Paul McCarthy

(Los Angeles, 1945)

Until 1968 he studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he already showed interest in performance and video. In 1973 he completed his studies in film, video and art at the University of Southern California (USC). In his first videos, made during his university training, he was interested in modes of perception and illusion, but he soon introduced the body as an object of intuitive and repetitive performances. For Paul McCarthy, performance is an appropriationist form that, through representation and fiction, questions the meanings of objects. Since 1974 he has used elements of American popular culture – specifically, culinary and children's elements – in performances of an eschatological and sexual nature that he has documented on video. In 1984 he performed his last public performance, later reinventing himself as a visual artist with sculptures that insist on the eschatological. In parallel, mainly in the 1990s, he continued making videos with complex sets and performances.

His work, Shit Plug (2002), was presented at MediaLab, a project carried out together with Paul McCarthy, where they manipulate waste and use a bottle as a container. The 11-liter Shit Plugs are presented in the exhibition along with the Shit-Sledge/Sleds, masses of rubber that the artists found at the Phoenix Rubber Works factory. These prefabs fascinated artists because of their completely fortuitous shape and the fact that a perfect sculpture (in reality, the waste material of an industrial manufacturing process) could be found in the back of a factory.