Paul McCarthy

Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, Germany
New York, Phillips de Pury & Company, Contemporary Art from the Collection of Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, November 7, 2005, Lot 21
Claude Berri, Paris (acquired from the above)
Thence by descent to the present owner

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Through a poignantly sardonic and irreverent amalgamation of innocent popular imagery and objects with inherently explicit connotations, Paul McCarthy’s monumental Santa Long Neck is a paradigmatic manifestation of the controversial and consciously provocative affront to consumer culture that has made the artist one of the most renowned and unique practitioners of his generation.

McCarthy’s penchant for exploring art’s capacity to disturb through absurdity can be rooted in his early performances. Creating dramatically uncomfortable scenarios which combined the use of meat, food, and excrement, McCarthy’s penchant for the grotesque has been compared with Viennese Actionism and the sensationalist performances of Günter Brus. Yet having grown out of a dramatically different context – Los Angeles, the home of American cinema – and in sharp contrast to the distinctly shamanistic elements of the Vienna Actionists, McCarthy’s humorous and pointedly sarcastic outlook debunks modern cultural myths. Santa Long Neck exemplifies the development of these key themes within the artist’s sculptural practice.

As noted by Ralph Rugoff, McCarthy’s subversive techniques have long played upon the accepted codes and narratives by which society has organized its cultural purview: “McCarthy’s topsy-turvy art stands our familiar models on their heads. Throughout his oeuvre, he has mixed cliché and convention to break down our social architecture of stereotypes... Indeed, all along McCarthy’s depraved patriarchal figures have implicitly insisted that the Father’s laws—his taboos and taxonomies—are not the neutral mechanism of a transcendent authority, but are tainted and besmirched with irrational desires.” (Ralph Rugoff in “Survey,” Paul McCarthy, London, 1996, p. 84) As a sentimentalized western cultural idiom, the father-like Santa Claus, epitomizes not only the ‘good-will’ gestures of Christmas but also a figure  whose image has fervently been utilized for commercial purposes. As a metaphor, McCarthy's Santa also exists at the crossroad between Bacon's tormented papal authoritarians and the cartoonish heroicism of Koons' Popeye.

Here we encounter the visually iconic elements of the popular depiction of Santa Claus fractured and reconfigured with unsettling objects; a rupturing of the body that calls upon the tradition of the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ game favored by the Surrealists and recently revived by Jake and Dinos Chapman. Incongruous insertions into the face give the implication that the figure is smoking whilst a bright pink sex toy replaces the neck, forming the focus of the work’s title. This desire to taint the sugary-sweet image of Christmas foreshadows two of McCarthy’s most important public sculptures. In the year following the creation of the present work he created Santa Claus for the city of Rotterdam, which consisted of a giant gnome-like representation of the figure holding a similar sex toy like a lollipop. More recently, Tree from 2014, installed in the Place Vendôme in Paris, held the duplicitous appearance of both Christmas tree and adult toy, sparking public outrage. It is McCarthy’s unique mixture of innocence and vice which grant such works iconoclastic capacities. 

The present work also incorporates other significant elements of the artist’s visual vocabulary, with the presence of feces and of cartoonish bite mark taken from the figure’s right side. Transforming the figure into an unsettling and near surreal mixture between body and apple, the bite connotes both the fall of man, as well as the tale of Snow White that fascinated McCarthy in his WS installation at New York's Park Avenue Armory in 2013. Realized at an absurd scale with an inherent lack of cohesion between these individually recognizable visual elements and their moral associations, McCarthy’s discordant sense of shock seeks to offend with humor and visual finesse.