Paul McCarthy’s videos from 1970 to 1997 constitute a central field of his artistic practice. Situated between performance, body, language, and media staging,

these works investigate the conditions of subjectivity, power, and representation. Video functions here not as a neutral recording device but as an active agent within the work.

McCarthy’s early video pieces are closely tied to performative actions in which the artist’s own body becomes material. Repetition, excess, and loss of control are recurring strategies, alongside the deliberate use of speech, noise, and fractured narration. What appears private is rendered public; what seems banal shifts toward the disturbing. Video becomes a site of self-confrontation and structural transgression.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the works expand into increasingly complex scenarios and constructed environments. Popular imagery, American myths, fantasies of violence, and familial role models are fragmented, distorted, and destabilized. McCarthy employs video to expose cultural scripts and to reveal the power relations embedded within them.

The videos produced between 1970 and 1997 do not form a linear progression but an ongoing experimental field. They explore video as a space of repetition, temporal extension, and performative escalation. It is in this sustained intensity that their lasting significance for the histories of performance, video art, and media critique resides.