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Over the past four decades, Paul McCarthy’s work has gone from intimate performance videos to spectacular public sculptures — all without sacrificing its unnerving psychosexual tone. While the artist’s recent show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York surprised many with its unornamented structuralism, its restraint was comically upstaged by the unmooring of his giant inflatable dog turd at Switzerland’s Zentrum Paul Klee, which left a trail of downed power lines in its wake. It was as if McCarthy’s art had unleashed on the Swiss countryside the cartoonish extravagance that had been put on the back burner for the Whitney.

Not that McCarthy hasn’t paid tribute to the twisted pop-mythological deities of the American psyche. “I’m interested in caricatures — from Miss Piggy to Popeye to Santa Claus — that are cultural fabrications,” observes the 63-year-old artist from his LA home. “Santa is one that I’ve hung on to longer, that I repeat more. There’s the whole thing of Christmas and consumption and commodity, and its relationship to capitalism and Western culture and Americana. The character itself is this roly-poly patriarch with a beard — almost a godlike figure.” In fact, he notes, one of his earliest childhood drawings is of Santa Claus.

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