Leigh Ledare: I want to start with something that’s been on my mind. A lot of your work stages the body in states of excess—repetition, inflation, collapse. It feels like the body is both the subject and the limit of representation. Where does that tension come from for you?

Paul McCarthy: I grew up in Salt Lake City. Very controlled environment. The body was always something to be managed—appetite, desire, mess. When I began making work in the sixties and seventies, I was interested in what happens when you push past that management. Not as shock for its own sake, but to see what the frame actually contains. The body becomes a kind of readymade that can’t be fully contained by the gallery or the market. It spills.

LL: There’s a parallel in your work with the domestic. Ketchup, mayonnaise, chocolate—consumer products that are already coded as bodily, as excess. You’re not inventing that; you’re exposing what’s already there.

PM: Exactly. American culture is already grotesque. I’m just slowing it down enough for people to see it. The supermarket, the television, the family dinner—these are performance spaces. We’re trained not to notice. The work is about making that training visible.

Repetition and structure

LL: In your performances, repetition does something specific. It’s not just duration. It produces a kind of structural exhaustion—the meaning drains out and something else appears. How do you think about that in relation to psychoanalytic ideas of repetition?

PM: I’ve read some Freud, some Lacan. The repetition compulsion—beyond the pleasure principle—that’s always felt close to what I’m doing. When you repeat an action enough times, it stops being about the action and starts being about the structure of repetition itself. The content becomes a container. That’s when it gets interesting.

LL: In Family Tyranny and other works, the family appears as a machine. Not metaphorically—literally, with motors and cables. The domestic scene is mechanized. Is that a comment on how the family functions as an institution?

PM: The family is a structure. It has roles, routines, circuits of desire. I wanted to make that structure literal. When you see a father figure operated by cables, you’re seeing something that was always true. The performance is just making it visible.

Desire and the spectator

LL: My own work has been criticized for implicate the viewer—for putting desire in the room in a way that can’t be neutralized. I’m curious how you think about the spectator’s position. Are they complicit? Are they outside?

PM: I don’t think you can be outside. Watching is a form of participation. The spectator’s desire is part of the work. When people are uncomfortable, it’s often because they’re recognizing something—their own investment, their own fantasy. The work holds up a mirror. Sometimes what you see isn’t pretty.

LL: The mirror is never neutral.

PM: No. And neither is the frame. The gallery, the museum, the market—they’re all part of the performance. I’ve tried to make work that acknowledges that, that doesn’t pretend to be outside the systems it critiques.

This conversation took place in Los Angeles in February 2026.