My Writings

Paul McCarthy’s Brain Box Dream Box: A Phallus Too Far

Sigmund Freud would have a field day when analysing the work of Paul McCarthy. The work of this 60 year old Los Angeles based artist is rife with phallic references and gender confusion, suggesting all kinds of suppressed traumas from a troubled childhood. McCarthy first became known in the 1970s for his performances and film works but during the 1990s extended his practice into stand alone sculptural figures, installations a series of large inflatable sculptures[1]. Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking artists of today, and has the questionable status of being a ‘Shock Artist’. While how shocking McCarthy actually is may be contested, it was at the very least shocking enough that the mayor of the French town Angouleme requested that one of his exhibition was to be closed. The attempt was not entirely succesful, but the exhibition was closed for minors[2]. Recently a collection of McCarthy’s work, both older and more recent, was on display in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven.

When entering the Paul McCarthy exhibition “Brain Brox Dream Box” in the Van Abbe Museum, faint distant noises offer a promise of what is to come. McCarthy is an artist who uses many different mediums in his work, from paintings and sculptures, to elaborate multi-media video setups. Because of the noises that the installations make there is some “spillover” in the eight rooms that the exhibition comprises of. While the exhibition is decribed as “one over-arching continuum” it is really not clear whether this exposition should be considered as a single entity, or rather as an overview of McCarthy’s work[3]. The exhibition in the Van Abbe Museum comprises “two extensive video installations from 1996 and 2003 and four large-scale sculptural ensembles, but also around 200 drawings ranging from 1967 to the present day”[4]. The exhibit is also accompanied several films showcasing Mccarthy as a performance artist and where you witness the artist spitting on his penis.

McCarthy is an artist who questions preconceived notions of gender and sexuality. References to transsexuality and an apparent loathing of a contempary culture dominated by masculinity are all over the place. This loathing of masculinity seems to relate as much to his own person as well as a general critique of western masculinity. One of the first works the visitor encounters, Europe Raw, is exemplary of this. Against the wall there are three full-size pin-up photographws. The left and the right pictures feature two women dressed in erotic lingerie. In the middle picture is a man with a blonde wig and satin panties. From the very first minute it is clear that McCarthy wants to challenge the status quo of contemporary American society. Gender assumptions are exemplary of what kinds of issues are at stake for McCarthy.

Moving on we stumble upon the Yellow Table. The Yellow Table is a huge yellow table, that presents a huge version of an ordinary item as a work of art. Because of its size it loses its function and only remains as an aesthetic object.

Then the visitor is confronted with the “Sushi Drawings” a large series of drawings on paper place-mats from a Sushi restaurant displayed on four long rectangular tables. The artist was a frequent guest of the ‘Yamaha’, the aforementioned sushi restaurant, and the drawings were made during the many visits McCarthy made to the restaurant[5].  The place-mats are smeared and scribbled with crude drawings and words, many of whom are taken from McCarthy’s idiom of phallic shapes, scatalogical references, cowboys, pirates and silly word jokes like “Moaning Lisa”. The pictures often seem as they were drawn by a child, but this seems contradicted by the subject matter of the drawings.

Moving on, the visitor is engulfed in a grotesque landscape filled with various Christmas trees. In the exhibitions first of two large mixed media installations we are confronted with McCarthy’s vision of Christmas as an exponent of western mass culture. The installation Tokyo Santa – Santa’s Trees presents the remnants of the performance Tokyo Santa. This performance took place in 1996  in an unused Tokyo restaurant where McCarthy dressed up as an Asian version of Santa Claus is engaged in making works of art with “crayons, ketchup, and liquid chocolate”[6]. The installation consists of, “fifteen large-format photographs [that] document and represent the moments of seeing and being seen in the performance”, combined with a plethora of decorated christmas trees[7].” These photographs feature the artist smearing himself with ketchup and blood, and eventually suggesting self-mutilation. The next room projects footage of the performance that inspired the installation. The installation evokes an uneasiness associated with guilt at first, but what remains is a feeling of disgust. As a review in ‘De Witte Raaf’already suggested, this is merely a variation of McCarthy’s idiom on a more monumental scale[8]. Bigger is not always better and McCarthy’s crititcisms come across as monolithic and dogmatic.

The Pirate Project sees McCarthy use the familiar pirate imagery as a critique of contemporary society. The Pirate Project has its roots in “Damon McCarthy’s suggestion of the Disney ride Pirates of the Carribbean as the visual impetus for a project”[9]. The pirate themed collection of works is a critique of the banality of Disney-culture. Unfortunately, McCarthy’s works suffers from the same banality it ostensibly criticizes. In several large and small drawings as wel as accompanying sculptures McCarthy shows us cannons shaped like phallusses, feces, and a pirate indulging in sexual acts with pigs. While this is mildly entertaining, at this point of the exhibition it becomes a bit too much. It is obvious that McCarthy wants to shock and break taboos, but his art seems merely reactionary and symtomatic of current times rather than offering sophisticated insights on mass culture. Other examples of this are Spoon and Paenis, both from 2001, Mccarthy uses porn magazines to be incorporated in a collage as another exponent of shallow mass culture.   

