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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23.2 (2001) 10-17



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Paul Mccarthy
Rites of Masculinity

Jennie Klein

[Figures]

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Midway through Paul McCarthy's retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (November 12, 2000-January 21, 2001), the viewer encounters a seemingly bucolic installation that initially seems to be jarringly at odds with the rest of the exhibition. [The retrospective was presented in New York under the auspices of the New Museum of Contemporary Art from February 22 to May 13, 2001.] A chunk of artificial wilderness sits incongruously in the center of the partitioned gallery space. This bit of fake foliage, which appears as though it was airlifted from Disneyland some thirty miles south of Los Angeles, pulsates with an odd mechanical sound similar to that found at many of Disneyland's mechanized attractions. One almost expects the pirates of the Caribbean or the children from It's a Small World to emerge from between the trees, overjoyed at the prospect of greeting yet another paying visitor. It is only as the viewer approaches this installation that the origin of the mechanical sound becomes apparent. A father and son, pants down around their ankles, copulate with the forest in rote fashion. Too late, the viewer realizes that she or he has stumbled upon a rite of masculine passage, one in which the father shares his sexual perversion with his son.

The title of this installation, The Garden, suggests a re-worked Garden of Eden, one in which the carnal knowledge long attributed to women is exposed through the masculine bodies of patriarchal secession. The father, his face mottled with age and his shirt soiled from his contact with nature, stands upright clutching a tree. The son, meanwhile, lies face down in the dirt, his black curls tangled and his face distorted into a grimace. Both men appear to be lower middle class and slightly seedy, existing in a space that is just this side of homelessness. Even if they were not engaging in such a disturbing act, they would be outsiders to the relentlessly consumerist society of southern California, a society that McCarthy's work both satirizes and explores. In a world of expensive homes and cars, swimming pools and trips to Disneyland, there is no place for a family such as this. Father and son are other to the sunny society of southern California--or not.

One of the benefits of a warehouse-sized space such as the Geffen Contemporary Center in Los Angeles is that it is possible to include a reading room and a special [End Page 10] project room. For the latter, McCarthy assembled film and video clips, both of his early work and of the influences on his work. While I was there, in addition to watching a bewigged, ketchup, and meat-smeared McCarthy writhing on a bed of meat (Sailor's Meat, 1975), I also watched excerpts from a number of low-budget horror films. The protagonists in these latter films looked a great deal like the father and son from The Garden. In spite of the apparent perversity of the two protagonists, The Garden is rooted not in archetypal mythology or the Freudian unconscious, but in the schlock imagery of Hollywood.

The Garden, reproduced on the cover of the catalogue, is clearly seminal to McCarthy's body of work. As curator Dan Cameron notes in his catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, The Garden, which was first exhibited in LA MoCA's 1992 exhibition Helter Skelter, helped to propel McCarthy to international and national acclaim. For many viewers (myself included), it was their first opportunity to view the work of an artist best known for his conceptual and performance work from the late sixties and seventies. In the context of Helter Skelter, a shock and schlock exhibition full of bad boy art by LA-based artists, The Garden looked like more of the same. A nascent feminist at the time that I first viewed it, I was taken aback by what I perceived as its aggressive portrayal of prepubescent masculinity. I subsequently wrote my dissertation...

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