For a brief period in the late 1940s, Salvador Dali and Walt Disney Studios collaborated on some animation projects, one of which, “Destino,” actually got made. Performance artist Paul McCarthy, known for spinning Disney into nightmares, ventures into the realm of the comically absurd in The Painter (1995). Satirizing William de Kooning, the abstract impressionists, and artists in general. The Painter (1995) mimics, in its lo-tech way, the outrages of Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou with a deranged Mouseketeers on brown acid vibe. In his own weird, transgressive, way, McCarthy takes up where Dali and Disney left off, drawing from pop culture, the high and the low, and tossing them into the Cuisinart of his feverish and fertile imagination. Imagine Snow White and Pinocchio starring in a collaboration between Takashi Miike and Pee Wee Herman.

The Painter (1995) is a brilliant interrogation of the senility and late paintings of Willem de Kooning, complete with collectors and dealers puppet-mastering around him. It’s a video deploying, as so many of his videos do, the mise-en-scène of instructional television (from the Galloping Gourmet to Martha Stewart), but one in which the painter mumbles and cries: ‘You can’t do it anymore you can’t do it anymore.’ And later: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ He means painting, he means art-making, he may mean life. At the end of The Painter the artist gets up on a table, pulls down his pants and a collector with a protuberant fake nose sniffs at his bare arse, McCarthy’s own.”

 
Here’s The Painter in all of its visceral glory, where art is more than an extension of consciousness, it’s an extension of the lower gastrointestinal tract.