The other big installation of the exhibition is Picadilly Circus, again are the remnants of a performance with the same same name. Piccadilly Circus (2003). In the video of this performance you see large masked grotesque figures play George Bush, the Queen Mum, and Osama Bin laden. It is a dramatic performance with lots of defacing, mutilation and destruction[10].The featured installation then, evokes the atmosphere of a cluttered attic that stores the remaining artifacts that were featured in the performance. Again these remnants are accompanied by video projections of the original performance. The musty attic becomes a surreal landscape that incorporates political caricature, elements of mass consumption and consumerism (“Award Winning Mortgages!”), and even more Ketchup. The result is an incoherent, confusing, but nonetheless interesting experience.

Paul McCarthy frequently appropriates elements of pop/mass culture, from porn magazines to Ketchup, but in “Michael Jackson Whites” he appropriates a work of art that takes its inspiration from popular culture. The work is is a parody of Jeff Koon’s sculpture, Michael Jackson and Bubbles. Jeff Koon’s sculpture is a mostly white Michael Jackson with golden clothes and hair, “in the style of a populist, pseudo-baroque centerpiece”[11]. McCarthy does away with the various colors, and his sculpture employs a single white color, apparently stripping the iconic status of the king of pop to its bare essentials, while at the the same time exagerating and manipulating some of his features. As Meyer-Hermann notes, “A shoe is elongated like a phallus, the pop star’s face manipulated into bored perfection becomes an unnaturally oversized hydrocephalic head, an obvious parallel to the inflated chimpanzee’s head”[12]. While the work draws upon the same themes as other works in the exhibition aesthetically there is a stark contrast with many other works in the exhibition. It is not messy or cluttered, but instead is a more unified whole.

The question remains whether Paul McCarthy is really able to shock or affect an audience with his banalities, especially in the 21^st century. While McCarthy himself claims that "I can't say my pieces were ever directed at trying to shock an audience", instead he claims that:

“At the time that I was making [those early works], I felt I was trying to deal with certain issues and that it was somehow a kind of language to discuss something. It was never a desire to shock in the sense of shock as entertainment. If anything, I was trying to make pieces that were potent rather than shocking, or trying to make pieces that would cause a reaction or do something real”[13].

If as the artist suggests he was trying to “make pieces that would cause a rection or do something real”, one wonders whether his upfront and reactionary visual rhetoric is really all that effective. McCarthy attacks the banality of American mass culture dominated by media companies such as Disney, consumerism, and pop icons like Michael Jackson. However, most of the times McCarthy’s attempts do not more than expose this supposed shallowness of American culture, but they offer little or no insights in how American culture functions. Moreover, McCarthy has to resort to banalities himself to get his point across.McCarthy might have been able to get away with this in the eighties, but right now his work does not come across as fresh or or original. Rather, the remaining sentiments after visiting the exhibition are those of a tired repetition of moves. That being said, McCarthy does succeed in getting a reaction from his audience even if it is perhaps not a wholly positive reaction. At moments when McCarthy is sucessful, as for instance in the topical and relevant Piccadilly Circus or the uncharacteristic Michael Jackson Whites, he strike a balance that is able to impress. Unfortunately, those moments are sporadic.

McCarthy’s vison of America and mass consumption seems decidedly pessimistic and does not seem very hopeful. McCarthy’s art is not a very hopeful one, and while there are moments of (attempts at) humor they certainly do not lighten the mood much. McCarthy’s art  is useful in that it signals the problems, but stays too much on the surface to make for a really profound experience. Brain Box Dream Box, is definitely worth visiting, because McCarthy’s vision is interesting. For the casual visitor, eight rooms filled with McCarthy might just be a little too much. When adding the various films, that are showed in two screening rooms, to the menu “Brain Box Dream Box” becomes an experience that is perhaps too overwhelming. In the end, McCarthy might just have taken things a phallus too far.

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[1] http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/paulmccarthy/

[2] Erik Troncy, “Het Pinokkio Effect. Recent werk van Paul McCarty, Metropolis M, nummer 6, 1994 p. 31

[3] http://www.vanabbemuseum.nl/chroot/htdocs/archief/2004/paulmccarthy_e.htm

[4] http://www.vanabbemuseum.nl/chroot/htdocs/archief/2004/paulmccarthy_e.htm

[5] Meyer - Hermann, Brain Box Dream Box, Richter Verlag 2004. p122

[6] Meyer - Hermann, Brain Box Dream Box, Richter Verlag 2004. p156

[7] Meyer – Hermann, Brain Box Dream Box, Richter Verlag 2004. p156

[8] De Witte Raaf, Nummer 11.

