Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential
artist
Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque
installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and
slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The
psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built
environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic
prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids.
These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often
documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and
artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways.
McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or
the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist.
This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by
luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and
Robert Storr.