Pirates, Pigs & Penises

Maureen Mcmanus visits Whitechapel Gallery to take stock of the latest exhibition:
Paul McCarthy’s La-la Land Parody Paradise

Striking, sexual, and seriously in-yer-face, this exhibition could be described as a retrospective for the beginner on the work of long-time famous American artist, Paul McCarthy, not to be confused with his more innocuous musical near-namesake.

Leave your subtlety gauges outside the door. Here are works whose titles leave nothing to the imagination, whose textures, materials and colours go for the short-sharp-shock. Anthony Spira, curator at the Whitechapel, said of the exhibition, “It’s like visiting a theme park, but one that has gone dreadfully wrong.” Dick Head, She Man, and Pig Island Marquette do not disappoint their monikers. Shitface, however is a fascinating combination of clay and plastic cast in resin; the title does it no favours. Paul McCarthy, whose provocative performance work in the 1960’s and 70’s using prosthetic phalluses and ketchup as blood took masculinity to task, is sixty this year. He has not mellowed with age.

The exhibition has two parts, sculptures and images in the main Whitechapel Gallery, near Aldgate East Tube station, and the Caribbean Pirates installation in a warehouse, twenty minutes walk away. This second part, the newer work, consists of large-scale objects, a frigate, a houseboat, and film showing images of brutal and gory sexually themed antics and is a take on the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park in Los Angeles. Copious amounts of chocolate sauce is put to rather disturbing and seemingly violent sexual uses. “Disneyland is so clean: hygiene is the religion of fascism”, McCarthy said in an interview in Bomb magazine two years ago. He added that Disney was “a Shangri-La that is directly connected to a political agenda, a type of prison that you are seduced into visiting.” The pirate world created in the warehouse certainly presents an alternative perspective.

With its roots evidently in the Sixties, Pauls’ main theme is sexuality, with an obvious effort to shock. Winston Longs, a print from 1976, depicts a hairy-penised man below and a blond with drawn on beard above. She-he holds a cigarette packet with an image of a penis. This must have been thrilling in the seventies, and still has resonance, but possibly due to McCarthy’s successful impact on so many younger artists, this is not matched by many of the other works, which seem obvious or dated.

The exhibition blurb talks about the need for the artist to resonate with contemporary global events. The use of pigs and pirates somehow contrasts with the reality on the streets around Brick Lane, and one wonders what is the resonance of this sexual feast available to us here. This is the work of another time: the Sixties, raising the question, have we already travelled so far, that the Sixties are thenew Art Deco? Seen in this way, the exhibition becomes a sort of imperative for the arty crowd that imbibe their influences from the streets of Brick Lane. How otherwise will they know their progenitors, and where the use of tore-out pornography, posters presented to us backwards, and the screaming video installation originated? What is interesting here is the common ground with other modern art, not the difference, Shitface connects to Damien Hirst, Dick Eye to the Chapman brothers. This succeeds not so much as an exhibition of modern art, but as an attempt to show a life in modern art, a retrospective.
The work is strikingly apolitical, except in the most personal terms, despite claims to the reverse. The tenuousness of the connection made between pirates and Americans as colonialist doesn’t hold up to any kind of examination; pirates by their nature were anti-colonial opportunists.

There is something of the mother in his sculpture of the pig. The great provider, with her row of little teats, and the open orifices, this pig is a soft-skinned beauty who twitches winningly for us, and contrasts with the anger expressed at the sexual women in the cut-outs from pornographic magazines.

The engagement with sex is real, anguished at times. There is pain and truth in the wishful thinking; in the confrontation of the artist, naked from the waist down, the pot-belly hidden by the shirt, on the cheap pull out bed. However the girls bodies are too pretty, the breasts just perfect, again we see the objectification of women. There is no ugliness allowed to them. Paul’s men are ugly but not his women.

There is a saying that people get the democracy they deserve, evidence George Bush, and here is the possibility that they also get the artists they deserve. There seems a link somehow, that a president as oddly dyslexic as Bush, should come from a culture that produces an artist, equally as dyslexic, as Paul McCarthy. The parallel can go further, McCarthy left the Mormon religious city of Salt Lake City to move to more debauched Los Angeles. Bush left a past of hard drinking, to return to the path of the religious right. The territory they occupy is not that different, but their approaches certainly are.