American artist Paul McCarthy (born 1945) is most well known for his live and video-taped performances in which he plays with mass-produced food products such as ketchup or chocolate syrup. In these scatological works McCarthy parodies characters from popular culture, such as Disney’s Pinocchio, while simultaneously referencing family figures from his childhood. Attacks on popular culture and on personal family figures are two themes that appear separately in the work of a number of contemporary artists, but McCarthy’s work is unique because of the connection he draws between the two. In his work he offers his own childhood experiences as proof of his implicit assertion that consumer culture is a totalizing and homogenizing force which pervades the intimacies of family life and identity. In this dissertation I present a selection of McCarthy’s performances and kinetic sculptures as case studies to argue that the rituals of his work are an attempt to expel those consumerist elements that on the one hand form his identity, and yet on the other feel completely alien to him.

I use both contemporary psychoanalytic and Marxist theories in this dissertation in order to analyze McCarthy’s psychical response to consumer culture. McCarthy’s work draws these two discourses together in a process that I call commodity abjection. I argue that his relationship to popular culture is analogous to the process of abjection as elaborated by psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Kristeva claimed that abjection is an interminable process whereby the subject attempts to establish a hermetic border against those materials which confuse its identity. In establishing one’s subjectivity against abject materials, the subject must expel things that have become part of himself. Television and entertainment culture are the locus of McCarthy’s childhood memories and cultural values, and to his consternation they form the core of his identity. I show that McCarthy’s irreverent and puerile use of food products and imagery from popular culture is an attempt to abject those elements.