Adam Lehrer On Paul McCarthy, The Specter Of Fascism, And Art World Authoritarianism

Paul McCarthy's current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth is sublime - and yet, it takes half measures when it should have went all the way

A pit of nausea in the center of my stomach pulsated outwards, becoming harder to ignore. But the sensation felt somehow deeper than abjection. Like a melancholic sickness. It wasn’t simply about being '“grossed out” by the massive paintings smeared in human excrement. It was all of it. All the triggering symbols laid out before me like a psychosomatic projection of all that I’ve been conditioned to abhor. Crude renderings of Hitler, recognizable by his malevolent mustache. Swastikas. A vomit of scatological language: “egg,” “suck,” “puss.” The sounds, too. A creeping, droning, loop of muted horror. A horror that is recognizable. A horror that we live with – that gnaws at us – day by day. But the sickness was pleasant somehow. It was comfortable. It’s how I always feel, I think. I was just more aware of it. But why did I feel like this? Why do I always feel like this? That is the central question of contemporary life, and one that artists seem less and less capable of addressing. Paul McCarthy, perhaps as courageous and bold as anyone still in art, is no exception to this rule. Though his work – as referred to in the exhibition I just described, A&E Sessions - Drawing and Painting – digs deeper into the dark undercurrent of American life and demystifies the lies embedded in its cultural hegemony better than any other American artist of his renown, he stops short of saying what needs to be said. When will artists break on through to the other side, again?

Paul McCarthy deserves our respect. Very few still prominent artists appeal to my perverse sensibilities quite like the old, white bearded, Angeleno himself. But, as I am with all artists these days, I was nervous to hear his thoughts on politics when a recent NY Times profile about him was published, because I’ve already seen so many of my art heroes make the same inane, uncritical, and often histrionic political statements made by left liberal elites in the media elsewhere, which complicates my appreciation of their art. And when I heard that McCarthy would be dealing with fascism, I feared that one of my favorite living artists would be capitulating to the anti-Trump psychosis and giving the art world more of what they want to hear. But in the NY Times interview, McCarthy refreshingly demonstrates concern with the liberal order’s insistence on Trump’s “fascism,” and remarks on his friends’ refusal to adequately contextualize their affected concerns about the state of their political economy after the 2016 election. After expressing his apprehension with the liberal haste to cry fascism, he quickly concedes ground to the faulty premises that paved the path for the “Trump is fascism” psyop narrative, even pointing to the Qanon group in his statement. “Whatever was ignited in them can be ignited in us. And we see it. What are we watching right now? QAnon dude!,” he says to the reporter. He’s right of course - the collective libidinal rage that ignites authoritarian politics is in everyone. But the statement reads as if McCarthy is hinting at something; like he is overwhelmed with insight, but just a little too disquieted to articulate it clearly.

Here we come face to face with the contradictions of an artist still attempting transgression and cultural critique within a political economy, industry and culture that has divorced itself entirely from troubling themes, and neutralized itself of a complexity that can adequately address the world. McCarthy has always harbored an antagonism against the art world, just as he’s risen to the very top of it. This contradiction has dual ramifications. McCarthy, on one hand, is among the few blue chip artists that can flirt with subcultural, provocative art movements well removed from anything resembling industry in a way that elevates his practice aesthetically without dismissing the contributions of the subterranean artists he works with. Unlike, say, Kim Gordon, who steals the valor of subcultural artists to build her brand in the upper echelons of the art world – take her Noise Name Paintings as an example, in which the artist and former Sonic Youth member crudely painted the names of underground noise and punk bands like “Circuit Wound” or “Noise Nomads” in monochrome, eventually admitting that she hadn’t even heard most of these bands’ music before – McCarthy’s subcultural connections have always read as fairly authentic, given the bourgeois limitations of the art world. McCarthy has, from very early on, collaborated with artists who couldn’t be further from anything resembling a creative mainstream. In the 1990s, he and Mike Kelley – the other Los Angeles-based artist who managed to exist in both the blue chip market and the underground without making a mockery of both – created albums and performances with the Japanese noise musician Masaya Nakahara, also known as Violent Onsen Geisha and (more recently) Hair Stylistics, in a way that felt legitimate and produced some fascinating art and music. This to me indicates that, unlike Gordon, McCarthy’s subcultural allegiances and fascinations are, to a degree, genuine. McCarthy is less concerned with stealing the ideas and transgressive authenticity of underground heroes like Nakahara than he is in introducing Nakahara’s creative production to a broader audience, while also contextualizing the influences that McCarthy derives from Nakahara’s work. McCarthy’s choice to collapse distance between high and low art, between pop culture and the avant-garde, and between the mainstream and the underground has allotted him a cosmic power for piercing beneath the spectacle of the political and social order. His work wields a rare insight into the contemporary condition.

