A full year before the COVID-19 pandemic shattered any illusions of a cohesive, collective reality, Paul McCarthy began working on a film script about a virus. The story featured a recurring character in the artist’s oeuvre: Santa Claus, who would appear not as a cartoonishly vulgar performance art patriarch or a bronze, buttplug-wielding statue, but rather a pathogen. In the would-be film, St. Nick arrives down a chimney on Christmas Eve and infects a family with his eponymous illness. Once afflicted, the household enters a state of murderous psychosis, and they spend the night killing each other, dying, coming back to life, and killing and dying, over and over again in an endless loop of frenzied rage and violence. The film ends on Christmas morning with only the camera left standing. Slowly it backs away, watchfully exiting the scene of the crime.
The film would have been shot in 2019 and released early the next year, but McCarthy got busy, and it was moved to the back burner. Shortly after California’s first lockdown orders, he dug out the discarded script, noting with an uneasy incredulity the references to an imminent plague and infection by proximity. Over Zoom, I ask the artist if he worries that by not making the film he unwittingly let something fester that should have been destroyed, thereby unleashing his fantastic vision of violent contagion onto the real world. He doesn’t blink, or laugh. “No,” he says, self-assuredly. “I don’t believe I unconsciously created something.” Though he tells me he does have a long list of times the niche, obsessional subjects of his work at the Park Avenue Armory, for example, three Snow White-adjacent films were released—, and . Whether these parallels can be explained as prophecy, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or historical conspiracy, McCarthy prefers not to speculate. Slightly disappointed that the mild, affable artist doesn’t want to assume the role of megalomaniac art-prophet, I suggest that it would require a certain amount of paranoid narcissism to believe one’s work is alchemically changing and twisting the tide of history. “Right,” he replies, winking. “But…there is a list.”
