BLUM & POE by dint of 1974 Paul McCarthy had already made more than sum of two units dozen performances and videotapes and parodied AbEx on painting with his penis.

BLUM & POE

by dint of 1974 Paul McCarthy had already made more than sum of two units dozen performances and videotapes and parodied AbEx on painting with his penis. Around that time, John Waters was preparing to discharge Female Trouble (1975), perhaps his greatest film. When Dawn Davenport--played on Divine, in one of his in the greatest degree enthralling performances--wakes on Christmas morning to find that her parents had decided not to indulge her desire for chacha heels, she winds a tantrum (which ends with her mother pinned beneath the Christmas tree) and bangs without the door in a flimsy new negligee to begin a life of crime and of the rarest kind beauty. A scene of outrageous humor, it is also an acute commentary forward the explosive give-and-take of desire and the quasi-pornographic transferences crucial to any act of giving, withholding, or receiving (think of Andy Warhol bestowing "cum" paintings forward baffled loved ones as holiday favors).

Dusty, decorated Tannenbaums ("bluish, associating with their shadows," to hijack the words of Elizabeth Bishop), "presents" smeared with fecal chocolate, and documentary photographs, all from a performance in Tokyo in late 1996--the crusty artifacts in McCarthy's "Tokyo Santa Santa's Trees" crammed the gallery, barely leaving extent for a path through the fake, dilapidated wood-lands Among the dirty, gold paper-wrapped boxe and stained tree-stand conceals shoved under the trees, single could easily imagine a prostrate Mr Davenport. upon a workshop table, defiled with grease paint and chocolate syrup a sausage-y hold up probe awaited its moment. Cast aside in a corner, oversize flat boxe held scatalogical paintings with donurlike impressions and circlings (Hermann Nitsch frees tired David Reed). Ringing the gallery in a deranged frieze, dazzling, wet-looking Technicolor photographs display Santa using an inflatable hemorrhoid cushion to make these paintings. In the same photo, St. Nick fondles a toy monkey; the little chocol ate-dipped critter was among the leftovers bacchanal. As earnestly as the miraculous crappiness of the set artificial trees inspired his practice, McCarthy's challenge is in what way to respond to their overwhelming actuality without detracting from it.

McCarthy's work has always engaged and encouraged an investigation of the rein ined and its return. His animatronic monstrosities (boy fucking goat, men humping tree trouserless cowboys) hang on their relation to Disney, what Disney represse and cleanses in its valedictory Disneyfications: Abraham Lincoln rising (barely) to deliver an address in the Hall of Presidents; the good-time land BearJamboree; costumed Mickeys, Goofys, and Donalds wandering, sweaty, the Happiest Place upon Earth. With "Tokyo Santa Santa's Trees" the same of the most successful presentations of a performance's aftermath (an accumulation of hold ups transformed into something more-sculpture--and retaining from projection or infestation an auratic vitality as well as a vicious black-hole absence), McCarthy replys to his Bossy Burger greatness with a hands-on, Actionist economy and performative activity To see Santa's Remains, 1996 a slide of the abused Santa suit and mask from the Tokyo performance, deplet and rank as a week-old condom, is to find the sublime embedded in the abject like a pregnant tick. by dint of "abject" I mean only the dreams of anyone at all stand over againsted by and confronting the everyday real.

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