Paul McCarthy

 

                        McCarthy was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, Utah, considered to be one of the most pioneering artists of today. At the end of the 1960s he was a student at the University of Utah studying art. He later enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute where he was formally trained as a painter. It was in the early 70s that Paul McCarthy went on to study film, video and art at the University of Southern California. During this decade he profoundly experimented with Performance. By 1982 McCarthy retired from performing in front of a live audience and was asked to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles.                              

Portrait of Paul McCarthy

                        McCarthy’s work is closely related to a Performance called a ‘Happening’ which is a live performance that interacts with the audience. A Happening was first lay claimed to in 1957 by Allan Kaprow but gained prominence by the hippie culture of the late 60s. The equivalent to a Happening is Viennese Actionism, Fluxus, Performance and Body Art they were self-governing efforts of the 1960s to extend “action art”. The audience would cooperate with McCarthy, in which they participate in his dark, dormant and repressed fantasies a distinguishing part of human culture.

 

Black and White Tapes 1970

 

                       McCarthy undertook a series of performances in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. He sometimes performed in solitude or with his friends present. The video entitled ‘Face Painting- Floor, White Line’ shows McCarthy using his head as a tool by painting a white line along the floor, leaving a trail behind him. Completely inserting his body into the paint was intended as parody of general minimalist susceptibility which was at a height during the 70s. McCarthy teaches us in this video and his work in general is that traditional methods of 
painting are somewhat obsolete and artists endure heavily under it throughout the 20^th Century.  McCarthy turns pointless behavior into significant perception and delusion as people are naturally unaware of their own diminutive actions McCarthy takes this concept and stresses this into practice. As shown in Upside Down Spitting –“Bat” closing of the artists legs are not only suggestive of gymnastic exercises, but also of early infancy behavior. He incorporated bodily fluids or food into his works as shown in Heinz Ketchup Sauce. 
                      At some point in the 90s Paul McCarthy began to use masks a great deal they are usually in the form of politicians and cartoon characters. The masks symbolizes a distort corruption of American commercialism. McCarthy would mutate adulthood scenarios by producing cartoon-like characters for his artistic depiction. This is evident in his video piece entitled “Painter” which represents an artist incapable of adapting to a human environment, McCarthy’s way of communicating is in an obsessive, spontaneous pursuit of his art.
                      The theme of McCarthy’s work consists of a number of issues relating to the conformist social structure of America during 60s and 70s, McCarthy revolted from conventional society by testing their limitations. He would accomplish this through a performance in which he would convey psychosexual perversion to analysis the boundaries of the audience. McCarthy performs in a degrading and revolting approach to expressing reserved sexuality, violence, prohibited themes of child abuse, rape, masturbation and the human cycle of origin and fate. 

Robert Rauschenberg (Oct 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008)

An American artist who converted from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Is popular for collaborating painting and sculpture.

 

The painting above entitled Rhyme was created in 1956 fabricated from paper, oil, enamel, pencil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas. I like this painting for the delicate use of colour schemes that complicates each other. I can tell it is a landscape scenery as the red circle on the yellow surface represents the sun. There’s emphasis placed on the random use of colour below the “sun” from a distance appears like feathers.