But conversely, McCarthy’s jaw-dropping success as an artist – he is represented by Hauser and Wirth after all – imposes limitations on what he’s allowed to express and on the depth of his provocations. He is simultaneously transgressive, but obviously transgressive in a way that the art world finds innocuous enough to make a star of him. McCarthy has suffered enough censorship throughout his career to maintain a courageous defense of the importance of free speech and expression, but he never criticizes those (in the art world) who cast doubt upon the importance of freedom of expression as a right. And I don’t wish to give the impression that McCarthy’s current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, A&E Sessions - Drawing and Painting, is a failure or even a misfire. Aesthetically, it’s as potent as any of the McCarthy shows that I’ve seen and in that way, I was thrilled by it. But, the contradictions that are inherent to McCarthy’s position as an art world figure have grown more apparent. McCarthy, a legitimately brilliant critical thinker and highly self-aware artist, has even commented on the contradictions that he inhabits in previous works. For example, in the 1995 video piece The Painter (which was just declared the greatest work of art of the 1990s in the opinion of Manhattan Art Review’s Sean Tatol, an opinion I just might share), McCarthy wears a blonde wig and grotesque facial appendages - such as an elongated nose - and pantomimes the artistic practice in late capitalism as one of horrific anxiety and absurd, irreconcilable inner turmoil and conflict. This “painter” is seen smearing himself in ketchup and engaging in all manner of masochistically unhinged artistic gestures, only to later be shown as being obsessed with money, fame and the approval of bourgeois cretin collectors. McCarthy is well aware that being one of the most famous performance artists in the world, while simultaneously being known for a confrontational ethos of transgression, is schizoid. Historically, this psychosis made his art all the more exciting, as he was able to expose the dual characters of art, pop culture, and the American political landscape, while also analyzing the duality in his own personage. But now, with the role of art collapsing as it’s recuperated ever deeper into a left liberal propaganda apparatus, I need artists like McCarthy to dig deeper, and be clearer in what they’re trying to say. I don’t want to just see the “what,” I want him to attempt to explain the why. I don’t believe this is too much to ask. Consider this a gentle ribbing from an adoring fan.

I wish that McCarthy would say “fuck it” and make his critique even more explicit. The exhibition is clearly attempting to excavate the question of fascism in regards to the perhaps unwarranted discourse surrounding the term since Trump’s election in 2016. But I can’t shake the feeling that this excavation has lost its political salience now that the “Trump is fascist” narrative carried a functionally brain dead, reactionary war lord all the way to the American presidency. (Paul, the art world could have really used this discourse two years ago! Not now, when art has already made itself complicit in the most grotesque hardening of the neoliberal status quo that Western society has ever seen!)

“How much more absurd can you get than Donald Trump?,” McCarthy asked The Guardian last year. “It’s a really good example of a performance, it’s theatre. He’s really just manipulating a population. The idea that we could go, ‘Hey, we don’t need this any more, let’s just make images of utopia, of where we want to go…’” Here, McCarthy insightfully points out that Trump is not “the problem,” but a satirist of “the problem.” He realizes that Donald Trump is not a fascist, but actually something of an absurdist artist capable of exposing the decay of the global political order to an extreme degree. McCarthy realizes that the neoliberal political hegemony is a mixture of “gangster mafia mentality and Hollywood,” and that Donald Trump’s performance illustrates these dynamics, just as Paul McCarthy’s performance does. Donald Trump, McCarthy suggests, is one of the few artists to best McCarthy in an aptitude for exploring the connections between finance capital, global politics, entertainment and art and culture. When we read Donald Trump as “performance,” it becomes undeniable that his performance unearthed the contradictions of American capitalism and democracy better than any political artist ever has. Paul McCarthy and Donald Trump are both artist-satirists of the neoliberal global hegemony.  If Trump was merely a fascist, McCarthy realizes, then so is McCarthy. And if McCarthy is an artist, then so is Trump.

