Paul Mccarthy and Benjamin Weissman

Paul Mccarthy and Benjamin Weissman - Paul McCarthy

exhibition design: Karin Seinsoth, Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy is one of the most well-known performance, video and film artists. His art is closely connected with the American way life. He grapples in an extremely radical manner with the traumas of the consumerist society, breaking taboos, provoking and deriding the icons of pop-culture: Hollywood, Disney, sitcoms, the Wild West ethos, movie stars. His practice is characterised by a tendency towards an exaggerated, chaotic and grotesque aesthetics. The viewer of his films is horrified by the characters’ uncontrolled actions and unjustified cruelty, disgusted by scatological and sexual allusions. Compared to a social anatomist or surgeon, McCarthy ruthlessly analyses its most secret traumas. However, as he stresses himself, the affinity between his practice and those of famous controversial performance artists such as the Vienna Actionists or Chris Burden is only superficial. Unlike them, McCarthy simply plays out roles and situations, creating his own theatre with its macabre characters, trap-like scenography and notoriously recurring props (e.g. ketchup as blood). Paradoxically, this does not make the world he creates any less shocking.