Paul McCarthy shows where his often twisted vision comes from

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-ken 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.