McCarthy has enough intelligence and integrity to vocally demystify the media narratives around Donald Trump’s support and ascendancy. It didn’t represent the rise of a fascist dictator, McCarthy acknowledges, but rather perhaps a futile but still important funnel for the justifiable alienation of the forgotten working people of America. It was a grotesquely exaggerated satire of the decay and latent fascism that had always been there, within the contradictions of our political economy. And if he sees that, then why wouldn’t he equally apply that analysis to the Biden ascendancy? That’s where the limitations of McCarthy’s art world success becomes hardest to ignore. McCarthy is reiterating the claims of Deleuze and Guattari (who he’s clearly read closely) that fascism can’t simply be a totalitarian political formation, but a metaphysical tendency within the ordinary amongst us to desire power from above. A “desiring machine.” The desiring machine that drives fascism was possibly present in the force that propelled Trump to power - to a degree, sure - but it is also undeniably equally if not more so present in the forces of “liberal fascism,” or the very forces that millions of Americans sought to reject and rebel against in the Trump movement. I believe that McCarthy understands all of this well, but this exhibition merely seeks to understand the fascist impulse as a desiring machine, and stop shorts of illustrating manifestations of those desiring machines in the broken liberal infrastructures that the Trump movement rejected. I feel certain that McCarthy is implying something like: “Trump and his movement weren’t really ‘fascist,’ and to the degree that he was, so are you (liberals), and maybe even more so.” But to say so out loud would most certainly result in outrage mobs and calls for cancellation, so McCarthy chews around the edges of the critique.

McCarthy has always understood that the same notions that propel obsessions with hollow, escapist pop culture are the same ones that harbor the fascist impulse. “It’s hard to overstate how many of American culture’s inadequacies McCarthy identifies and conflates in this work: its alimentary compulsion, Puritan repression of bodily urges, ‘bossy’ cultural imperialism, infantilization via television and other institutional structures, and general ensnaring in a trap of its own construction,” writes Martin Herbert. But we are no longer living under the cultural domination of the “Moral Majority” or the Christian Right. To anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty, it’s obvious that our “cultural imperialists” come in the form of leftwing activists. If McCarthy wanted his art’s conceptual thesis to evolve with the culture, then he should acknowledge this political shift, no? After all, are those forces that wish to imbue employers with the powers to fire their working class employees for their perceived “micro-aggressions” or their vague demonstrations of alleged racism, sexism or otherwise, coming from those of a historically right wing disposition? Hardly. It’s the bougie left activists (Antifa, BLM, et.) that fuel these discourses, that normalize them into political exchange, and that assert their unquestioned righteousness under the auspices of a banal moral purity. “Moral purity” is the undiluted fascist phantom, and it’s one that evolves alongside the cultural hegemony.

The fascist tendency, the “desiring machine” of fascism, is everywhere, baby! It’s in every political movement, every ideology, it’s in you and me! Lurking just beneath the surface is an impulse towards fascism attempting to claw its way out. McCarthy, to his absolute credit, is among the few artists that comprehensively understands these dynamics. He knows that violence is the constant human undercurrent, and that it’s often most present in those that repressively deny their brutal natures:  “Violence exists in the world in some countries and places more than others—genocide, real horror, real violence,” McCarthy remarked while speaking with the artist Tala Madani. “My work is a reflection of that but also a reflection of mediated violence and the desire for violence.” But he’s not willing to implicate everyone in his critique out loud, and one wishes he would find the courage and will-to-power to do so. He implicates himself, yes (which is valuable); but in not directly implicating art world and activist ideologies’ (as if there’s a meaningful difference between artists and activists these days) authoritarian impulses in his work, he’s protecting himself. The liberal fascist impulse that is all too common in art world circles is what McCarthy implies, but dares not say out loud.

“Indeed it is obvious to us that fascism today is rarely less pronounced and vicious than in the forms it takes not just among the ordinary, but in and among discourses and practices that declare themselves to be avowedly 'anti-fascist',” write Brad Evans and Julien Reid. “The consistent identification of the liberal project in the post-war era with the victim and survivor of the Holocaust is one of the key techniques with and through which liberalism has been able to elide its own fascism...”

McCarthy’s art has always aimed beyond Freud’s “Pleasure Principle,” offering the artist’s viewers a space from which they can confront their traumatic memories, perversions, madnesses, and capacities for violence; “The Compulsion to repeat the trauma—be it in art, nightmare, or waking life—is the organism’s attempt to master the surplus anxiety that the original incursion produced,” writes Maggie Nelson on the creative tendency towards trauma in The Art of Cruelty. McCarthy’s exhibition presented him with an opportunity to force his viewers to confront their authoritarian impulses, to sublimate them, and to possibly even reflect upon them. But without direct aesthetic polemics, McCarthy’s conceptual thesis remains too encrypted for this discourse to organically emerge from it.

