PETER PAUL CHOCOLATES
Chocolate Santa is $100 plus Shipping and Handling.
Paul McCarthy, (born 1945, Salt Lake City, USA) began, in 1970, to record performances he did mostly at his studio on videotape.
«I think that in part my work refer to my own private, forgotten or repressed memories and that I seem to play them out unconciously in my actions … but I’m not sure how they relate to me. Are they specifically my traumas, or someone else’s that I have witnessed either directly or through the media?»
He started working with liquids early on: motor oil, ketchup.
«The bottle of mayonnaise within the action is no longer a bottle of mayonnaise; it is now a women’s genitals. Or it is now a phallus. I suspect that that suspension of belief does exist within viewers, even though they cling to the concious interpretation that ketchup is ketchup. I suspect that they’re disturbed when ketchup is blood.»
Ten Years Later his video-liquid performances Santa Chocolate Shop (1997), a pathological Santa shitting chocolate as symbol of cultural framing and conditioning, Paul McCarthy examines the distressed state of the human psyche reversing the process onto edible chocolate.
The artist will transform the Maccarone Gallery in New York into a chocolate-making factory and will be producing 1,000 figures daily. It is an extreme performance, not only very critical against consumism, also for the deeper meaning : Whoever looks will cease being spectator and will be transform in eater, taking part to the ritual.
Further the Chocophagia recalls the Dionysian element as a basic structure of human psyche: a vital element to be brought into consciousness. Perversions represent infact an unsuccessful attempt to solve the unconscious conflicts provoked by repressing human nature.
PETER PAUL CHOCOLATES
Edibles by Paul McCarthy
Opening November 15th 10AM-8PM
http://www.maccarone.net/
From Nov. 15 to Dec. 24, 2007
