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Paul McCarthy's Sailors' Meat remains one of the most revolting masterpieces in contemporary art. The video and photographs show a 1975 'performance' in which the artist, wearing women's underwear and a blonde wig, writhed in a dismaying mess of mayonnaise, tomato ketchup and mustard. The finale saw him insert a hot dog into his rectum.
Dicks, mouths and throats recur in McCarthy's astonishing opus - they are used to symbolise the choking of over-consumption, on which he has been commenting, with prescience, for over 30 years. He was not subtle or tasteful but he understood the relationship between heathen excess and subversion.
McCarthy is now 60. He has already influenced one generation of dissidents. Hopefully his current exhibition at the Whitechapel - Lala Land Parody Paradise - will incite more
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(much-needed) recalcitrance.
His early performances and multi-media work, for instance, established him as a respected leader amongst avant garde artists in California. He easily made the transition to video and by the 1980s was also making huge animatronic sculptures. Cultural Gothic featured a young boy mounting a goat while his father looked on. The Garden saw two life-sized men lost in a forest and humping a tree.
These ideas are, of course, also conveyed by the Chapman brothers. McCarthy (and his collaborator Mike Kelley) were amongst the first to understand the sinister elements inherent in the language of childhood and that Disneyesque symbols could be used to provoke questions about passivity, as Lala Land shows. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 27
Lala Land Parody Paradise, Whitechapel Art Gallery, until January 8
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