Influenced by Allan Kaprow’s happenings, McCarthy has been incorporating controlled performance into his art practice since the 1970s as a method of complicating the artistic practice itself. Beginning in 1981 with the video and performance piece Sailor’s Meat, Sailor’s Delight, McCarthy has drawn and painted in character, a process that allows himself to embody the creativity of “the other,” divorced from his own subjectivity. But also, I’m sure that on some level McCarthy uses this practice strategically, to give himself plausible deniability when approaching troubling and “problematic themes.” “It’s not me who is painting this swastika, it’s this other character.” Just as we can’t be angry at Anthony Perkins for the crimes of Norman Bates, we also can’t be angry at Paul McCarthy for the drawings and paintings of Walt Disney/Walt Paul. I’ve always found McCarthy’s painting-in-character technique to be a clever method of defense against the bad faith critiques espoused by bougie moralist art writers.

In A&E Sessions - Drawing and Painting, this method is exploited once more. In the creation of these drawings and paintings, McCarthy inhabited the character of “Adolph.” The actress Lilith Stangenberg was “E,” as in Eva Braun. The performance was an evolution of the themes that McCarthy has been interested in exploring since his 2019 project NV Night Vater, in which the artist referenced Liliana Cavani’s 1974 masterpiece of erotic Nazi Stockholm Syndrome, The Night Porter. By becoming Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, McCarthy explores the cultural tendencies that Hitler exploited in his rise to power: a mix of symbols, language, catharsis, libidinal satisfaction, and dejection. Performance stills reveal McCarthy – adorned in Adolph wig, nose extension and signature mustache – writhing on the floor stomach down and painting ferociously, while Stangenberg rides on top of him in a manner suggestive of occult ritualism. McCarthy channels the collective psychosis of the people, funneling it through the hands of Adolph and onto the canvas. The use of Adolph Hitler as an icon allows McCarthy to disconnect fascism as an idea from the news cycle, and contextualize it as a kind of “dark potentiality” that always exists just beneath the surface of the political economy and the populace.  But with this plausible deniability, why won’t McCarthy just go all the way? Why won’t he point at the barely dormant fascism that exists within the sensibilities of the ideologues that most commonly proliferate the art world? There is a powerful emotional sensation to this show, and yet, it leaves you blue balled. Normally, this ambiguity imbues art with its peculiar beauty. But in this case, one detects a retreat from the show’s central provocation. The people that should be offended by this show – namely, reactionary liberal art world figures like Jerry Saltz or Marilyn Minter – most likely won’t be, because they won’t see themselves in McCarthy’s critique, because they don’t understand these themes in a manner sophisticated enough to comprehend what McCarthy is getting at. McCarthy lets those who need to hear these ideas the most off the hook.

A&E Sessions - Drawing and Painting occupies two floors of Hauser and Wirth now almost obnoxiously huge Chelsea space. On the third floor, there are a series of drawings that could be interpreted as Adolph and Eva’s self-portraits, adorned in the images of the historical figures often engaging in lewd sexual acts through a pandemonic sprawl of graffiti texts: “pussy,” “cunt,” “Adolph fucks Eva.” One particularly hypnotic painting uses two vertically stacked canvases; the top canvas shows several words on top of one another, escalating in grotesquerie as the eye moves downward, and the bottom canvas has almost its entire grid draped in sickly lime green. The piece emphasizes a barely dormant sickness of the mind, one that needs to be expelled in catharsis somehow, or someway. On the fifth floor, the exhibition achieves a libidinal crescendo effect, like a ritual exorcism of what Foucault called, “The fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” A delirious noisescape of muted screams of anguish and hauntological crackling ambient sound saturates the space. The paintings and drawings are adorned in crudely rendered symbols and figures. Adolph and Eva remain the central figures, but the images are not guided by any rigorous attention to form or application. As formal objects, there is a disturbing beauty to McCarthy’s works here, as always. His performance paintings and drawings truly look as if created under the spell of hypnosis or some kind of body switching, occult magic. Normally, I draw the line at the use of condiments and human excrement in art. I just find it….. Well, disgusting. But McCarthy’s shit smeared all over these canvases facilitates our understanding of his work as dealing in the metaphysical expulsion of psychic fascism. McCarthy’s practice is still singular in the world of art. He complicated the transgressions of the likes of Acconci and the Aktionists by alluding to the world’s dual character in its specifics, capturing the tenor of postmodernism. But the show feels unfinished. McCarthy is suggesting something truly provocative here – something that needs to be said in the context of the art world and the system of which it’s embedded – but he stops short of direct confrontation.

