Paul McCarthy

Girl

1994

Courtesy :

Boy and Girl represent exactly what the titles indicate, a boy and a girl. Contrary to tradition, which generally relates statuary to the celebration of a given person in the perfection or completeness of forms, here we find ourselves before anonymous figures, fragmentary and partial, their identification being entrusted only to the clothing. The affirmation of the self contained in the upright posture is dispelled in the unstable asymmetry of what remains of the body, reduced to all effects to a casual negligee with ornamental stars and stripes, clearly denoting the identity or culture of reference. From masks, dolls and mannequins used in his performance inspired by Artaud (based on ketchup and mayonnaise) to the creation of actual sculptures, was a short step for McCarthy. All the more so because from the start the figures of the father and son in The Garden (1992) were present also as independent figures (Garden Figures, 1992-94). What McCarthy stages in his sculptures, which break through the boundaries of the acceptable, is a vision of the human body as a “battlefield”, traversed by the promises of the new bionic technologies, moved by political tensions and induced collective desires, undermined by lethal invisible viruses which include first of all repression and the sense of guilt that accompany the initiation of childlike innocence into adult culture. McCarthy's scathing parody is an instrument of de-sublimation and unmasking of the brutality subtended by Western culture, notably in its myth of youth (at all costs and therefore envied) and of physical beauty, constructed by the unwieldy mass entertainment and fashion industries, determined to teach not only how to spend but also how to appear to be.