[9] Meyer-Hermann, Brain Box Dream Box, Richter Verlag 2004. p86

[10] http://www.garfunkel.nl/article.php?id=290&page=2

[11] Meyer Hermann, Brain Box Dream Box, Richter Verlag 2004. p. 236

[12] Meyer Hermann, Brain Box Dream Box, Richter Verlag 2004. p. 236

[13] http://www.papermag.com/paperdaily/paperclips/01paperclips/paul_mccarthy/p2.html

Buy A President

In the past decades, election campaigns have turned into massive media spectacles. The most poignant example of a country that has such election campaigns is the US, the main focus of this essay. It seems that the image of a presidential candidate, or indeed most candidates that are in an election race, has become just as important, or perhaps even more important, than the actual issues. TV commercials, huge newspaper advertisement and massive party conventions have turned elections into events that can last for months. The actual facts and ideas are drowned in a wave of marketing techniques. This development, elections becoming media spectacles that is, does quite literally have a price. Campaign budgets have soared to unbelievable heights. From a battle of ideas, election campaigns appear to have turned into battles of budgets instead. As former House Speaker Thomas O’Neill once said, “As it is now, there are four parts to any campaign. The candidate, the issues of the candidate, the campaign organization, and the money to run the campaign with. Without money you can forget the other three”(Dionne). This clearly shows how important money has become in politics. Although the ethical question of whether such large campaign budgets are preferable, or even acceptable, is an interesting question in itself, the question of who is paying for this is just as important. So who is actually paying for all of this? Of course large amounts of the campaign budget typically come from public funds, paid for by the tax payer, and from party funds. However, a substantial amount of the campaign budget often comes from large corporations and interest groups. Even though there are regulations on how much such organizations can donate to campaign funds, there is a loophole in these regulations that allows much larger spending. The loophole consists of the fact that even though there is a limit of $5,00 to be donated to the campaign fund by organizations, there is no such limit on so-called soft money that can be spent for voter education (Janda et al. 164-165). This money for voter education is typically used very creatively, so that it becomes very difficult to distinguish educational purposes from campaign purposes. This leads to the situation that many corporations and interest groups have large amounts of money invested in election campaigns. In a democratic system such excessive sponsoring of an election campaign should not be tolerated because it will inevitably influence government policies.

One of the ways in which excessive sponsoring hurts government policies is that it supports the established parties and that it raises the bar for new participants not aligned to an established party to actively participate in politics, especially at the state or national level. Ralph Nader and the Green Party have a very difficult time to get companies to support their goals and their campaign budget is tiny in comparison to that of The Republican and Democratic parties. This is not to say that the Green Party would be much larger if it had comparable campaign funds, but it does show that the Green Party does not have equal opportunities in election campaigns. Compared to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party the Green Party is completely blown away in the dollar battle. Another example to show that excessive campaign sponsoring hurts new people getting involved in the election race is that most of the independent candidates in presidential elections were multi-millionaires. None of them has ever won an election. In fact it is also true that many presidential are very wealthy and have had to contribute considerable sums of their own to finance their election campaign. What does this mean for the average laborer, manager, or intellectual? It means that without aligning themselves with an established party, they do not have a chance to become president of the US even if they were just as charismatic, diplomatic, intelligent, and knowledgeable as a candidate for the Democratic or Republican Party.

In ancient Greece and in the earliest incarnations of democratic systems in the modern world, money also played an important role in the loudness of an individual’s democratic voice, or even whether that voice existed at all. However, it is now almost universally understood that in an ideal democratic system, wealth should not affect the importance of the participants in the system. As Aristotle put it, “[i]f liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.” (152) Large election campaign spendings undermine the essential value of equality in a democracy. Democracy at its heart is about the voice of the people and not about the voice of money. Unfortunately, in the current US political system this does not appear to be the case. For example, consider these data found in article by Jay Mandle:

According to data compiled by the Federal Elections Commission and analyzed by The Center for Responsive Politics, of the $2.4 billion raised by candidates during the 1996 elections, $597 million came from 630,000 donors, each of whom contributed at least $200. Another $161 million came from candidates themselves. This latter group included not only presidential aspirants such as Steve Forbes who contributed $37.4 million to his own campaign and Ross Perot who spent $8.7 million of his own money. Also in this grouping were 54 Senate candidates and 91 House campaigners, each of who paid out at least $100,000 to support him/herself. In combination this meant that 630,000 individuals, representing 0.3%, of the 196,509,000 people of voting age in the country in that year, contributed 31.5% of campaign donations. (par 4)

Taking these data into account, it can be argued that money does indeed have too large a role in politics.

