Sailor's Meat (Sailor's Delight)

Sailor's Meat (Sailor's Delight)

1975 · 81 min · Documentary

Here, the artist performs as the female protagonist of Russ Meyer’s soft-porn film, Europe in the Raw! (1963). Done up in black lace lingerie, heavy makeup, and a seductive expression, he meanders across the room, methodically exposing different body parts, accentuated by cropped close-ups. Yet the work quickly deviates from standard realms of sexual fantasy, devolving into something unexpectedly abnormal. Having thrust a hot dog up his ass and smeared himself with ketchup, he positions himself on all fours and “goes down” on a slab of glistening raw meat, burying his face in it, taking it in his teeth, drooling and spitting on it, and finally rubbing it over his body. He then adds ground beef to the mix, spreading it across the bed along with the steak, hot dogs, and ketchup and thrusting his body back and forth with increasing agitation, as if simultaneously humping and being humped by it. Such antics continue for nearly 45 minutes.

Directed by Paul McCarthy

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In Painter, the mythology of the artist as hero is attacked in a grotesque, parodic performance that unambiguously points to the abstract expressionists. Performing as the painter, McCarthy undermines pre-packaged ideas about the creative process by turning it into an absurdist soap-opera.
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Family Tyranny (Modeling and Molding)Family Tyranny (Modeling and Molding) · 1987
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In contrast with McCarthy's recent projects, however, many of his older works are little short of incendiary--particularly three videos from 1975, whose now lo-fi texture and queasy saturation only add to their bad-dream quality. Here is McCarthy, in Experimental Dancer, as something legitimately alarming: an idiot self-celebrant prancing naked in a grotesque, grinning mask, tucking his cock between his legs or pulling it into distension, waving scissors around, ceremonially trimming his pubic hair, and pushing his anus toward the camera.
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In a shamanistic, quasi-sexual ritual performance, McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup-spattered classroom at the University of California, San Diego until dazed and self-injured. He then vomited several times and inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum. The piece ended when the audience could no longer stand to watch his performance.
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Drawing on the idiom and imagery of the consumer culture he grew up in, video artist Paul McCarthy distorts and mutates the familiar into the disturbing and grotesque as fairy tale narratives and foods are transformed into tableaus of abuse and violation.
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Following the piece Heidi, a loose interpretation of Joanna Spyri’s novel by the duo of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Kelley performed four dances with just an apparently innocent basket as a prop.

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