Prop, studio, action

This essay examines the complex conjugation of action and event, film and exhibition, prop and performance, object and environment in the work of Paul McCarthy, beginning with his early films – which were lost as he moved from Utah to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles in the early 1970s. 1 It is organised around a number of strategies taken on by McCarthy as he worked out his signature negotiation between the genres of performance and sculpture, film and drawing. I connect McCarthy’s concept of destruction or evacuation (figured early on by digging actions and road kill) to the visceral violence – latent, allegorical and literal – that courses through Caribbean Pirates (2001–05) and is reverse engineered by the artist’s mobilisation of the cut – physical and metaphorical, editorial and divisive. The other side of this discourse of incision and montage can be found in McCarthy’s arbitration of the gigantic, the multiple and the repetitive, evidenced in the colossal scale of his studio and emblematic object-environments; in his unremitting commitment to collective actions and ensemble work; and in the promiscuous formatting, multiple points-of-view and uncanny duration of his video and photographic ‘takes’. Looking to Hollywood and horror, by way of CNN and Disneyland, McCarthy sublimates the relation between objects and moving images by reconstituting their dissonant intersection as a non-didactic political allegory. His predicates for this dispensation depend on the compulsions of simulation, the masquerades of multiplicity and the inevitable violence of the cut.