The 2013 edition of the Katowice Street Art Festival in Katowice, Poland took place last month. We already posted about Peter Fuss’ mural for the festival, but there’s plenty more to check out. This year Katowice hosted SpY, El Tono, and many more artists. Here are some of my favorite works from the festival:
Continue reading “This year’s Katowice Street Art Festival”
Among the artists brought this past week by Converse‘s Wall to Wall project to Hong Kong is one of my favorites — Alex Hornest aka Onesto. I’ve seen Alex’s playfully endearing characters in Sao Paulo, Brazil – where he is based – and in Bogota, Colombia. I’m thrilled that they’ve made their way onto a huge wall in Hong Kong during the 2013 Art Basel Festival!
Photos courtesy of Alex Hornest
I came across this piece by mobstr yesterday in London near the Bethnal Green underground station. From what I found on Instagram, it looks like The Scribble Wall was installed on Wednesday morning and very quickly got covered by passersby by the time I came across it in the early afternoon. This is one of my favorite ad takeovers in a while. In addition to covering an advertisement, mobstr chained four markers to the billboard, allowing anyone to add their voice (although a few of those voices did end up being advertisements themselves). Most people who I saw walking by the billboard didn’t notice it or didn’t care to stop, but a lot of people did stop to take a look or scribble something of their own. I asked two teenage girls who were writing on the board what they thought it was. They said they had no idea, but that they thought it was really cool. I agree.
As a little bonus, I also came across this mobstr piece in Hackney Wick yesterday evening:
Photos by RJ Rushmore
I recently met PMER/CATELLOVISION at X On Main in Beacon, New York. He has been kind enough to share with me some of the photos from his extensive collection of graffiti photography. This is the first post of what will hopefully be many, and look back into an era before street art and blogs and Oscar-nominated films, an under-appreciated era in the history of graffiti. Because some Vandalog readers will certainly be less familiar with this kind of graffiti than what we normally cover and because many of PMER/CATELLOVISION‘s photos have undergone edits to become artworks in and of themselves rather than simply documentation, this post starts with his explanation of his photographs. Enjoy! – RJ
“It’s graffiti. I like to twist it up, rock it up, shake it up, fingerfuck to fuck it up. I learned a long time ago not to trust graffiti artists. We’re a rare breed. Cut throat motherfuckers! Wreckless. Disrespectful with a shrug. We DGAF! I rock CatelloVision on each photograph because I deserve it. I earned it. I lived it. It may be your art but it’s still my memory. Besides, I was taught at an early age to write my name on everything. Each picture I choose to edit rocked me upon first seeing it. It’s that “Yo!” factor. Turnin’ the corner to see that wall for the first time, “YO!” Being a little kid in the midst of adults on a train platform while a dope train rolls in, “YO!” It was like Christmas! I had the camera and an endless supply of stolen film. I went everywhere and had friends in the lowest of places. It was the 1980’s and I was a little kid, a Brooklyn graffiti writing scumbag calling himself PM. All I ever wanted was to write my name on a wall and inspire a memory. I’m not sure if I have yet. Everybody is too busy paying attention to sugar coated graffiti dudes. I favor the underdogs. The dudes time forgot. . Graffiti is fucked up like that. You put in all this time and energy and have nothing to show for it in the end but a picture, and most dudes don’t even have that. Graffiti! The greatest sport ever played. It’s method & mischief. It’s Mission. It’s a coked out whore at last call. I’ve danced with this Devil almost 30 years now. It’s the only way I know how to live. It’s how I was brought up. It’s graffiti man! I love it and sometimes it loves me too.”
– PMER/CATELLOVISION: Graffiti’s bitch! A writer, painter, historian and pusher.
Artist, Photographer & Owner of X On Main: A Contemporary Art Gallery located in Beacon NY.
Continue reading “From the PMER/CATELLOVISION vault…”
Pipe Dreams marks not only Sheryo and the Yok’s first exhibition together in the United States, but also a departure from what viewers have come to expect from the duo. As of late, the artists have been defined by their use of a red, black, and white palette to portray unique vision of reality. However, don’t be concerned that these changes mean that the work is missing the cartoonish, pop imagery seen in past pieces. The pizza, drugs, and other wild things are still present, just reimagined.
