In 1983, Paul McCarthy realised the performance Aryan Death Ship in which the artist assumed the authoritative figure of the captain of an ‘Aryan Ship of Death’. The performance viewers were expected to interact with and humour the grotesque antics of the captain, as though they were a crew subjected to his tyranny. Amplifying shipboard power relations and the violence associated with the figure of the sea captain, Aryan Death Ship is one of several of McCarthy’s performances dedicated to the subject of the ship and its occupants as the embodiment of a micro state and its un-civil society.
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