Miamian plans to put his bones to rest in his own artworks
by Carol K. Comer
Miami News Reporter


The Miami News
Lifestyle
Wednesday, October 24th, 1984

The Artist as Medium

When the human bones –an Oriental skeleton stripped clean, no drill holes as requested — arrived in a jumble by United Parcel Service, Tom McCarthy was alone in his sprawling Kendall studio, and they scared him. Scared him to death.

After all, McCarthy is just a regular Miami mortal of 47, amiable and easy, whose flesh is beginning to settle more softly and comfortably around his own bones the way an aging body tends to do when its brain is doing most of the work.

His brain is working full tilt these days, and its work is dangerous — that of exorcist. McCarthy means to scare himself, and mail-ordering a skeleton is only one part of the ritual.

Last year he journeyed to the Great Pyramid on the Nile and, during a lunch hour when tourists are banned, paid an Egyptian guard to close him up in the tomb once inhabited by the mummified Cheops. There was dark and profound silence. "I took the place of the pharoah," testing the feel of immortality, where bones meant to last forever once lay. He scared himself.

But the most frightening thing he has put himself through happens Friday night at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables.

"You dare yourself doing things like the pyramid, but that's easy, that was private. This [the exhibit) is much more dangerous. I'm hanging it all on the wall."

On the wall is his first "mature" fine art exhibit. McCarthy's personal exorcism Is going public, and the aftermath isn't pretty. It isn't meant to be. The guts of his inner world are spewed forth in a tangle of cigarette butts and bicycle wheels, bras and broken liquor bottles, Jesuses and Adams and Eves and feathers, cellophane wrappers and a coffin. Calling himself a modern-clay archeologist, McCarthy has gathered, glued, wired and hammered together society's trash. Most of it comes together as religious satire: a suffering Christ on the cross is getting relief, cooled by three little fans from a broken copy machine McCarthy found by the side of the road.

There are lots of bones — of the human variety, "which has long held religious significance as the most enduring physical part of a person, the tangible evidence of one who has passed on," McCarthy writes in the catalog.

In fact, there will be a series of 206 artworks -the exact number of bones in the body — and each will have, somewhere in it, a replaceable human bone. McCarthy intends to take a stab at immortality, offering buyers his final "signature" by having his own bones placed in the works when he dies. He would like the buyers to be museums and collectors, because these works "should be seen, not owned."

"It won't make me immortal," he says. "It's futile. But it's the best I can do."

Tom McCarthy wasn't always in the self-fright business. The German-Irish boy born in the Midwest and sent to Catholic parochial school went at achieving the American Dream in earnest, and successfully, as a commercial photographer. He has photograhed for Life magazine and took the famous spread-eagle flight of the "Diver at Acapulco" used by Eastern Airlines in its "Wings of Man" ads. His prime assignments out of New York, to make beautiful advertising pictures for airlines and cruise lines and such, took him all over the world: "I can make beautiful artwork."

He toured the museums and cathedrals of Europe, gazing on the bones of the saints.

His photographs and mixed-media works were exhibited in New York, "but I never really got my act together — the others [exhibits! were not mature enough ...

"I had the perfect marriage for 14 years. My wife was my business manager, and we had one child, a little girl, and we traveled. Because of my work, we traveled the world together. It was perfect."

He was 40 years old when he became a classic Gall Sheehy "Passages" vignette. He was divorced. In one fatal swoop, he lost his mate, he lost his manager, and his busineess dealings fell apart at the seams. And he lost his daughter. "I think divorce is harder on a sensitive man, emotionally, because he doesn't have the child for companionship. The woman does."

It was the official 20th-century male mid-life crisis, and "blubbery" Tom McCarthy did the normal male-in-mid-life-crisis things: He shed 40 pounds playing racketball, permed his hair into an Afro, had three dates a day, drank lots of Stolichnaya vodka.

That was outside. Inside, the passage was dark and long and "I cried." He didn't do any art work for a year. "I went into extensive therapy to try and understand the psyche and to deal with the fears beyond myself. He began to scour out the taboos in back of his mind, especially Biblical taboos. He started to scare himself.

"I took a psychological approach to my fears — religion, forbidden things, the things I felt guilty about." Carl Jung, Freud, Gestalt — McCarthy explored them all. "I was very squeamish, this is very frightening."

Along the way, he found his new wife, Dee Ann Divine, Miami abstract painter, and the frightening exorcism of creativity began in earnest.

He took junk lying alongside the road, he went to swap meets where he got "beautiful things that people discard," he's still getting chased out of the city dump. He built his work out of refuse and fears — especially of religion and mortality. He also worked at the humor, the satire. "I'm a happy man." Somewhere along in there, the idea for the human bone series began to take shape.

His attorney, who "turned pale when I told him," is still researching the legality of this method of disposing of McCarthy's bones. "There are tons of laws about hygiene and how to get my bones back. I thought of having it done outside the country, but then I would have to deal with customs and immigration and the other government. There is the trust for the money the people pay for the bones" ($100 for the first bone placed, $200 for the second, and so on, up to 206), insurance, the curator, the coroner. The list goes on. He pulls a name from the American Civil Liberties Union from his pocket, planning to contact them about "what are my own rights." The Supreme Court is how far he says he may have to go.

Meanwhile, his personal project has been going fast and furious, at the same time keeping up with his commercial work. In the last year, he has been extremely prolific, and most of the work shown in this exhibit was done during that time. The works are not for condo lobbies. They're grotesque, he says, from his German side and humorous from his Irish side.

The Afro is gone, and the steely hair lies from a center part — cut as though a bowl had been put on his head — then brushed back with his fingers. The eyes are earnest and clear, piercing blue, and the eyebrows are beginning to tangle and stand up a wiry grey. "I've grown up. I've had to learn to deal with things the proper way. Everybody was doing it for me before."

Through it all, the photographer who takes beautiful pictures has been scared. "I didn't used to be religious, but now I am ...

"Sometimes I wake up at 3 a.m.d and feel awful. I say to myself, 'Cut this out, act normal.' But then I get up and have a cup of coffee, and there is something inside — I go on. There is a lot of pain, a lot of fear of not being normal. I'm afraid of what people think ...

"This exhibit is about mortality. It is conceptual, symbolic, serious," he says, and then comes a deep sigh: "It's got to be done."

Heaven or hell? "I think it will just end and people will have some bones — the guy who thought he could be immortal. I think I'll be lonely, but there will be a chuckle when I'm dying, wondering if everybody is ready for me."









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