During their travels to through South East Asia, from Sheryo’s native Singapore to Vietnam, the artists began to infuse their work with the surrounding culture. Now, geishas and dragons have become central characters alongside smoking pizzas and skateboards. While visiting Vietnam, the artists took advantage of the opportunity to begin painting pottery, starting with vases and later expanding in the States to plates. Initially, the work appears a light air blue, mimicking the smoke emanating from elongated cigarette holders. After three coats, the plates begin to don the cobalt blue associated with Eastern ceramics.
Beyond these surface appearances, this influence extends to deeper meanings, including numerology. During the studio visit, patterns of 4 (4, 8, 12) began to emerge within the bodies of work, however intentional or not. Sheryo was quick to speak about the auspicious meanings of the numbers 4 and 8 in Chinese, representing wealth and death respectively. Other coded beliefs trace their way through the different media in the exhibition, including the Illuminati. The all-seeing-eye positioned atop a pyramid has become a widely recognized symbol for the alleged secret society. Through these allegorical codes, an air of mysticism is hidden within their playful cartoons. Continue reading “Pipe Dreams: Coded Meanings and Cartoons”
A note from the editor: This is a guest post by Australian street artist CDH. Although I personally disagree with some of the conclusions CDH reaches in this post, I think it may be the start of a debate well-worth having, and it’s one that connects closely to my upcoming book, Viral Art. – RJ
Street art is primarily consumed as digital images online, rather than as paintings on walls in the physical world. Juggernaut sites like Street Art Utopia pump out new images each day to their million plus audience. Street art fans are likely to subscribe to multiple sites and so this audience encounters far more street art online, than on the streets. The street art fades away but the digital images live on, which makes them the primary cultural product that we engage with.
In many ways it’s very positive; I can view global works from locations I may never visit, or the works may be gone by the time I do visit. It’s also just more efficient; I don’t need to travel all over my city to view the latest works, I can just check out the Melbourne Street Art page. There are many other consequences of online consumption to the street art medium that I don’t intend to investigate here. I’m primarily interested in exploring two consequences of online consumption:
Online dissemination has generally diminished the audacity and the physical-world lifespan of street art. In the experiment here, I will take these 2 elements to their logical minimum and reduce them to zero. I have created street artworks that require no audacity and have no physical-world lifespan. I do this by photoshopping street art images into photographs of physical locations. Ultimately if we primarily engage with street art online and the digital image has effectively become the art (rather than the physical object), why not make this cultural production more efficient? This just cuts out the laborious middle step of painting a physical object, to then photograph, to then share online.
Results:
Interpretation:
This is an art experiment, so we should examine these images honestly. My interpretation is this: I think this is an interesting idea but ultimately I think these works are really just a bit shit. If the images were printed out, framed and hung in a gallery it would feel completely in place. But on a street art blog it feels out of place. It seems dishonest. An unspoken rule of street art has been cheated- it’s not on the actual street anymore, so can it even be street art? We had a similar debate in the early 2000s, when street art first transitioned into the gallery system; it’s a weird limbo space outside of what’s really street art. Perhaps it can be called ‘street inspired art’, like the gallery street art was originally described. The term ‘street art’ again appears amorphous and manipulable.
This experiment also draws attention to the idea that street art is really something halfway between art and mountain climbing. These photoshopped street art images are like photoshopping yourself into a picture at the top of Mt. Everest; the real point is that you climbed the mountain, not that you got a photo. Street art is less about the image and more about the task of creating the image. The street art audience is continually fascinated with large scale works. It seems absurd that artistic merit could be proportionate to the scale of a work, but when interpreted through the prism of the ‘audacity and the task’, it seems perfectly reasonable. Perhaps it’s why street art is closely tied to cultures that are intertwined with physicality, like skateboarding or parkour.
What are we actually engaging with when we view street art images online? We’re consuming a digital facsimile of a street work, not the actual street art in its original psychogeographical location. People sometimes falsely believe the photograph is an objective representation of truth. In reality the photographer’s eye subjectively selects images to present. Those images are then open to the same forms of manipulation as the photoshopped images above: Perspectives are forced; contrast and lighting can be adjusted in Photoshop; colours can be enhanced; the photograph might be taken from a crane or an angle that is inaccessible to a viewer in physical reality. So who is really the author of the online content we consume? Is it the street artist, the photographer or a convolution of the two? This photographic subjectivity and influence become even more noticeable when images of the same artwork by different photographers are compared side by side; sometimes they look like completely different artworks. With the online dissemination of the digital image, where exactly does street art end and digital art begin? Perhaps it’s tied up in abstract elements like the intent of the photographer or the place of exhibition.
