VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

Paul McCarthy - Born 1945,  Salt Lake City,  USA.

Cover of Lisa Phillips’ biography, “Paul McCarthy”

An artist relevant to my work is Paul McCarthy, a contemporary artist, from Los Angeles, California. This painter, sculptor, video, performance and multi-media artist often uses the body as a paintbrush or canvas. McCarthy explores themes of family, childhood, violence and dysfunction, as he incorporates bodily fluids and food into his pieces to create elaborate and grotesque critiques of cultural icons. (www.vdb.org/) 

McCarthy aimed to test the limits of the viewer, and ultimately wants to repulse them. In a 1974 video, Painting, “Wall Whip”, he painted with his head and face, “smearing his body with paint and then with ketchup, mayonnaise or raw meat and, in one case, feces.” (Roberta Smith, May 1998, The New York Times Art Review). Another video of his in this vein is “Class Fool,” his 1976 piece in which he throws himself around a classroom splattered in ketchup until he becomes dizzy and vomits. He then inserts a Barbie doll into his rectum.

 “My work is more about being a clown than a shaman”- Paul McCarthy (Petersen, Magnus “Head Shop/Shop Head”, Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, 2006, p.20)

My video, “Chewing 2.0”, relates to McCarthy’s work. My concept is to create a video where time appears to be changing. “Chewing”, or eating in general, can be a leisurely activity or a rushed necessity. Food is needed to be consumed in order to live, and needs to be included on a daily basis, whether one appreciates it, or dreads it. “Chewing 2.0” is a second version of the concept. I used the same idea of filming people chewing, but added a few elements. Like McCarthy, I decided to make it more graphic and grotesque, to highlight the inherent barbaric and gluttonous nature of eating. This time, I both sped up and slowed down the footage. I also decided to focus on sound, as I added the ugly sounds of chewing and swallowing. The eaters listen to Jimmy Buffet’s “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” to highlight the significance of food as a means of attaining a sense of fullness, pleasure, and fullness (physically and mentally).

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2009
5:00 pm
Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall, 194 Meeting Street

Ursula Heise, Associate Professor of English at Stanford University, is also the Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature, a member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society, and of the Woods Institute for the Environment. She specializes in contemporary American and European literature and literary theory; her fields of interest are theories of modernization, postmodernization and globalization, ecology and ecocriticism, literature and science, narrative theory, science fiction, and media theory.

She has published articles on contemporary authors from the US, Latin America and Western Europe, and is the author of Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008). She is currently working on a book entitled The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature, about the role of biological form in works of the European, Latin American and North American avantgardes of the twentieth century.