For a brief period in the late 1940s, Salvador Dali and Walt Disney Studios collaborated on some animation projects, one of which, “Destino,” actually got made. Performance artist Paul McCarthy, known for spinning Disney into nightmares, ventures into the realm of the comically absurd in The Painter (1995). Satirizing William de Kooning, the abstract impressionists, and artists in general. The Painter (1995) mimics, in its lo-tech way, the outrages of Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou with a deranged Mouseketeers on brown acid vibe. In his own weird, transgressive, way, McCarthy takes up where Dali and Disney left off, drawing from pop culture, the high and the low, and tossing them into the Cuisinart of his feverish and fertile imagination. Imagine Snow White and Pinocchio starring in a collaboration between Takashi Miike and Pee Wee Herman.

The Painter (1995) is a brilliant interrogation of the senility and late paintings of Willem de Kooning, complete with collectors and dealers puppet-mastering around him. It’s a video deploying, as so many of his videos do, the mise-en-scène of instructional television (from the Galloping Gourmet to Martha Stewart), but one in which the painter mumbles and cries: ‘You can’t do it anymore you can’t do it anymore.’ And later: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ He means painting, he means art-making, he may mean life. At the end of The Painter the artist gets up on a table, pulls down his pants and a collector with a protuberant fake nose sniffs at his bare arse, McCarthy’s own.”

 
Here’s The Painter in all of its visceral glory, where art is more than an extension of consciousness, it’s an extension of the lower gastrointestinal tract. 
 

 
What if Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom was performed by The Three Stooges?  Well, it might come out looking something like the work of L.A.-based artist, Paul McCarthy.  Although he probably first captured national attention with MOCA’s infamous Helter Skelter show in ‘92, McCarthy’s been working with “the primal substances of life—blood, pus, urine, feces, sperm, milk, sweat,” ever since the ‘70s.

Below is a more recent work from ‘03, WGG (Wild Gone Girls).  Ubu describes it thusly: “Depicting a sailing party gone wrong, McCarthy questions the effects that violence and mutilation, both real and simulated, have on the viewer in contemporary culture.”  Maybe so.  But strip away the cozy, art-speak contextualizing.  Couldn’t that be said, too, for something like, oh…Wes Craven’s, Last House On The Left from ‘72?  WARNING: McCarthy’s WGG = not for the squeamish!

 
In the NYT: Fairy Tales, But Strictly Adults-Only

 
Once again, time for another guest post from Dangerous Minds pal, main Medicine man, and one of my dear childhood friends, Mr. Brad Laner:

Airway, the “noise orchestra” led by Joe Potts are one of the original mainstay bands of the fabled Los Angeles Free Music Society.  Issuing a string of self-released and very homemade-feeling LPs which had a broad effect upon the world of experimental music, the LAFMS emerged out of the suburban haze of California’s San Gabriel Valley in the mid-‘70’s.

Being huge influences on the likes of Nurse With Wound, Keiji Haino (who evidently traveled to L.A. in the early ‘80’s with the sole purpose of finding and playing with Airway) and, most certainly, yours truly (plus, really, anybody who’s made improvisational noise music since the mid-‘70’s), it’s a bit amazing to report that Airway will be making their first ever appearance outside of L.A. this month as part of a nice-sounding hoedown called A FANTASTIC WORLD SUPERIMPOSED ON REALITY: A SELECT HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC, a “Mini-Festival to Present an Exciting Line-Up of Key Musicians and Artists Who Developed the Dynamic Trajectory of Experimental Noise Music.”

The whole thing is curated by artist Mike Kelly, who will also be performing with LAFMS/Airway alumni Tom Recchion, Fredrik Nilsen, Joe Potts and visionary genius Paul McCarthy as Extended Organ (see them below playing at L.A.‘s Schindler House).

 
Bonus amusement: Attention, Joe Potts!  Some punk kids have stolen your rad, emo-ready band name.  Time to lawyer up!