Post-Script: Coincidentally, after submitting this article, these photos, which depict one of my pieces, appeared on the Melbourne Street Art Facebook page. The tagging has been photoshopped out of the original image by the photographer. Random experiences like this never cease to amaze me in street art. On a personal level, it’s flattering that someone has taken the time to digitally restore the work but it also demonstrates that the digital image is not an objective record of reality. Similar to a restoration, the photographer constructs their interpretation of my original intention, not the work as it exists today. What if I tagged the work or intended for it to be tagged? Like a photoshopped image of a girl in a magazine, this photograph represents a mutable, aspirational reality. The photographer and I become collaborators in the construction of a new cultural artifact, that is consumed by the online audience but only exists in a digital realm.
Photos by RJ Rushmore, Melbourne Street Art, Nate Dorr, AnubisAbyss and Dylan Pech, with a portion of an image by sultan-alghamdi used in one of CDH’s edited pieces
LNY was at Haverford College this week to paint on James House, a student arts space that has also been painted by Gaia, Labrona and Troy Lovegates. Here are some photos of his mural, Apex Predator. One of his best pieces yet, in my opinion. Thanks to The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities’ Student Arts Fund at Haverford College and James House for sponsoring the mural.
Photos by RJ Rushmore
Blu recently finished two murals in Niscemi, Italy, where residents are protesting the US Navy’s installation of communications satellites which will be integral to controlling the next generation of military drones.
The above piece is one of my favorites from Blu in quite a while. The drones slowly transform into crosses at a graveyard, and the multitudes of Niscemi stand up and resist against the military monster. Besides the ethical concerns about drones, residents are also worried about the electromagnetic waves that the communications satellites will emit. Check out the No MUOS website for more information about the protests.
While the idea of satellite dishes as visual pollution would probably come up anywhere, it’s especially relevant in Niscemi, which looks like an absolutely beautiful place. Just have a look at the spectacular view just next to this mural.
And I also want to give major props to Blu for continuing his mission as a mural painter on his terms, even when he could certainly be making a living by painting at mural festivals around the world and selling his work indoors. Instead, he gets to paint what he wants, where he wants, when he wants, but he doesn’t have the easiest time of it. Any other muralist of Blu’s fame and talent would have a scaffolding or a lift to get help him paint, but all Blu had for these murals was a ladder and an extendable pole…
Photos courtesy of Blu
Young New Yorkers is a restorative justice, arts program for 16 -17 year olds who have open criminal cases. The criminal court gives eligible defendants the option to participate in Young New Yorkers rather than do jail time, community service and have a lifelong criminal record. After our successful pilot program last year we continue to finance the project by hosting a silent art auction this summer – which would not be possible without the very generous donations of our artists, friends and collaborators – This year we are also publishing a catalog which contains critical essays on Youth Justice, Art as Social Practice and Street Art in order to make connections between these projects and our youth at risk.
The following is one of those essays and we’ll be publishing more of them on Vandalog as we approach the auction – so feel free to join the developing discourse…
We are a self-organized and grassroots effort. If you’ll like to help us find a locale for the auction, donate your time, partner with us or just be more informed please visit our website or Facebook page or write to Rachel@youngnewyorkers.org.
– LNY
A couple years ago I was doing a wheat paste installation on a friend’s outhouse at his rodeo arena. A team roping competition was to start several hours later. I woke up around 5 a.m., drove an hour to the site and started working before sunrise. An 18 wheeler loaded with calves was parked nearby. A white cowboy emerged from the cab and groggily made his way to the outhouse. Upon seeing me he mumbled to himself “…Where else would you find on old black man wallpapering the outside of an outhouse at dawn at a rodeo event on an Indian reservation? Only in America.” We both laughed. In retrospect, it was an improbable moment but in the words of Spaulding Gray, it was also a perfect moment in that it captured the bridge building potential of public art.
That’s the question I get asked most frequently – what the fuck is an old black doctor doing making street art along the roadside on the Navajo reservation? Admittedly, it’s an unlikely journey which upon further inspection it makes perfect sense.
