I stepped into a little hut made of slapped together, unfinished boards, and watched a video loop of a perversely messy Santa pour brown syrup over a naked man's crotch, as the man sat far above a coffee can. The chocolate syrup dripped down into the coffee can. Watching it, I felt something rise in my throat. I didn't know if I was aroused or sick to my stomach.
Bruno Bettelheim, a psychoanalyst, writes about what could be termed, "womb envy", in his book Symbolic Wounds.Everyone's heard about Freud's theory of Penis Envy. Bettelheim theorizes that the fact that men are expected to be circumscised in many, if not most, cultures suggests an underlying envy of women's mysterious ability to bleed regularly and not die, and to give birth. Men are often uneasy with the mystery of women's insides, and from this anxiety springs the myth of the vagina dente (does that vagina have teeth inside?!). They also are often unsure about paternity, which almost always seems to be up to the woman (to choose, and to know about).
In a recent article in Flash Art, Paul McCarthy states: "The body has to do with the inside and outside in that we perceive the outside from inside but we can't perceive the inside from the outside. The internal functions of the body are housed within this mysterious sack."
In his series of sculptures from the nineties to the present, he often has bizarre, cartoonlike figures with unlikely heads standing stiffly, and surrounded by snap-on, interchangeable, male and female genitals (See the Tomato Head series). Often his sculptures have both male and female genitals, though oddly placed. In his Chocolate Blockhead Nosebar... sculpture, he has both a phallus nose and a vagina mouth on the face.
The chocolate-colored ballon figure, nearly a story tall, has a chocolate bar vending machine under its rump. McCarthy likes to play with the edge of the erotic and disgusting. And in working through this obssession, he makes videos of grotesquely costumed figures performing bizarre rituals with food stuffs (ketchup and chocolate) that suggest bodily fluids.
He states that his work is about: "the body, the visceral material, the idea of a tunnel, a birth channel or stomach."
The fact that he blends together "a birth channel, or stomach", demonstrates that he is using the male experience of digestion and excretion to as a way to understand the female experience of menstruation and giving birth. The body, he says, is a "mysterious sack." Much more mysterious to men, who wear their sex on the outside. Women, who can be penetrated without harm, are more used to their bodies being permeable and fluid. They wear their sex on the inside and appear to be more familiar with their insides.
Paul McCarthy deals with the tension of the different ways of "knowing" between the sexes by dramatically reproducing many female processes in men.
It is as if, by making grotesquely masked men appear to ooze and bleed, he is creating a pan-sexual being, who, like a frog, has a cloaca (one opening for both sex and excretion). By erasing the sexual difference in this "mysterious sack," McCarthy attempts to control what he cannot understand.
A link to some of his recent work.
More about his work, and where you can find images.
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