Home
Talks
Paul McCarthy: ‘All for the Gut’
Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and ground-breaking contemporary American artists but for some people his visceral work can be hard to stomach.
The artist is known for his gut-wrenching, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums, from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting. McCarthy often mixes high and low culture in his work, seeking to break the boundaries of art by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food, his end goal to provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs about culture and human appetites.
In this HENI Talk, eminent critic Robert Storr surveys McCarthy's provocative work and makes a case for it to be read in the same vein as grotesque social satirists such as François Rabelais and James Gillray's oeuvres, which have long become canonical.
Time Period:
Various
Themes:
Robert Storr is a curator, critic, and painter. From 1990 until 2002 he worked at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he was curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. His exhibitions there included, 'DISLOCATIONS', 'Modern Art Despite Modernism', and retrospectives of Robert Ryman, Tony Smith, Chuck Close, Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann, and Elizabeth Murray. From 1990 to 2000 he directed MoMA's Projects program devoted to contemporary art, for which he organized small monographic shows by Art Spiegelman, Franz West, Tom Friedman, and others. In 2002 he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. From 2006 to 2016 he served as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale University School of Art, where he continues to be a professor of painting. In 2007 he served as Artistic Director of the Venice Biennale, the first American to hold that position.
Since 1982, his essays, reviews, and columns have appeared in Art in America, Art Press, Frieze, Artforum, Parkett, Corriere della Sera, and other magazines and journals. He is the author of numerous catalogues and books -- most recently, of Intimate Geometries: The Life and Work of Louise Bourgeois (2016), for which he received the 2017 Filaf d'or Award, as well as the 2017 Filaf Award for Best Book on Contemporary Art. A frequent lecturer both in the United States and abroad, he has taught painting, drawing, art history, and criticism at numerous colleges, universities, and art schools. He is the recipient of prestigious awards for his criticism and curatorial work from organizations such as the International Association of Art Critics and the Archives of American Art. In 2016 he was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2000, he was subsequently promoted to Officier of the same order. Storr lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut.
1:07:27
Francis Bacon: Revelations
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan chart the life and art of Francis Bacon. The conversation is expanded by Robert Storr.
7:56
Glenn Ligon: ‘I AM A MAN’
Gregg Bordowitz explores the work of Glenn Ligon through the lens of his highly charged painting ‘Untitled (I Am A Man)’, 1988.
20:50
The Bed in Art: From Titian to Emin
Death, sex, birth, childhood. Uncover how the bed has been represented throughout art history.
1:07:27
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan chart the life and art of Francis Bacon. The conversation is expanded by Robert Storr.
7:56
Gregg Bordowitz explores the work of Glenn Ligon through the lens of his highly charged painting ‘Untitled (I Am A Man)’, 1988.
20:50
Death, sex, birth, childhood. Uncover how the bed has been represented throughout art history.
09:34
Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is the architectural historian’s “built manifesto of Postmodernism”.
8:44
Join Ashley Bickerton on the Hawaii beach where he first caught a wave to hear how a nomadic lifestyle has influenced his practice.
6:42
Articulation Alumni Lucy Miller and Oliver Garland reflect on 'Fructus' by Peter Randall-Page, exploring how the sculpture complements, juxtaposes and transforms the natural landscape in which it is placed.