Santa Long Neck

Tout pour la tripe the French writer François Rabelais declared, "All for the gut" So saying he reduced existence to its primary appetites and functions-eating, drinking, digesting, and evacuating. During the Renaissance when Rabelais wrote, sex was no less on people's minds, but the struggle for survival and the rit- ual celebration of earthly life centered on food. In this context Rabelais was the satirical rhapsodist of oral and anal excess, a systematic leveler-his aforementioned motto applied to everyone: beggar or bishop, nobleman or "ignobleman and the first great experimental novel- ist in whom we perceive the primary structures of the modern grotesque. In choosing to emphasize the domin ion of the physical over the spiritual in an age and a culture governed by religious doctrines and devoted to life after death, Rabelais's credentials are significant-he was a doctor who knew as much as could then be known about the body unbeautiful and how it worked. His purpose was equally clear to make a radical case for humanism in language and images as frank, various, and anarchic as his subject demanded. Human instinct and the wilder side of human behavior do not make Paul McCarthy blush either. He revels in them, while upping the erotic component. In his per formances, overabundant foodstuffs-chocolate sauce, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and other surrogates for bodily fluids-are his primary materials and his own body and those of others are at once his painterly applicator and his painterly support. Wigs, rubber masks, and novelty and sex shop items round out the prop department where rudimentary costumes barely stay on long enough to worry much about McCarthy's drawings and sculptures harness the same manic energy to forms, which, rather than dissolving into smears of abjection, swell into imposing, entirely legible, though heterogeneous, presences. And impose is the right word here: Popeye's Funk uncle sports a penis for a hat: Santa Claus comes equipped with a butt-plug. Ecce homo? You beti Channeling Rabelais for our media-saturated, commodity-glutted era, McCarthy is a shameless witness to human incorrigi bility in a time of dangerous ideological propaganda for a new and improved mankind.
Text written by Curator Rob Storr for the exhibition catalog.