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There is nothing so disturbing as the familiar with its true nature revealed. Most of us don’t know—don’t want to know—what really goes on in the crawl space under the house, in the dirt in the garden, in the organs in our bellies. A pack of wolves, thousands of miles away, roaming a landscape most of us will never set foot on, we might describe as dangerous. But it’s when the household pet finds his pitbull self and bares his fangs at Junior that we truly become afraid.

Pretty much since an abortive start at college in Utah, Paul McCarthy has explored the uncomfortable, the other side of what we thought we knew. By the time he graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute (1969), and the University of Southern California (1973), he had hurled his own body down hillsides and made paintings using, as a brush, his face and his penis. In 1972 he began using food in the primal, direct way that children do, exploring not taste, but smell and feel and association in a series of performances that brought him an underground fame. In these works, ketchup, mayonnaise, and milk are manhandled into metaphorical violence and sexual abuse-allusions all the more disturbing because these materials spurt and plop from the same containers we have in our refrigerators. These references themselves become metaphors for the larger matters of education and acculturation: “That’s what culture is,” McCarthy says, “It is force-feeding.”

In the performance work, McCarthy’s assumed personas are frequently off-the-shelf latex Halloween versions of Popeye, Olive Oyl, and other characters. So the full-scale mannequin as surrogate performer was a logical next step. Generic and seemingly store-bought, the models are actually precisely designed, and often hand-crafted, by the artist.

When he doesn’t fabricate the work himself, it may be that he’s looking for richer associations. In one notorious work called The Garden, included in the 1992 Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition Helter Skelter, tree-humping, ground-thumping automatons with heads left over from monster movies are glimpsed through a forest commandeered from a Bonanza set. An early version of Chocolate Blood Boy (1993-94) was actually built by Universal Studios. And though McCarthy hand-modeled interchangeable body parts out of clay, Bondo, and foam for the Tomato Heads he showed this year, “It would be ideal,” he says, “if Mattel could make them.”

Where the clothing-store mannequin is an idealization of the familiar—the perfect fit to which we seek to conform—Paul McCarthy’s dummies are flawed and swollen. Where the stuffed animals of our childhood were comfortably declawed, detoothed, and desexed, McCarthy’s are outsized and carnal. McCarthy describes his own suburban home life as comfortable enough, familiar enough. Then he adds: “In Los Angeles, gangs live in houses with lawns in front.”