Messy messages with a whiff of dysfunction

A scene from Paul McCarthy’s Family Tyranny.

American artist Paul McCarthy's sexually charged social critiques can be comical or violent, often both at once, but they are always messy.

Whether his theatrically scatological performances have him playing with chocolate, ketchup, paint or bodily fluids, you can be sure he'll be slopping it everywhere, making viewers squeamish and uncomfortable.

Set in a crudely approximated sitcom-style set, Cultural Soup and Family Tyranny (Modeling and Molding) were filmed and edited in three days. After two days of improvising without any script - one day alone and one day with fellow Mixed-Up Childhood artist, Mike Kelley - McCarthy edited down the footage to just 15 minutes for the two works.

Like his later work, Heidi, also done in collaboration with Kelley, McCarthy unpicks media portrayals of family life using the sculptural installation of a studio set, performance and video.

In Cultural Soup, a dishevelled McCarthy blearily mumbles and fumbles his way through a coarse imitation of a cooking show, performing for a small boy-doll, which he smears with mayonnaise for obvious phallic connotations.

Family Tyranny uses the same set and co-stars Kelley as the difficult son for a sitcom scenario featuring a polystyrene head, a stand-in for the son when McCarthy's well-meaning but inept father-character demonstrates punishment techniques with mayonnaise and a funnel.

"It's funny but uncomfortable work," says Mixed-Up Childhood co-curator Janita Craw. "It made me burst out with a hysterical, nervous laughter. It touched a nerve. I'm a parent and that loving feeling McCarthy provokes is familiar to me.

"This pivotal work challenges issues of the discipline-abuse divide: 'my father did this to me and it did me no harm'; the discipline or the hiding; the 'wait till your father gets home' that is now considered abuse; child-rearing practices that are passed on through generations, or parenting manuals that are like popular cook books."

McCarthy began his career as a painter and moved into performance in the 1960s. He decided video and installation was an easier way to approach his intense explorations of the body, sexual taboos and initiation rituals.

Although McCarthy's works appear grotesque and infantile, they are rarely offensive. In dealing with family violence, he alludes to these aspects through cartoon-ish behaviour and kitsch props. It is the whiff of dysfunction that creates alarm for the viewer, who he implicates by leaving them to create their own associations.

Exhibition

 * What: Paul McCarthy in Mixed-Up Childhood
* Where and When: New Gallery, to May 29