For three days, I had been eagerly running after Paul McCarthy for this story, while he was in Paris for his new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, “SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf.” I chatted with the legendary 80-year-old artist over a “casual” standing breakfast organized by the gallery, and the next day he obligingly answered questions while we squeezed through narrow Parisian sidewalks. This, after a Friday screening of his films A&E Adolf & Eva/ Adam & Eve Cooking Show, 2022/2023, and A&E Adolf & Eva/Adam & Eve Mother, 2022/2025: two psychosexual fever dreams from an ongoing series loosely referring to both Adolf Hitler and his longtime mistress (and later wife) Eva Braun and Adam and Eve made with his co-starring collaborator, actor Lilith Stangenberg.
There are few contemporary artists whose knack for unearthing collective, repressed trauma and social taboo, while still maintaining a sense of humor, has impacted generations of artists as deeply as McCarthy. Throughout his career, which began with early performance works in the 1960s and ’70s, the artist has been associated with a group of radical, now iconic Angelenos, including friends like Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Jason Rhoades, Robert Irwin, and Mike Bouchet, eventually establishing himself as a global art star. He is well-known for pushing the limit with works that defile illusions of the American dream, cultural icons, and consumerism, like the early 1990s installation The Garden, featuring a father and son fornicating with a tree and the ground on a set from Bonanza, or Train, Mechanical, 2003-10, a George W. Bush-pig orgy.
My Parisian pursuit of the artist culminated with his packed Hauser & Wirth opening, featuring large, raw drawings made during completely improvised, multi-camera filmed performances with Stangenberg, where they respectively played twisted Santa and elf characters. (He’s also showing works at The Journal Gallery in Los Angeles, through April 25, and at Madrid’s SOLO contemporary art space until May 16.)
In Paris, young artsy types tended to echo what so many, including gallery staff and one of the artist’s former students, repeated to me about McCarthy: that for someone who deals with such visceral, sexualized brutality, often absurd and occasionally nauseating, he is an incredibly kind person. McCarthy tears open the blood and guts of our repressed subconscious, where evil and affection shove and rub against each other, smothered in American-style Heinz mayonnaise and ketchup, to make a searing critique of the abject misery in our societies. That kind of misery has “become normalized,” he told me with real concern.
This came up when he described the unhoused people living in an alley near his LA studio, which survived last year’s fires, unlike his home and another studio. The other day, he said, a woman walked down the street with nothing on below the waist. Nobody paid much attention as she walked into a local bar, where the artist thinks she is regularly given a meal. With McCarthy’s art, we can’t not pay attention. Quite literally. At the film screening, McCarthy told us to stay through the three-hour experience, wished us luck, and repeated: “Stick with it.” Not everyone did, but afterwards, die-hards were treated to a talk about the project, and why, amid the mayonnaise humping, murder, and feces, this was also “a real love story.”
Below is an edited compilation of our conversations.
You mentioned fascism earlier, and normalized suffering. Do you think art that provokes us is important, or has a role to play today?
Yeah, I think it’s important to engage it, and to think about it. The work is an attempt and a proposition. The work is what comes out of me, it’s a type of venting, regurgitating the world. Making references to the subject of fascism is a way of bringing it up, exposing it, making it an absurdity and offensive.
An attempt at?
Getting to something, finding, digging into something. The “Drawing Sessions” [collaborative drawings made with Stangenberg, examples of which are on view at Hauser & Wirth] are different than the [performance video features, like A&E Adolf & Eva/ Adam & Eve Cooking Show, 2022/2023, and A&E Adolf & Eva/Adam & Eve Mother, 2022/2025]. The drawings are about getting into the drawing and the actions and then unfolding images in a kind of erotic cartoon playtime. There’s no script. It’s an improvisation and some drawing actions are more intense than others. The [performance video features] are scripted improvisations that go deeper into the subjects of domination, love, desire, confusion, sex, death, murder, and male/female entanglements. They are exaggerated love stories. Adolf/Adam and Eva/Eve love each other. They’re caricatures in love.
