McCarthy uses violence dialectically throughout the work to address the pirate myth, the viewer, and himself. 18 from Pirate Party Photograph Portfolio This essay focuses on an amputation scene in Pirate Party in order to explore how McCarthy’s implementation of violence dismantles the artifice of the romanticized pirate figure.įig. Pirate Party blatantly confronts the presentation of the pirate as glamorous by bluntly depicting the inherent debauchery, brutality, carnage, and sadism of the pirate, and spurring viewers to do the same. The resulting portfolio of seventy-nine still photographs record how McCarthy, Damon, and the actors in the performance address the obscenity that is obscured behind the pirate fantasy in Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride. Together with his son Damon, McCarthy perpetuates his performative identity in Pirate Party. Smashing, hacking, smearing, and ripping his way through contemporary culture, McCarthy’s acts of defilement are never gratuitous, but rather hyperbolic replications of violence in culture writ large. Violence permeates Paul McCarthy’s work, from his early body art to performance and his later installations. This violence activates viewers’ desire to stare, inciting them to acknowledge the entanglement of fantasy with reality, and challenging them to recognize their role in perpetuating cultural myth. McCarthy’s use of violence in the scene exposes the artifice of the romanticized pirate figure, peeling away the pirate’s façade to uncover his true nature and probes further to reveal the mechanism that fabricates the illusion. GagliaĪbstract: This essay examines a sequence of six photographs from Paul and Damon McCarthy’s performance Pirate Party in which Paul McCarthy, as the pirate captain, orchestrates the amputation of his own leg. Violence and the Viewer: Amputation and Artifice in Paul and Damon McCarthy’s Pirate Party Nicole Y.