I came to work at a small clinic on the Navajo nation 26 years ago bright eyed and full of idealism and misconceptions. My first misconception was that as an African-American I’d be accepted by the Navajo who I thought would share a sense of solidarity with me as a member of a historically oppressed group like themselves. Wrong. I learned quickly that people here are focused on addressing their daily needs such as herding sheep, hauling water, firewood and/or coal and taking care of family. Acceptance into the community is hard won. There’s an expression amongst people here that unless you’ve walked amongst the Navajo for 2 years, they don’t take you into their trust. They’ve grown weary of outsiders coming to take from them leaving little in return.
My first year here I set up a black and white darkroom. After work I’d go out into the community to spend time with people as they were doing chores around their homesteads or hanging out with their families often getting to photograph these experiences. I’d started shooting black and white film in junior high school. My junior high school experience was unique and in retrospect, was instrumental in influencing my efforts to contribute fully to my adopted community.
I attended a small, alternative school in the mountains of North Carolina called The Arthur Morgan School. The school had 24 students, aged 12 – 15 in grades 7, 8 and 9. Being an actively engaged community member was demonstrated to us in practical terms every day. Each student had work assignments that we’d rotate weekly. The projects involved everything from preparing meals to working in the garden to repairing bridges on the dirt roads around the school. Once a week we’d have community meetings where students and staff would sit around in a large circle to discuss issues affecting our lives at the school. Coming from a traditional, all black public school, I remember being impressed that my opinion in these meetings mattered just as much as anyone else’s including our principal.
During my family practice residency in West Virginia during the early 80s, I’d make frequent trips to NYC hoping to see break dancing on street corners + burners on trains. My dream was to become a member of the Zulu Nation and it was during this time I started experimenting with graffiti.
Public Health Meets Public Art
The Navajo nation is located in the Four Corners region of the U.S. The land area of the rez is 27,500 square miles in size which is larger than the state of West Virginia. It’s home to roughly 160,000 people. Coal, natural gas, oil, uranium are found in abundance here. The Navajo should be one of the wealthiest groups of people living in the U. S. However, because of the way the contracts were written to exploit those natural resources, the Navajo people are amongst the poorest people in the U. S. Health problems on the reservation reflect those of other impoverished communities. Rates of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, interpersonal violence are all higher than the national average. The unemployment rate is close to 60%. Yet in the midst of what many from outside the reservation characterize as overwhelmingly dire circumstances, there are people living lives of dignity, celebrating the joys of family, farming and community.
My first intersection of public art and public health occurred shortly after I arrived on the reservation. Concerned with what we considered irresponsible advertising in that it was promoting cheap, sugary drinks in a population plagued with Type 2 Diabetes, a community health nurse and I went out one night to correct a billboard on the reservation.
Building Community
Wikipedia defines community as a social unit that shares common values. It goes on to say that “in human communities intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.”
What does it mean then to build community and what are the implications of such an undertaking for someone from another community whose belief system differs from the host community? I didn’t consider any of these questions before I started placing photographs along the roadside.
During my time on the reservation I’d been following street art from a distance. Any time I’d go to a big city with graffiti or street art, I’d seek it out. In the mid 90s I did a project called the Urban Guerrilla Art Assault where I’d place black and white photos on community bulletin boards and in store windows in Flagstaff. In 2004 I traveled to Brazil for the first time and was blown away by the abundance, diversity and caliber of the street art there. I returned to Brazil for 3 months in 2009. The first day of my return the feeling of being alive and intrigued by art on the street made by the people and for the people consumed me again.
There was one guy whose work I saw and liked as I moved around Bahia. His name is Limpo. It turned out that during my last 3 weeks there I rented a flat immediately above his studio. I spent everyday in his studio talking with him and street artists from around the world who’d stop by to share ideas in sketch books, videos online and street art books. The highlight was getting to go out on the street with one of the artists as he did a piece. These guys loved what they were doing. Their energy and enthusiasm were infectious. As I left Brazil, the street art community that had embraced me and stirred my soul said “keep it going!”