But is this importance of money in election campaigns necessarily a bad thing? The answer is that it is quite clearly an unwanted situation for various reasons. As mentioned above, it hampers the opportunities for new people to actively get involved in politics, but even more importantly, it has an unwanted effect on government policymaking. Put quite simply, corporations and interest groups in general do not invest money in an election candidate because they think he or she is such a nice person, but they will almost invariably expect something in return for their financial support. They will expect that the candidate, should he or she be elected, to actively serve the interest of the sponsors. Inevitably, the interests of the sponsors will have a tremendous influence on the actual policymaking. There are numerous examples. There are numerous examples to support this claim and I will mention a few of them here. First of all, there are the donations to the Republican by the coal mining industry. In the 1999-2000-election cycle, they contributed over three million dollars to the Republicans. This amount was about three times as much as they had contributed to the previous election campaign. Among the first topics the newly elected George W. Bush dealt with was the decision to put an end to all the proposed regulations to control carbon-dioxide emission; these proposals would have cost the coal mining industry millions of dollars if they had been carried out (Weinberg par. 5). Another example is the National Rifle Association (NRA), which spent over $1.6 million dollars during the 2000-election cycle and has spent multitudes of that amount on previous election campaigns. The purpose of these spendings becomes absolutely clear in a video made public by Handgun Control Inc. where Vice President of the NRA, Kayne Robinson, says that if Bush is elected “we’ll have a president [where] we will work out of their office” (Harshbarger par, 4). As a final example I would like to the food industry that gave more than $41 million in campaign contributions during the 1990s. This helped them stop every bill that promised meaningful improvements in food safety (Weinberg par. 5). The impact that corporate and interest group money has is poignantly illustrated by these examples, and clearly shows an undemocratic element of the US political system.

People who are opposed to limiting and regulating the amount of may donated by corporations and interest groups point out that this money is absolutely necessary to run an effective election campaign and to allow the voter to make an informed choice when the time to vote comes. To a certain extent, they do have a point. Indeed, the voters should be made aware of the choices they have and who the candidates are. However, the candidates with limited campaign funds should also have the opportunity to present their selves to the voter. There is hardly any reason why this should be funded with such a large amount of private money. For the sake of fairness it would be a good idea to limit the spending of interest groups and corporations to election funds and instead increase the amount of public funds that go to the election budgets and to distribute the in a fair manner among the participants. This would put the various candidates on an even footing and lead to fairer, and amore democratic election system.

The opponent will at this point probably argue that, in the interest of freedom of expression, the way in which people spend their money should not be restricted. If people want to donate considerable sums to an election candidate, they should have the freedom to do so. They say that people are free to spend their money any way they want. Again, to a certain extent they are right. People should be allowed to do what they want with their money, provided that it is spent legally. This problem can be easily solved by limiting the amount of soft money that the candidates are allowed to accept by any given person or organization. Absolutely abolishing the involvement of private money in politics is not a feasible option, but in this way the influence of private money is at least kept in check. The current system resembles the illegal action of bribery too much. Considering what bribery actually means:” the act of influencing the official or political action of another by corrupt inducements” the resemblance with excessive campaign spendings is rather striking (dictionary.com). The only word in the definition that is not appropriate is corrupt, and that word would be appropriate if the US law did not allow for a loophole regarding soft money. At the heart of the matter is the fact that corporations offer money to election candidates to influence future government policies. This should be avoided.

It is fair to say that excessive spendings on election funds makes the democratic system less transparent, and provokes inequality; this is an altogether unwanted result. This essay shows how this kind of spending has influenced policy making in the past, and how it makes it difficult for new participants to enter the political fray. Hopefully, it also shows that it should not be necessary to fund elections with private money as opposed to public money. To conclude, there is hardly any reason not to regulate campaign spendings and donations heavily. It is only in the interest of the people, and therefore in the interest of democracy, that this should be done.

Works Cited

Aristotle. The Politics of Aristotle. Trans. Peter L. Phillips Simpson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Dionne, E.J. “On the Trail of Corporation Donations.” New York Times, 6 Oct. 1980

Harshbarger, Scott. “ElectionEar Campaign Monitor.” Commoncause.org May 12 2000 http://www.commoncause.org/campaign200/051200.htm

Janda, K., et al. The Challenge of Democracy. Boston; Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001

Mandle, Jay. “Elections as a Public Good.” Democracy Matters. http://www.democracymatters.org/ResearcCenter/Articles/publicgood.htm

Weinberg A. “Get Money Out of Politics: Change Elections To Change The Environment.” Democracy Matters. http://www.democracymatters.org/ResearcCenter/Articles/Getmoneyout.htm