Paul McCarthy: ‘The world is now an extreme absurdity. The work is a reaction to that’ – The Art Newspaper

The US artist Paul McCarthy has been probing the dark underbelly of our contemporary commercialised culture for more than five decades. Across multifarious media including performance, film and video, sculpture, drawing, photographs and animatronics, the ebullient and transgressive bad boy of contemporary art takes no prisoners as he lampoons social hierarchies and challenges conventional power relations. Nothing is too sacred or profane: Walt Disney, Snow White, Queen Elizabeth II, George W. Bush, Willem de Kooning and Adolf Hitler have all featured as caricatured protagonists in McCarthy’s taboo-busting scenarios where abused and abusers meet, melt and merge, and every sacred cow is up for slaughter.

Now, in his exhibition SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf at Hauser & Wirth in Paris, McCarthy has returned to one of his most enduring motifs: Santa Claus. The show finds the octogenarian artist reprising the role of (a very bad) Santa, joining forces with his long term collaborator, the German actress Lilith Stangenberg, as the Elf, to take part in a gruelling and disconcerting series of filmed performances that have resulted in a new body of large drawings and a six-channel video installation. McCarthy is also exhibiting earlier drawings made with Stangenberg at Bowman Hal gallery in Madrid.

The Art Newspaper: This interview was originally supposed to coincide with your Hauser & Wirth show in London at the beginning of 2025, which had to be cancelled mid-install when the Los Angeles fires destroyed your home, as well as the homes of your children, Damon and Mara. How are you doing after such a catastrophe?

Paul McCarthy: The thing about the fire is that it’s just all gone. You realise it pretty quick. I had some clothes in a suitcase, [McCarthy’s wife] Karen had nothing and got out with the dog. Mara about the same, and Damon too. I lost a drawing studio, and we lost one of the video editing studios. But now we have a house and we’re pretty happy where we’re living. So, we’re all right, but we lost a lot of art, drawings, notebooks and a lot of books. Crazy.

Your new work in Paris, SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf, finds you reprising the role of Santa while making large scale drawings during performative sessions with your long-term collaborator Lilith Stangenberg as the character of Eva Elf. Santa Claus has been one of your key characters for more than three decades—why revisit him at this point?

Around 2015-16 I was asked by a production company to make a horror movie called Satan Santa. It’s a whole genre: I can’t tell you how many horror films have been made about Santa Claus. And I came back with one called Saint Santa, which they just couldn’t understand. In the script I wrote that Santa Claus is a disease that causes psychosis and anybody that gets near him becomes psychotic—it’s a home invasion feature. Santa Claus is the god of capitalism and consumption. The production company wouldn’t do it. I’m still working on the script. I still want to do it. Then we did [the collaborative film projects] NV Night Vater (2019) and A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve (2020-22). In 2025 Lilith said, “Why don’t we make more drawings?” And in August last year we both had time. We’d made a lot of A&E drawings in 2022. We decided to shift the characters to Saint Santa and Eva Elf. We knew this would affect the drawings, they would change.

The filmed drawing sessions for SS EE were made in part of the original set for the WS White Snow series (2012-13), which reconstructs the interior of your childhood home in Salt Lake City. This had already housed some intense encounters between the characters of White Snow, Walt Paul and the dwarves. Why did you choose it for Santa and Eva Elf?

I thought it was interesting to make the SS EE drawings in the set that was the Dwarf House—the house of Walt Paul and White Snow as well as a reconstruction of my parent’s house. Then there is my history of growing up in that house and my memories of Santa and the Christmas tree in that living room. The tree in the set is the tree from the White Snow piece. Turning my family house into a studio seemed perfect. The drawings were done in the living room, dining room, kitchen, my parent’s bedroom, and in the room that was called the rumpus room, which was down in the basement. All the large drawings I’ve made before have been made on a platform, but these drawings of SS EE were done on the floor and on the wall.

I looked at the drawings in Paris—especially the floor drawings—very differently after watching the two films showing how they had emerged out of such intensely physical and sometimes almost excruciatingly visceral performances. How do you approach these drawing sessions? Are they planned at all in advance?

