"Chocolate Factory", Paul McCarthy

"I was never really too interested in actual sex toys as performance objects. I was interested maybe in other kinds of objects like a hot dog, a Barbie doll, whatever, any kind of vertical object becoming phallic, but not the actual toy or the representation used as a sex toy. I wasn’t really interested in that. And the same that I wasn’t really interested in actual blood, or actual shit, I was interested in these other notions of representation, or sublimation, or standings."

"The piece started with this notion and this clear idea, or clear perception, that that object, the butt plug, existed as several objects within a perception. It was not only a butt plug, it was a tree, it was a Brancusi. And as time went on, it became more of a tree, more of a Brancusi."

"The cube became central to me and in what I was thinking about. And the cube had a lot to do with architecture and the skull. The windows are the holes that we look out of the skull. Architecture and the skull. Architecture and minimalism, minimalism being hollow."

"Do I have difficulty finding myself being Santa Claus at night, or do I have difficulty all the sudden being Walt Disney or something or Paul? There is a type of character and I kind of like sleeping into these characters and seeing what can happen. When you do adopt a character then that allows you to explore something that you may not explore otherwise. The change in the voice, the costume, all these things. There are things that actors know."

"What was interesting about the nine rooms was that there was no hallway that you went from room to room, essentially an older type of architecture. You went into one room then went through a door, went into another room, went through a door, went into another room. In some ways it acquainted a kind of dreamscape to me, that in a dream you might find yourself in one room and then immediately be in another room without going through any transition or through any hallway."

"Actually, we will probably run out of chocolate before that and we will run out of space. And so, at 15 000 figurines, we are just adding more shelves, filling it up and filling it up. And at one point the video would probably be more and more projected on to the figurines or the projections are shifted into new positions. The piece begins to fill up."

"At one point, because of the notion of the dreamscape of the architecture, the beds entered the thing. I had planned on sleeping at the Mint but it became progressively more difficult because of everything that was going on. So the beds became more of something that maybe happened, or something in storage but something that is related to sleep. Sleep being a human condition. So the beds entered and they indicate horizontal."

"At one point, it wasn’t about the plug being taken down. It was the question of “Are you the artist ?” separated from that event itself and the question of art being questioned. And the question of me questioning art. And the question of the society questioning art. The role that art could play and that art does play. What is it? How significant is it within human history, within this notion of humanity. I think it shifted completely from that strata of the event on the Place Vendôme and it took on of this new layer of me talking to myself. It took on a repetition again, a mantra again."

"The reality is that chocolate figurine, if we decide to do it, is a Guinness book of world records of the largest chocolate figurine pulled from a mold. But when we pulled it out, there was something incredibly beautiful about it hanging there. And then realizing that it split."