b. 1945, Salt Lake City, Utah. Lives and works in Altadena, California.

An influential and infamous artist in California since the late 1960s and internationally since the early 1990s, Paul McCarthy has engaged in a decades-long investigation of abjection and taboo. He has worked in a range of scales and across media, including performance, photography, painting, installation, public sculpture, video, and combinations thereof. McCarthy’s distinctive brand of inspired depravity is often enacted by performers who take on a variety of guises—Santa, Pinocchio, George W. Bush, Heidi—in visceral, grotesque, and violent mockeries of American political and popular culture.

To celebrate the opening of his 2005 exhibition LaLa Land Parody Paradise at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, McCarthy staged a parade that began at the rear of the museum and circled around to its entrance. The parade featured a caravan of horse-drawn wagons, a Bavarian marching band, lederhosen-clad German dancers, and performers in Wild West costumes. McCarthy himself presided over the event and danced a jig along with the group. Video documentation of the parade will be on view in On Procession, along with mannequins donning Western costumes made for the event. Satirizing both imported and local iconography, McCarthy’s parade embodied the spirit of exchange in a transcontinental mash-up of cultures.

Image Credit:
LaLa Land Parody Paradise, 2005
Photo by Damon McCarthy. Courtesy of the artist.