The Abject Sublime
In five decades of provocative practice, Paul McCarthy has made excrement, bodily fluids, and consumer-culture detritus the raw materials of some of the most rigorous—and most unsettling—art of our era. This is not shock for shock’s sake. It is philosophy.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1945, McCarthy spent years on the margins of the art world before his breakthrough at age forty-five. He worked construction to support his family, taught at UCLA’s pioneering New Genres Department, and packed his props into trunks that he sealed shut for nearly a decade. When he finally opened them, the art world was not quite ready. When it became ready, it could not look away.
At the heart of his practice lies a deliberate, theorized engagement with the abject—a system in which food surrogates stand in for bodily waste, in which the commodity and the excremental are made to reveal their secret kinship. As McCarthy himself put it with characteristic directness:
“It was ketchup—but it could be blood. Mayonnaise was mayonnaise—but it could be sperm. Mustard could be shit. Chocolate could also be shit.” — Paul McCarthy
Filth as System: The early performances
McCarthy’s engagement with the abject began in the early 1970s with a series of filmed performances in which he smeared his body in condiments in confined, dimly lit spaces. The most emblematic of these, Heinz Ketchup/Sauce (1974), announced his radical program. A Heinz ketchup bottle—supreme symbol of American processed food, of mass production and democratic taste—became, in his hands, an instrument of bodily desecration.
Where performance contemporaries such as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci used the body as a site of endurance or liberated sexuality, McCarthy’s body was a site of comic degradation: a parody of the consumer self that eats, produces waste, and pretends not to. The graininess of the video, its low-fi aesthetic, amplified the discomfort. There was nowhere to look away to.
Bossy Burger: Fast Food and the return of the repressed
Bossy Burger (1991), filmed on a set constructed from discarded props from the TV sitcom Family Affair and reconfigured as a fast food kitchen, remains one of the most celebrated and disturbing works in the history of performance art. McCarthy, wearing a chef’s outfit, oversized clown shoes, and a mask of Alfred E. Neuman—the gap-toothed mascot of Mad magazine—plays a puerile fool hosting a children’s educational television program. The performance descends into chaos: condiments are smeared across surfaces and bodies, and food preparation becomes indistinguishable from bodily function.
The work is a two-pronged attack on the mythology of fast food (the cheerful kitchen, the branded product, the promise of clean, frictionless consumption) and on children’s television (the educational host, the bright set, the performance of wholesome normality). McCarthy reveals both as chambers of barely suppressed filth—and in doing so, implicates the entire apparatus of American consumer culture in a collective act of denial.
Chocolate, shit, and the logic of the commodity
The substitution of chocolate for excrement is among the most persistent and conceptually precise moves in McCarthy’s practice. Chocolate is, of course, one of the most universally desired substances in the world—associated with pleasure, luxury, and childhood reward. It is also, unmistakably, brown. McCarthy exploits this resemblance to collapse the distance between what consumer culture most desires and what it most strenuously represses.
His 2008 public sculpture, Complex Pile—a monumental inflatable in the form of a heap of excrement—took this logic into the public realm. In full view of passers-by, it insisted on what consumer culture denies: that beneath every commodity lies waste and the body’s irreducible materiality.
Buttplug Gnome and the Public Sphere
Santa Claus (2001)—widely known as Gnome Buttplug—is a bronze sculpture of Father Christmas holding an object that ostensibly resembles a Christmas tree but unmistakably evokes an anal sex toy. Commissioned for a Rotterdam shopping district and rejected by city officials, it was eventually housed by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Its genius lies in the double desecration it performs: Santa Claus is simultaneously a religious icon and the supreme avatar of consumer capitalism. To fuse this figure with an object of anal eroticism is to expose, with a single gesture, the libidinal charge beneath the wholesome surface of Christmas commerce.
Tree (2014), installed in Place Vendôme, Paris, extended the provocation further. The monumental green inflatable—its resemblance to a sex toy beyond dispute—was defaced and removed after two days. McCarthy himself was physically attacked, his nose broken. The ferocity of the reaction was, for McCarthy, the point: proof, written in violence, of the depth of the repression his work sets out to expose.
The theoretical ground
Three interlocking intellectual frameworks sustain McCarthy’s scatological art. Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque—the temporary inversion of social hierarchies in which the bodily overwhelms the spiritual and the repressed returns with anarchic force—provides the historical and cultural frame. Bataille’s base materialism—the insistence on the irreducible reality of matter in its most degraded forms—provides the philosophical anchor. And Freudian theory, particularly the concept of anal repression as the hidden foundation of civilized life, provides the psychoanalytic depth.
Together, these frameworks allow us to understand McCarthy’s work not as provocation for its own sake, but as a sustained, rigorous philosophical project: the dismantling of the repressive architecture of consumer culture, one smear of ketchup at a time.
McCarthy’s influence on subsequent generations has been substantial. Jake and Dinos Chapman, Matthew Barney, and Nathaniel Mellors all show clear debts to his exploration of bodily degradation and spectacle. More broadly, his work helped establish the scatological and the abject as legitimate territory for serious contemporary art—a contribution whose importance cannot be overstated.
As critic Jonathan Jones observed, the remarkable fact about McCarthy is not that the mainstream art world ignored him for so long, but that he “ended up rich and famous without once compromising or simplifying his disturbing, shocking, confrontational art.” His work remains, in the most precise sense of the word, unpalatable—and that is exactly why it matters.