Off the Deep End

A cartoonish figure of a man stands at just over 7 feet tall in the middle of the open gallery in Los Angeles. His arms hang at his side, and, save for a dark green long sleeve shirt, he is naked. In place of a human head, he has a tomato, in the spirit of Mr. Potato Head of the Toy Story franchise fame. Various objects are plugged into the orifices of Paul McCarthy’s Tomato Head (Green), 1994. In his mouth: a carrot. Where his penis should be: a rectangle block. Various pegs of body parts and shapes are scattered around his bare feet, yet those attached to his body are fixed. Nearby, a set of red silicone gloves rest on a pedestal, waiting its turn in perpetual limbo.

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Earlier drawings from McCarthy line the walls of the room at Jeffrey Deitch’s 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard location in Los Angeles, offering a glimpse into his process. Their absurdity is undercut by the fact that the artist indeed did make the real thing. In one sketch from 1993, the Tomato Head has a long, hose-like penis that coils on the floor at his feet. In another from the following year, holes begin to appear on his body, and a suite of utensils float nearby on the page. In others, a fork is affixed to the end of a penis, and shovels stick out of eye sockets. Elsewhere, a detailed list outlines 72 various pieces for attaching.

The space is punctuated with various grunting and breathing sounds from the artist himself coming from his new AI-generated work Wolf-Pig, 2024, that plays on loop upstairs. In the video, uncanny, distorted human figures continue in the vein of actions first acted out by the artist himself decades prior. In one scene, a warped animation of a man climbs atop a table and uses his own body to draw. Down the street at Jeffrey Deitch’s second, larger LA location, a faux-forest on a raised platform conceals two animatronic men in business attire, pants pulled down humping a tree and the ground, respectively. The seminal work, titled The Garden, 1991-92, is part of the gallery's re-staging of its influential 1992 group show “Post Human,” in which McCarthy was an original participant.

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A singular artist and a Los Angeles icon, McCarthy’s provocative approach to performance, installations, photography, film, drawing, and sculpture begs the question: What genre? Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, his practice is synonymous with experimentation—first in the ‘60s when he began painting with bodily fluids and foodstuff and now with AI where he translates his bizarre performance structures into a glitchy universe. For McCarthy, the body is in motion, a moving target that evades any binary mode of thinking. At the heart of his practice lies action, an immediacy and foreshadowing of ephemerality that remains even in his most permanent works.

Across town from Jeffrey Deitch, at Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown, a video from 1974 follows the artist as he dips a large swath of fabric into a bucket of black paint and whips it against a wall and window until both are covered. During the laborious process, perplexed passersby can be seen pausing to look in. The film, aptly titled Whipping a Wall and a Window with Paint, is part of a curated survey of 20 of McCarthy’s early-mid ‘70s videos, titled “Black and White Video Tapes III, Basement Tapes, which provides another entry point to the enigmatic artist. 

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Even more: online at Xavier Hufkens, a selection of McCarthy’s rarely seen performance works from the same time period in the ‘70s is on view through February 2, 2025. The virtual show, titled “Soiled,” presents the artist experimenting with his own body, often to disturbing ends. In Heinz Ketchup Sauce, 1974, McCarthy opens a bottle of ketchup with his teeth, pours it into a bowl on a table with a white tablecloth, and begins dipping a sponge. Soon, he climbs onto the table and begins to lather the ketchup over his naked body. A microphone in his mouth captures his heavy breathing. The table, the canvas. McCarthy, the tool. 

Throughout his practice, the artist has used his physicality as a tool in various ways: his body dragged across the floor to spread paint, his penis dipped in a paint bucket, his various limbs as both canvas and paintbrush. In Meat Cake, 1974, the first work he performed in front of an audience, the artist covers himself in mayonnaise and ketchup, and proceeds to stuff his mouth with minced meat and jam. Black-and-white footage of the performance, Meat Cake Edit #5, also on view at Xavier Hufkens, captures the attentive audience standing quietly against the gallery wall—while the various sounds of his hands slathering and mouth gagging cut through the silence. These actions often veer into the territory of violence and humiliation. How much can the artist endure? And how much can viewers stomach?

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Life is brutish, McCarthy’s work seems to posit, inescapably so. The gleaming finish of late-stage capitalist trappings might attempt to cover up this uneasy truth, but the inverse simmers beneath: humans as leaking vessels, full of shit, repressed and sadomasochistic. Like a car crash or a true crime documentary, when confronted with our own mortality, the fringes of our humanity, we cannot turn away.

Dysfunctional, twisted, and perverted, the artist hacks away at the myth of America until it is nothing but a pile of flesh. The aftermath of his action provokes disturbing questions about fame, capitalism, facism, technology, art, and popular culture writ-large. At times deeply disturbing, McCarthy’s theatricality descends into a subconscious that is both repulsive and reminiscent of child-like play, documented and displayed for all to gawk at. 

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“Tomato Head” is on view through February 8, 2025 at Jeffrey Deitch at 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA, 90038.

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“Post Human” is on view through January 18, 2025 at Jeffrey Deitch at 925 N Orange Drive, Los Angeles, CA, 90038.

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“Black and White Video Tapes III, Basement Tapes” is on view through January 11, 2025 at Charlie James Gallery at 969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA, 90012.

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“Soiled,” is on view through February 2, 2025, online at Xavier Hufkens.