Your work is often described as extreme or brutal, yet the state of the world can seem as bad.
I think my work has gotten more to the point, more exaggerated, more extreme as the world has become more brutal. It’s a response. I think it does have to do with an empathy for what’s happening. It’s an attempt, an alignment with other humans. It is about trauma.
We could use more alignment in these pretty desperate times.
America, the world, is in a desperate situation. What’s going on, it’s confusion, buffoonery. It’s constantly shifting and stirring, and who or what’s behind it all? Where’s it going? Buffoonery and vile fascism are at the wheel. The wars and climate change… America is a very strange place right now. The powers that be in America have a lot to do with the chaos of the world. What will happen now? It’s a big subject.
Do you have any hope that the viewer will come away from your work feeling empathy?
I make the work according to what I think it should be or what I’m feeling, what’s going through me, what’s coming out of me. That comes first. I’m always interested when someone sees it like I do, or they see something that I didn’t see but that makes sense to me, that’s interesting. The negative responses, that happens, it’s part of it all.
Can you discuss the A&E as in America and Europe, or your feelings about showing in both?
There’s European fascism and then there’s American fascism. America and the ultra-right coming to life. Acting out their strategies. Trump’s playbook imitates Hitler’s playbook. The fascist-capitalist strategy to dismantle a democracy, it’s been going on for a while. It’s all connected. This new fascism in America is moving quick.
I think A&E is more related to what we are as humans, the absurdity of what we are. Adolf/Adam and Eva/Eve are stand-ins, they’re caricatures of the male and female. In the performance video series, there are chapters in which the vile, violent male comes out of the buffoon-clown Adolf. He loves his work, his violence, he kills to kill. Eva kills Adolf because she has to, or simply because he’s useless.
Lilith and I did five nights of [live] performance of A&E at the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus theater in Hamburg, Germany in 2022, and there were a lot of positive reviews in the press, but I have yet to find a venue in New York or Los Angeles to do A&E. I think that has to do with some overriding fear in America. The institutions play it safe. Complicated subjects are shut out, censored. I think at the moment there is this difference between America and Europe, but this conservative attitude is already spreading. For me there is no difference between the artists and film makers I know in Europe and America, they’re all on the same page.
Tell us about your works in Paris, both at Hauser & Wirth and shown in a small theater on March 20th.
The A&E performance videos we showed in Paris grew out of another project we did, NV Night Vater, 2019, an abstract remake of the film The Night Porter, by Liliana Cavani. At the end of The Night Porter, the two main characters, Max and Lucia, commit suicide. We were trying to come up with how our characters would kill themselves. One idea was that we would commit suicide in the mountains outside of LA, and I think Lilith said, “like Adam and Eve,” and I said “A & E,” and one of us said, “Adolf and Eva.” So Adam & Eve and Adolf & Eva became Adolf/Adam and Eva/Eve, A&E. As soon as we said, “Adolf & Eva,” the question was, do you take on something like that? The subject of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun? But the cat was out of the bag, and we both wanted to do it.
We made a series of performance videos, each one a chapter. I played Adolf Hitler, the American, older fat capitalist, fat artist. And Lilith played Eva Braun, whose character at one point turned into a Marilyn Monroe. This made it both interesting and confusing, because Lilith is a German playing the part of a German as an American. And I am an American playing the part of an American pretending to be Adolf Hitler, who was a German. A&E is about the entanglement of male-female. Am I the father, am I the son? Is she the mother or is she the daughter? Who has the power? It’s a masochistic love story. I had written a script about Santa Claus in 2017-2019, pre-Covid, where Santa Claus and the Green Elf are a disease, and you become psychotic if you’re in the same room or in the same area as them. And then Covid happened, which was crazy.
In August of last year, Lilith and I did a drawing session for 14 days as Saint Santa and Eva Elf, the Green Elf. Saint Santa is also SS. A reference to Nazi Germany. And Trump and the situation in America happened.
