Paul McCarthy (Phaidon)

Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids.

These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist. This is the first comprehensive survey of over twenty years of work by a profoundly influential artist whose work is in the collections of the world's most important museums.

Ralph Rugoff, curator, critic and author of Circus Americanus, has created an important critical framework for contemporary West Coast art. In the Survey he identifies key themes in McCarthy's oeuvre and sets them within a broader cultural context. Expert on live arts and co-editor of Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Kristine Stiles talks with the artist about his performances. Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, celebrated for his writings in Flash Art and his curating of public art projects in Italy, focuses on McCarthy's Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma, a nineteenth-century tale told in a post-Disney world. For the Artist's Choice, McCarthy has spliced together various fragments from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, creating his own non-linear rendition of this classic existential novel. The book also includes interviews and previously unpublished notes and poems towards sculptures, performances and videos.