When I returned to the States I decided to enlarge and start wheat pasting images from my 22 year archive of negatives along the roadside. I got a recipe for boiling wheat paste off the internet, talked with people at Kinko’s about how to make enlargements and away I went. My first forays were at night. I pasted onto roadside stands where people sell jewelry to tourists venturing to the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and Lake Powell. As I contemplated doing this, I had to consider how to introduce a new art form into a traditional culture. What imagery is acceptable? After stumbling a couple times, I settled on what I considered universally beloved Navajo themes – Code Talkers, sheep and elders.
One of my first pastings was of Navajo Code Talkers that I pasted onto an abandoned, deteriorating jewelry stand along the highway to Flagstaff.
I was shocked a week later as I drove by the stand to find people repairing it. Curious, I stopped to find out what was up. The guys working on the stand didn’t know I’d placed the Code Talker photo there. They said that so many tourists were stopping to photograph the stand, they decided to repair it and start using it again. I asked if I could take a photo as well and told them that I placed the image there. They responded by asking me to put something at the other end to stop traffic coming from that direction. This was my first validation from the community to continue pasting and it was my first insight into the potential of art to promote economic independence for the roadside vendors. More importantly, I appreciated the potential of this work serving as a tool to bridge cultures and races of people.
It is through these types of interactions with people as I’m installing art that I get to better know my community apart from the constrained interactions I have in the clinic. Installing art in communities on the reservation where people don’t know I’m a doctor who has been here for 26 years and that I have a sixteen year old 1/2 Navajo son, I defend what I’m doing by telling people that my project is a mirror reflecting back to the community the beauty they’ve shared with me over the past quarter century. It’s my hope that a stronger sense of self and collective identity is nurtured through the images which thereby strengthens the community.
Last summer I decided to pursue a dream suggested by a fellow street artist to invite some of my favorite artists out to the reservation to paint murals and to work with local youth. I called this experience The Painted Desert Project.
The Painted Desert Project
The Painted Desert Project hates stereotypes, respects the unique culture in which it operates and spreads love.
Before the first group of artists came out last summer to paint murals (which included Gaia, Labrona, Overunder, Doodles, Tom Greyeyes and Thomas “Breeze” Marcus), I sent to the non Native American artists copies of a book chapter on the Navajo creation story, a book of images and observations about the land and the people, a beaded item from one of the roadside stands and a film (“Broken Rainbow”), in an effort to sensitize the artists to the different world view here. I attempted to pair artists with various roadside stand owners and arranged for sweats with tribal elders to bless our efforts and to give the artists an idea of acceptable imagery and Navajo taboos.
It’s important to me that artists come to the project without preconceived ideas of what they’re going to paint. It’s important that they have enough time to interact with community members and spend time in this land of enormous skies and stunning landscapes then create work that reflects this interplay of cultures and landscape. In this way, the art is responsive to the moment like jazz. My hope is that the artist leaves enlightened and that the community feels enriched or vice versa.
Last summer as the first group of artists was preparing to leave, we did something I’d never done in my long tenure here. We invited members from the community to my house to share a dinner with the artists. It was a simple meal shared around a candlelight lit table outdoors under the stars. How can this type of rich exchange not inform my medical practice which like my art practice attempts to heal and spread love?
My hope for the project this year is to not only share art but to do community service projects. For example, last summer Doodles painted a killer mural on a nearby food stand which burned down last fall. I’d very much like to get him back this summer to help the vendor rebuild the stand and then repaint it.
So when mofos ask me what’s up? What’s an old black doctor man doing wheat pasting on the Navajo nation? I tell them like the brothers told me in Brazil. I’m just trying to keep a good feeling going round and around.
Photos by Jetsonorama
Earlier this month, I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston for the opening of Barry McGee, a retrospective of McGee’s work that had come to Boston after first being shown last summer in Berkley, California at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Barry McGee is a mid-career retrospective and the most extensive museum exhibition of McGee’s career to date. This version of Barry McGee is somewhat smaller than the version in Berkley, and so a few large works are not included, but this version also included a few pieces that were not seen at Berkley, more specifically work by Boston artists and graffiti writers and a bit of new work by McGee. Since the exhibition is a retrospective, Barry McGee includes sculptures, paintings, drawings, zines, ephemera, etchings and video works by McGee from the early 1990’s all the way through to 2012, although even the old work is not quite the same as it once was because McGee likes to rearrange his old work into new configurations and shapes whenever possible. In addition to work by McGee, there were artworks and ephemera by about a dozen other artists whom McGee included in the show. It is not quite an official part of the show, ICA adjunct curator Pedro Alonzo also arranged for McGee to paint a mural on the back of Boston’s House of Blues theater. Despite the title, the show seems to be an effort by McGee to take advantage of his position as a “museum-ready artist” by bringing the work of his friends into the museum galleries too and to highlight the significance of the kind of graffiti that many people find ugly and undesirable.