Art doesn’t need to take direct political stances. Typically, it should trade in mystery and uncertainty. But McCarthy missed an opportunity here. The show’s Deleuzian emphasis on fascism as a concept accurately dismisses the idea that liberals are so beholden to: that they somehow have just survived a fascist government under Donald Trump (that they were somehow able to overcome through an election, like what?) But now that Biden is in office, liberals are probably already willing to confront and accept this idea, now that it’s no longer of political use to them (their “morals” are typically just smokescreens for their class interests). But if you want to emphasize fascism in the Deleuzian sense – the desire for repression and control that Wilhelm Reich commented on in The Mass Psychology of Fascism – then it would have been infinitely more powerful to loudly proclaim and explicitly point to the latent fascism of the left liberals who think themselves in a perpetual war with the specter of fascism that they unquestionably assume they are forever on the right side of. Why? Because of their conditioned moral righteousness, these people are incapable of self-reflection upon their own authoritarian tendencies. As Reich pointed out in that text, there can be “fascist Jews” and “fascist Democrats” because fascism is a definite kind of “mass influence.” The kind of liberals that are drawn to the art world are the same liberals that are drawn to the media, to politics, to academia, and elsewhere. Their influence is total, and any and all opposition to their influence and ideological orthodoxies is effectively written off as, yup, fascism. McCarthy’s work here depicts this fascist impulse as a kind of cultural mood but fails to implicate those who harbor the impulse the most.

So even though McCarthy negated Trump’s “fascism” directly in the NY Times interview, the left liberal viewer could still easily interpret McCarthy’s show through the prism of reductive anti-Trumpism and anti-intellectual Antifa tendencies. To the degree that the fascist poltergeist haunted Trump’s base of support, it’s ever more peripherally present in his liberal opposition. I recently watched the documentary on Idi Amin, and was struck by how Amin would present himself as a clownish “man of the people” (“I’m just like you”) while at the same time projecting militaristic strength and all-encompassing power. Amin’s persona deliberately encouraged the Ugandan people to dangerously over-identify with their brutal dictator. The parasociality of liberals’ investments in their leaders is – like the Ugandan people’s relationship with Amin – disturbing. AOC using a tale of personal trauma to justify her lies about her experience during the storming of the Capitol Building. Kamala Harris, who was widely rejected by voters in the 2020 primaries, is now on her way to the presidency, using phony signifiers of social justice to mask her brutal politics and deplorable criminal justice record as California’s top cop. Roland Barthes said fascism wasn’t the right of speech taken away, but the right of silence taken away: does “Silence is Violence!” sound familiar to you? It is the left liberal side of the political spectrum that is enforcing a repressive and suffocating hegemony, while manufacturing new taboos limiting what we are allowed to think and say. It is that side of the divide that increasingly paints its political opposition as morally impure and unworthy of basic human dignity. The fascist specter that McCarthy visually alludes to in A&E Sessions - Drawing and Painting isn’t just a dormant omnipresent potentiality of liberal politics anymore. It’s alive and kicking! It’s in the Democratic Party and its tangled web of NGO infrastructures and its loyal propagandists proliferating through the media. And by extension, given its political leanings, it’s in the art world! It’s in the tactics of the Invisible Dole listserv that would rather erase Darja Bajagić’s exhibition than think critically about her ideas. It’s in the strategies of Instagram accounts like Surviving the Art World or Cancel Art Galleries that weaponize paranoia, anger, and unprovable smears to neutralize the art world of their competitors. And most toxically, it’s in the powerful art institutions, that consistently bow to the pressure of the ever present mob to enforce a liberal cultural hegemony all the while accepting donations and funding from the world’s most nefarious financial oligarchs. To leave this hot pink elephant that’s unavoidably sprawled out in the middle of the room uncommented on was a retreat from the otherwise courageous subject matter that McCarthy ultimately only hints at. The thought taboo that the art world harbors is its own fascistic tendencies. Those of us in art who actually think for ourselves all feel this. Paul McCarthy, unlike any other artist of his stature, appears to understand this, but he can’t follow through and point to it. That’s the trouble with art world success.