Bossy Burger

Beginning in the 1990s, McCarthy moved away from raw performance toward film, video, and architecturally complex installations which often include either projected videos or mechanized figures. The two most compelling pieces from this period currently on view at the New Museum are the installation Bossy Burger (1991) and the hour-long video, Painter (1995). Bossy Burger takes place in the cast-off sets of the 1970s television show, Family Affair, which have been mucked up with now-spoiled milk, ketchup, mayonnaise, and ground beef; the entire first floor of the New Museum reeks of decaying food. Videos of McCarthy’s performance play on monitors on either side of a jutting wall. The sets themselves are unsettling, because while their interiors are painted and furnished, their exteriors are bare, giving one the sense that there is no way either in or out of their truncated spaces. In the performance, McCarthy arrives donning a parodic Alfred E. Newman mask, a chef’s hat and apron, and a pair of long clown’s shoes. Mumbling and chortling as usual, McCarthy seems to be conducting a show on how to cook, but of course things rapidly degenerate. Ketchup is poured, stirred, and flung at random. All kinds of eccentric instruments are brought into the process, including a pair of pliers and a length of hose. The couch ends up on the table. At one point, McCarthy humps the wall, then wriggles under the couch and humps the table. Whereas Contemporary Cure-All and Doctor are full of horror-film violence, Bossy Burger revels in anarchy. What is sinister about Bossy Burger is more subtle: trapped in a wacky, kitsch TV interior from which there is no way out, the basic rules of cooking have evaporated, as has the difference between cooking and fucking, beautiful red substances and repulsive mess. Like Santa Chocolate Shop, Bossy Burger suggests some kind of production, some sort of making, but finally one has the sense that there are neither rules for making, nor any end-product.