homage to Yves Klein," he says, referring to the French artist whose 1960 photograph, "Leap Into the Void," was a sensation.
Distributed on a broadsheet created by the artist, the picture depicted Klein diving out of a second story window, as if leaping to eternal freedom. But, as was later revealed, the artwork was a photograph of a photomontage, with the people who caught Klein before he hit the ground removed from the image.
"I hadn't seen the photograph, so I jumped out feet first," McCarthy says. "In the late '60s when I see the image of him diving, I am shocked and I think, 'Oh god, mine is so pathetic.' And then, years later, it comes out that the photograph is a fake. That's what's so great."
McCarthy loves poking fun at himself by telling the story of his misguided leap of faith, but his performance and its aftermath are telling. A risk taker with a wicked sense of humor, he has always thrown himself into his work and has definitely learned to look beneath surface appearances as he exposes the dark underside of entrenched institutions and social conventions.
Themes of repression
Salt LAKE CITY "can be super repressive," McCarthy says. "It's an issue, but what part it plays in my work, I don't know. My work has always been about repression to some degree. It can be seen as a reaction to Salt Lake conservatism. But it's hard for me to pin that down. And the work really changes. It becomes more political, more about sexual repression, probably when I hit L.A. in 1970. . . . There's this tendency to try to pinpoint things in geographical locations. It's more complicated than that."
The exhibition, a personal form of archaeology, is complicated too. There are many art historical connections to be made in McCarthy's selection of drawings, paintings, sculptures and films, along with photographs, books, magazines and other materials from his archive.