The drawing sessions are different from the feature-length chapters of Night Vater and A&E. In those, there’s a script and the script gives a type of skeleton to the improvisation; it can lead into things. But with the drawing sessions, we never talk about what we’re going to do, what’s going to happen. We never talk about what the other will wear. We simply begin. It’s very immediate, it’s an improvisation, and each one of the videos are quite different.

For SS EE I think we made at least 15 to 20 large drawings, and each time they seemed to change. What happens in them is hard to describe. There’s a lot of parts to these drawing sessions. I don’t think of it as being in a trance. For me there are lost moments. It’s like entering another world. Lilith and I have done a hundred or more actions together. We’re both interested in the unexpected moments, when things fit together, when you feel like you’re inside a drawing, inside an action.

Sometimes these actions can be extreme to the point of being almost unbearable to watch, with the viewer not knowing where or how far it is going to go. Do you, in the throes of making the work, feel the same way?

Lilith and I trust each other and we try to take care of each other. I think we both believe in the images of the drawings and the performances. It’s ultimately an attempt to make something that we believe in; we both see the world and art in a similar way. It is important, I think, that it affects us, that we feel it, and that it’s critical. That it is of the existential. The world is now an extreme absurdity. I think the work is a reaction to that. You find something, and it takes you somewhere. When Eva/Lilith draws Mickey Mouse on her stomach with lipstick and I rub it with my face and it goes to the ground, that’s how it starts.

Over the years you have presented an array of grotesque buffoon figures that parody and critique the systems and the abuses that they embody. But now, in real life, we get a lethal apotheosis of all-consuming buffoonery in the form of Donald Trump. How do you respond when the current US president is more horrific than almost anything you have portrayed?

Trump is literally a caricature; he’s a cartoon. A violent destructive insanity in a position of power. How can I be more exaggerated than Trump? That’s not the point. I think it’s more about “what is it?”, him and us. For me it’s about making an image in another form that reveals what’s at the bottom of it. I am trying to capsulise what’s in front of me. It’s my way of dealing with it. It’s what comes out of me, like throw-up. It’s a regurgitation of life. It’s like breathing in and out. As humans this is what we’ve created. We’re these simple absurd cartoons.

What do you feel art can say or do, in response to these dark times?

It’s always the same subjects: existence, desire, death, physical reality, body, violence, male/female. And now the death dive, how close can we get to it. For myself, I can’t care what other people think of the work. That can be difficult, there’s so much pressure to check yourself. In my case it’s the nature of my art. I have to just start, it’s an evolution, a development. One piece leads to the next one. You begin here, and pretty soon the parts fit together. I just have to do what I’ve always done. What’s critical in all that is not to block it. Society can stop it. The art world can stop it. The galleries can stop it. The people who buy the art can stop it. You can’t listen to it. It’s very important right now.

Biography

Born: 1945 Salt Lake City, Utah

Lives and works: Los Angeles

Education: 1966-68 University of Utah, Salt Lake City; 1968-69 San Francisco Art Institute; 1969-70 University of Utah, Salt Lake City; 1970-73 University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Key Shows: 1979 Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Exhibitions; 1995 Museum of Modern Art, New York; 1999 Venice Biennale (with Jason Rhoades); 2000 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; 2001 New Museum, New York;Tate Liverpool; 2003 Tate Modern, London; 2005 Whitechapel Gallery, London; Haus der Kunst, Munich; 2006 Moderna Museet, Stockholm; 2008 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 2011 Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; 2013 Park Avenue Armory, New York; 2018 M Woods Museum, Beijing; 2021 Kode, Bergen

Represented by: Hauser & Wirth, Xavier Hufkens and Max Hetzler

• Paul McCarthy: SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf, Drawing Sessions 2025 with Lilith Stangenberg, Hauser & Wirth, Paris, until 31 May

• Paul McCarthy: A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve, Drawing Sessions 2020-22 with Lilith Stangenberg, Bowman Hal, Madrid, until 16 May