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Anality is in the eye of the beholder. An inflatable sculpture by American artist Paul McCarthy has been vandalised – and the artist himself assaulted – after a flurry of outrage in Paris over a sculpture that is said to resemble a type of sex toy known, I am informed, as a butt plug.
I feel old fashioned that I had to be told that. The work is called Tree, and if I didn’t know about the accusation that it looks like a sex toy, I would probably have taken the title at face value. Well, perhaps not entirely. The chances of McCarthy erecting anything as innocent as a tree seem slight when you consider this surrealist’s oeuvre.
McCarthy is the Chapman brothers’ estranged dad. He is a fabulist of the grotesque. At his studio in Pasadena there is a naked shop dummy of President Obama. He has created subversive statues of Disney characters, wallowed in tomato ketchup for absurdist performances, and done awful things with giant pigs. His colossal black rubber statue of Pinocchio outside Tate Modern, with its long stiff nose and small round hole of a mouth, was far more overtly obscene than his Paris “sex toy”, which surely requires familiarity with the artifact in question before you can take offence. Yet I don’t remember anyone being shocked by the phallic nose of McCarthy’s Pinocchio. Why not?
This stuff really is in the mind. After all, the original Pinocchio also had a long nose. McCarthy’s sculpture, Blockhead, is based on Walt Disney’s animated film. Was Disney unconsciously imposing an erect penis on the puppet’s face? That is surely what McCarthy is suggesting. But if you don’t see the phallus in the film, you won’t see it in the statue. The London crowds didn’t.
Are Parisians really so prudish nowadays that they find the idea of a sexually suggestive artwork in the Place Vendome scandalous? Heck, the square is dominated by a column, a great Napoleonic phallus that has both fallen and risen over the years, when it was torn down during the Paris Commune and later re-erected. Paris has traditionally been seen as more, not less, alive to sexuality than London. This is the city of Manet’s Olympia after all. Surely it can take a sex toy tease? Isn’t that the kind of thing it used to be famous for, in art and life?
Perhaps that’s the very point. Surely it was the underlying puritanism of we Brits that stopped us noticing how filthy McCarthy’s Tate Modern sculpture really was. And surely if Parisians find his Tree outrageous it is because they all recognise its other meaning. Did McCarthy mistakenly count on a bit of anglo-Amerian naivety? Art is completed in the imaginations of its onlookers. If you see this sculpture as a tree, it’s a tree. The fact that so many French observers saw something else in it is more revealing about them than the art.
Of course, this is a great moment for Paul McCarthy. The trouble with his art is precisely that it gets shown in very sophisticated galleries and art events where everyone takes it in their stride. In Paris, he’s suddenly managed to provoke the masses. That’s when contemporary art gets exciting. And this is good for Paris. After all, nothing in London’s Frieze week caused a comparable stir. Frieze has us well trained. Modern art in Britain is muffled by a middle-class, bland consensus of approval. It seems that if you want the tension that makes art live, you need to go to Paris. Vive la scandale.