Can you explain your interest in Santa Claus?
Santa Claus and Jesus Christ. In the ’60s, I drew Santa Claus in several drawings. Maybe the earliest drawing I ever did was Santa Claus when I was probably six years old. I think it’s also about the colors of red, white, green, and black. Color is very important for how I think about things. In addition to the SS EE drawing session performances, I’ve done two other performances in the character of Santa: Tokyo Santa, 1996, and Santa Chocolate Shop, 1997.
Why Santa Claus appears in my work: You could say he’s the patriarchy, he’s a clown and the God of capitalism and consumers. In the pieces I have done, the idea of Santa Claus as this innocent character is flipped upside down, I’ve turned him into a buffoon, a vile character. Santa Claus becomes a metaphor for society.
All these characters overlap and appear at shifting levels in your work.
You redo things, because you haven’t finished it, or you realize something new about it, you have to do it again. That happens all the time. You make something, you see something you didn’t see before. You have to make it to see it. This idea that you know what it is beforehand, for me is an illusion. One piece leads to the next piece, the next work. And they often overlap; they connect to one another. It’s just how it works.
You seem to be deep into those connections now and are producing a lot at the moment.
Yeah, a lot.
You have a show up in Los Angeles right now as well.
The show is of pieces that are connected to two different large projects separated by 10 years, the Western, CSSC Coach Stage Stage Coach and A&E. There are paintings and drawings from both projects and two sculptures. They’re dummy bodies used in the video features. The one from CSSC is the banker, Ronald Raygun, from the scene where he’s killed by the men called “The Dogs.” And the other is the Adolf character who is killed by Eva before she commits suicide.
Is this your normal working rhythm?
The shows come in spurts, but the work is every day, all day. It never stops. It’s constant.
It keeps you going.
Yeah, it’s fine. [Laughs.] I don’t have a problem with it. Other people around me feel a little different.
Can you talk about how you do the drawings while performing?
[The Santa Claus and Elf drawings were all filmed with multiple cameras inside a reproduction of the artist’s childhood home in Salt Lake City, Utah, which was also used for his WS White Snow series (2012-13).] For the drawings, there’s never a script. We never talk about what’s going to happen. We never talk about what each of us will do. We never talk about what we wear or don’t wear. I never know what I will draw… One thing that did happen in SS EE, is the Elf character almost always appears at the top of every one of the drawings, and there is only one drawing with a Santa-like face and body. The Elf is almost always green with pointed ears.
How are these drawings a departure from your earlier works?
It’s not that the drawings changed so much, but certainly the way of drawing did. For SS EE, there was music playing the entire time, the beat from an old organ. At times I’m not aware of what I’m drawing, I just keep drawing and interacting with Lilith. In the end we always stand up and look. We look at the drawing. And that method of drawing with someone else—I think for Lilith and me… we both go quite deep into a kind of lunacy while making a drawing, a certain state. That happens in these sessions, a funny form of madness-play. It’s a free zone. The SS EE drawings are more grimy, torn, and smeared by our bodies than even the A&E drawings have been. Drawing with Lilith, for me there’s no way to explain it, but something happens. There’s never been a drawing we’ve thrown away.
Why do you like performing with a collaborator like Stangenberg?
We’ve done two major projects/feature-series together, NV and A&E. Each have included drawing sessions. And now we’ve done the SS EE drawings. It’s been so important to have worked with Lilith. It’s about how she thinks, what she knows, what she reads, what she watches, what she says… She does amazing things, makes important actions/images in the performances. She’s so open, it’s another world. It’s not easy to do what we do. There are one- or two-hour-long takes with camera people trying to get everything and ending up in the wrong place. It’s an improvisation for them as well. So much of what happens is improvisation. Lilith can stay in that world in a deep way while stringing action together, I watch it happen.
Does having a performance partner help the process of losing oneself?
Losing ourselves in a performance, going into it… It’s totally about trust. It’s physical and it’s a dream.
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