Paul McCarthy: Lala Land

by Elisabeth Bronfen, Stephanie Rosenthal, Benjamin Weissman

To say that Paul McCarthy is a provocative artist is to make an understatement as gross as the artist's own infamous use of chocolate syrup and Santa Claus costumes. Since the late 1960s, McCarthy has pushed the boundaries of taboo through the media of performance art, sculpture, and video, aiming for ultimate catharsis via an inside-out journey through sticky layers of shock and provocation. In his early performance works, the artist used his own body as material, testing his physical limits amidst a mess of American condiments like mayonnaise and ketchup, plus a helping of fluids simulating bodily excretions. His attack on the values of the American way of life and on a society manipulated by the media continued into the 80s, when he began to produce mechanical sculptures that gradually replaced his own presence in the gallery. In the 90s, his ever expansive installations continued to break taboos in a theatrically drastic way, further exploring issues of violence and pornography, masturbation, birth, and death. LaLa Land is published in conjunction with the most extensive exhibition of McCarthy's work in Europe, which ran through the summer of 2005 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Included is the first published documentation of two new works on which the artist worked for several years, Pirate Project and Western Project , whose respective protagonists, pirates and cowboys, are drawn from common clichas and myths, as are so many of his characters. Here they are treated with McCarthy's characteristic irony and grotesque exaggeration. Complementing this documentation are video stills, drawings, and sculptures dating from the early 60s to the present, for an important overview of the artist's entire oeuvre.

Genres: Art

192 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2005

About the author

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.

She did her PhD at the University of Munich, on literary space in the work of Dorothy M. Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage, as well as her habilitation, five years later, on representations of femininity and death. A specialist in the 19th and 20th century literature, she has also written articles and books in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture.

She is a frequent contributor for local and international news publications and broadcasts, serving as an expert on culture as well as American politics.