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McCarthy’s exhibition ‘LaLa Land Parody Paradise’ at the Whitechapel is his
largest London show to date, its title identifying his central theme – the
subversion and ridiculing of American culture’s banal fantasies, anodyne
values and the hypocrisy and extreme brutality at the heart of them all. The
bleak nightmare (with its terrible global implications) that the old cliché of the
American dream has spawned has been entering the wider cultural
consciousness for a good while without having the slightest effect, political or
otherwise – American values continue to be exported worldwide as their
bland, homogenising products become ubiquitous. Since his groundbreaking,
cross-dressing and foodstuff-smearing performances of the early 1970s,
McCarthy has relentlessly subverted masculine stereotypes, attacked
traditional American family values and sexual taboos, and transformed the
cutesy anthropomorphic animal characters of Disney et al into monstrous pop
icons of the American nightmare, without ever thumping the table didactically
or naming any names. We are all implicated in the push-pull of horror and
desire at the core of his work.

‘LaLa Land Parody Paradise’ is spread across two venues: the
Whitechapel Gallery – featuring sculpture, drawings and photographs –
provides a kind of formal, solid, quantifiable ground for the carnivalesque
madness encountered at the huge beaten-up warehouse space off Brick
Lane, where kinetic sculptures and video projections disorientate and
hypnotise the viewer. This work is collectively titled Caribbean Pirates (2001-
5) and it explores (in a generously explosive sort of way) the romanticised and
heroicised pirate of the 17th and 18th centuries – the time when North
America herself was being colonised and huge amounts of booty were sailing
the seas back to that corrupt old world the founding fathers had so admirably
hoped to improve upon.





McCarthy and his son Damon (also an artist) based their project on the well-
known Disney ride Pirates of the Caribbean. In a now familiar McCarthy trope,
the warehouse installation hosts the props used in filming the video
performances screened on the walls next to them; the viewer is invited to peer
into every architectural form of orifice to see the spattering of blood and
faeces (ketchup and chocolate sauce), the prosthetic limbs hacked off the
pirates’ torture victims and sundry other terrible remains. At the rear of the
space, a gigantic boat heaves lasciviously back and forth on a mechanised
structure, calling to mind copulation, sea-sickness and other types of piratic
fun. In Houseboat Party (2005), another accompanying video performance, a
demented Liz Taylor type and an evil blonde Barbie doll-babe smear
themselves with foodstuffs and cackle with glee as their male companion
empties his chocolate sauce diarrhoea through a hole in the ceiling. It’s all
filthy good fun, as cathartic as Viennese Actionism with the added bonus that
no animals have died to make this work. Upstairs on the mezzanine, in some
broken down small rooms, is a video projection of a group of unnaturally
clean, fresh and wholesome people singing Christmas carols (Newport,
2005). Or, rather, they would be singing carols but they’ve been stopped,
reversed, slowed down and otherwise distorted. Mouths wide open and eyes
goggling with sincerity, their arrested expressions reveal the theatre behind
the clichéd image.

McCarthy is a master of materials – the figures mounted at intervals in the
clean, white space of the Whitechapel gallery are resin casts of piratic
monstrosities that combine the tactile sensuousness of chocolate with the
inevitable recollection of piles of shit. Hybrid humans with plastic masks, they
ooze phalluses in various forms, ranging from the realistic penis emerging
from the unfortunate Dick Eye, or the horrible long, pitted nose of Jack, to the
thick severed member hanging over the face of Pothead, and the huge trunk-
like organ curving over the head of Captain Dick Hat (all 2003/2005). Sitting
on humble, bare wooden trestles and boxes, the busts have a comic-tragic
appeal enhanced by the presence of a persona in progress – the plaster cast
of a man’s head and shoulders wearing the green remains of a mask, half
destroyed, like the human face discernible beneath it, in the process of
casting. Lengths of wooden dowel stuck into his closed eyes exacerbate the
horrible brutality of the sculptural process, which is again referred to upstairs.

Here we find fingers summarily snapped off plaster casts of hands, a woman’s
body that looks as though somebody has gone for it with a sledgehammer
and then carefully, but slightly illogically, collected up all the bits, and a group
of human and cartoon-mask heads (Heads on the Table, 2004/05) that
brilliantly intertwine theatre with the real. By displaying the processes
involved in creating and wearing masks, and by putting figures wearing
cartoon-masks side by side with life-casts, the artist affirms their equal
status and cuts right into the fine line that divides the performative mask
from the biological human behind and within. Theatrical performance is at
the core of McCarthy’s work; blending plastic America with primal mess, he
exposes ways in which culture assists the social need to conceal horror with
crass entertainment.

Affirming McCarthy’s courage and moral integrity, Dreaming (2005) is a
waxwork replica of the artist, lying on several layers of foam on a garden
chaise long. He is clad only in a shirt, making his small, wrinkled penis
something of a focal point and emphasising the white, naked state of his legs.
The naked patriarch has been a representational taboo for at least the last
150 years in European art – McCarthy exposes his vulnerability and shows
his power too, the power that comes with the ability to be fearlessly honest,
which perhaps means knowing when to wear a mask and when to take it off.

elizabeth manchester

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