The Whitney Visual Explorer

Artist Biennial

Paul McCarthy

1945–

43 works in the collection 13 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

In the groundbreaking performances that form a significant part of his artistic output, Paul McCarthy creates graphic and disturbing scenarios that imagine the dark underbelly of American popular culture and family life. As he once noted, “I’ve always had an interest in repression, guilt, sex, and shit.” McCarthy’s performances of the late 1960s and early 1970s announced the thematic preoccupations and unfettered physicality that the artist would develop in his transgressive later works. Some of his best-known actions were documented on video and in photographs; such imagery forms the basis of his Combination Photographs, a series of unique collages.

Sailor’s Meat and Sailor’s Meat, Europe Raw and Sailor’s Meat and Tubbing is a document of two well-known performances, Sailor’s Meat and Tubbing, which McCarthy loosely based on Russ Meyer’s soft-core film Europe in the Raw! (1963). In these works, the artist, wearing a blonde wig and black lingerie, smeared his body with ketchup and performed movements suggestive of copulation on a soiled bed and in a bathtub. Employing a range of props—including raw meat, skin cream, and bodily fluids— McCarthy delivered a pointed attack on commercial entertainment, consumption, and social conventions. Although such body-based actions characterized much of the video and performance work of the 1970s, the spectacular and often grotesque extremes to which McCarthy extends these gestures set his work apart from that of his contemporaries and continue to challenge viewers who encounter his art today.

Works in the collection

Exhibitions at the Whitney