Paul McCarthy (American, b. 1945)

Paul McCarthy (born August 4, 1945 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

McCarthy studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting. In 1972 he studied film, video, and art at the University of Southern California receiving an MFA. Since 1982 he has taught performance, video, installation, and performance art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. McCarthy currently works mainly in video and sculpture.

Originally formally trained as a painter, McCarthy's main interest lies in everyday activities and the mess created by them. Much of his work in the late 1960s, such as Mountain Bowling (1969) and Hold an Apple in Your Armpit (1970) are similar to the work of Happenings founder Allen Kaprow, with whom McCarthy had a professional relationship.

McCarthy's work is heavily influenced by Viennese Actionism, seeking to break the limitations of painting by using the body as a paintbrush or even canvas; later, he incorporated bodily fluids or food into his works. In a 1974 video, Painting, Wall Whip, he painted with his head and face, "smearing his body with paint and then with ketchup, mayonnaise or raw meat and, in one case, feces."His work evolved from pushing painting to the limit, using the body as canvas and as paintbrush, and eventually substituting bodily fluids or food for paint and then moving on to psychosexual events that fly in the face of social convention, testing the emotional limits of both artist and viewer. An example of this is his 1976 piece Class Fool, where McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup spattered UCSD classroom until dazed and injured. He then vomited several times and inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum. The piece ended when the audience could no longer stand to watch his performance.

McCarthy's work in the 1990s, such as Painter (1995), often seeks to undermine the idea of "the myth of artistic greatness" and attacks the perception of the heroic male artist.

Biographical information from Wikipedia