‘Who Made This Mess?’: Paul McCarthy’s Gross-Out AI

Hands everywhere: hands sprouting out of torsos, hands grabbing heads, fingers pushing through soft flesh. There are bloody spatters and sores – ketchup-red – and sauce bottles, too, and sausages, and fantastical beasts that resemble cutesified pig-rats. We’re in a kitchen, then we’re in the woods, then leaves and logs cover the kitchen counter. These deranged scenes are imagined by a machine, though one that has observed and remembered millions of images made by humans. 

The upsetting grey zone between the human and the non-human, between inanimacy and liveness, is, for Paul McCarthy, an inexhaustibly fertile terrain. In 1982, he made a rudimentary robot – Human Object – with a penis, a vagina, an anus and a head with a gaping mouth. Gallery visitors were encouraged to interact with it in private, however they wished. In The Garden (1991–92), animatronic businessmen humped a woodland landscape, while his uncanny, slumbering Mechanical Pig (2003–05) employed yet more sophisticated special effects, including a digitally-controlled robotic armature, a hyper-real silicone skin and motion sensors which stirred the animal as viewers drew near. McCarthy’s recent turn to artificial intelligence is, therefore, an entirely consistent – even predictable – extension of his technologically sophisticated but thematically base practice. 

A&E, Adolf & Eva / Adam & Eve, The Counter 2, 28:32 (2024), the first video McCarthy has released using AI, is not an easy watch. It is part of a larger body of work featuring the German actor Lilith Stangenberg titled ‘A&E’ (2020–ongoing). ‘A&E’ stands for Adolf (Hitler) and Eva (Braun) and for Adam and Eve but also, sardonically, for ‘Arts and Entertainment’, the name of a US television network. Entertaining it is not.

For A&E, Adolf & Eva / Adam & Eve, The Counter 2, 28:32, McCarthy fed performance footage of himself and Stangenberg into an AI model, outputting it as a sequence of individual, disconnected images which clatter along at 24-frames-per-second accompanied by the original audio of maniacal laughter, grunting, groaning, panting, choking, infantile squealing and screamed, obscene insults. It is unclear whether these bodies are fucking or fighting.

Because of the failure of McCarthy’s chosen AI platform to render human anatomy accurately or consistently, limbs, heads and genitals fuse together and switch unpredictably. McCarthy’s face becomes Hitler’s and – presumably due to the AI’s training on images of heteronormative, white studio porn – his aging physique is honed into flawless plastic. Stangenberg’s youthful features, meanwhile, flicker into masks resembling Marlene Dietrich or Marilyn Monroe.

McCarthy summons a whole encyclopaedia of inhumanity: an excavation of fundamental evil in which the biblical first man and woman are reincarnated as the 20th century’s most abhorred couple, today erotic archetypes of a perverted entertainment industry who also manifest, implicitly, as the incoming US President and First Lady. As with Human Object, the work asks difficult, important questions about responsibility. Who made this mess? A computer? An artist? All of us? Furthermore, who’s going to clean it up?

This article first appeared in frieze issue 248 with the headline ‘What a Mess’

‘Paul McCarthy’ will be on view at Hauser & Wirth, London, from 4 February 

^{Main image: Paul McCarthy, with Lilith Stangenberg, A&E, Adolf & Eva/Adam & Eve, The Counter 2, 28:32 (detail), 2024, video still. Courtesy: © Paul McCarthy and Hauser & Wirth}