Midterm

The artist that I was assigned is Paul McCarthy, he does all kinds of art really.  He looks to be in his mid 60's and mainly does installation pieces, sculpture, and large scale vinyl inflatable pieces.  Earlier in his life he did a lot of performance art and short films.  Although the films were quite abstract and he likes to make very large installations where you can view loops of the film that are started at different times, side by side.  He said that he thinks of his films more like a painting than a regular film because there is next to no narrative in the sense of a story line but you can extract a narrative form the madness much like a still painting.  His process seems to have evolved slightly from what it was when he was a collage student doing performance pieces to some of the things that he does now.  He said that when he was younger he would just grab what was in front of him and find some way to use it.  He would wrap his head in scotch tape and cover it in butter.  There is a video of him crawling face down on the ground behind an open bucket of paint and smearing the paint with his face and body.  In some of his more recent works he said he has done a great deal of planning for certain parts of it to get a desired result.  He also said that he still just dives in and things sort of take shape in the middle of everything.  One idea that he says he took on in one of his short videos was the idea that people become their parents when they have kids.  He said it was being conditioned by your surroundings.  The video was just him and another person acting like a dis-functional father and son, where he was playing the father.  So he seemed to pretty much just come right out and say that he felt like he had become his father.  Some of his newer works are quite large sculpture installations and a lot of the subjects of the sculptures are large figures in American politics.  He says that he thinks of these people as real people at times and as caricatures or cartoon characters most of the time.  He has made bobble head looking sculptures of President George W. Bush that look like he's having sex with a pig.  I have seen some of his installations and I’m not really a big fan of a lot of his work.  A lot of it seems to be vile and disgusting for no reason other than to be vile and disgusting.  He did say one thing that I thought was very well said and made a very good point.  He said he doesn’t feel like he has a responsibility to his audience, his responsibility is his idea.