In Ben Valentine’s review on Hyperallergic of the Berkley version of Barry McGee, Valentine completely missed the mark and misunderstood McGee’s work and what was going on in the show. Valentine repeatedly refers to McGee as a “street artist” or his work as “street art”, a mistake that was made in some of the Boston press as well, perhaps because street artist is a more institutionally acceptable term than the much more accurate “graffiti artist” or “graffiti writer”. Valentine also claimed that there were sculptures all around the show of McGee tagging walls, and suggested that this might be some sort of mid-life crisis/street-cred proving move by McGee to show that he is still authentic. In fact, practically the opposite is true. Those sculptures actually depict McGee’s assistant Josh Lozcano and help to point out that McGee is older and that he is not longer as directly as involved in the culture he grew up in as he might like to be, whereas Lozcano is from a slightly younger generation and continued on as an active and accomplished writer long after McGee went into his current stage of semi-retirement.
Similarly, at the opening at the ICA I heard multiple people asking docents what the letters “THR,” “CBT,” or “DFW” stood for or meant (the letters appear throughout much of the work in the show). The docents were either unable to answer or radioed in to their superiors and then explained that the letters were acronyms for “The Human Race” and “Down For Whatever,” but the significance of the letters is much more important than the meaning. DFW, CBT, and THR are graffiti crews that McGee is affiliated with. McGee is repping his crews in his own way, now that he has the attention of museum-goes and does not have the freedom to go out writing graffiti as much as he once did. Of course volunteer docents cannot be expected to know everything about every exhibition, but if McGee’s show has meaning beyond “these are some cool drawings I did,” it has to do with graffiti’s relationship to the museum and the community spirit of graffiti versus the one-man genius model of the museum.
McGee is subversive to a point that he probably gets in his own way sometimes. He is clearly uncomfortable in galleries and museums, even though he has exhibited his work indoors for about two decades. This discomfort about and subversion of museum norms is the hidden theme of the show, which McGee successfully sneaks into the museum.
The elements of Barry McGee that McGee himself made sure were included, and a few pieces that may have been added by curators but which it seems likely McGee had a good amount of say in including, point towards his attempts to subvert the museum and their model of a one-man retrospective even when it is about his own work. The show includes the work of at least a dozen other artists, and, in a video tour of the exhibition by curator Jenelle Porter, Porter points out that McGee’s video installation is made up of animations and video clips created and organized by McGee’s assistant Lozcano. Some of the other artists whose work can be found in the show include McGee’s late wife Margaret Kilgallen, his father Jon McGee, Craig “KR” Costello, more than half a dozen freight train moniker writers, and Rize (a prominent Boston-based graffiti writer in the early to mid 1990’s and the subject of a photograph which has appeared repeatedly in McGee’s work since the mid-1990’s). McGee even devoted an entire room of the exhibition to showing his work alongside the work his friends and legendary Boston graffiti writers who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to show inside the ICA. Lozcano’s chaotic tower videos and animations also include clips of other graffiti writers at work next to animations of McGee’s drawings, and at this point it becomes hard to say anymore exactly how many of McGee’s colleagues are represented in the show because there are dozens of video clips with fast cuts that all seem to melt together in the massive installation. Some would say that graffiti is about ego, and that can certainly be said of the upper-echelons of the art world, but McGee broke the stereotypes to subvert the museum and turn his supposed one-man retrospective into a celebration of many artists and mark-makers.
Outdoors, the trend of subversion of norms and inclusion/celebration of graffiti culture and community continues. Rather than putting his name (TWIST) on the wall on behind Boston’s House of Blues, we get Lozcano’s name (AMAZE) in huge letters next to an almost equally massive OKER tribute piece (OKER is currently serving time in prison in the UK for graffiti, and has painted with Lozcano and McGee before). McGee put up the names of people who would better fit the wall, since the wall can be seen from the highway coming into Boston, and there is plenty of illegal graffiti to see nearby along the highway. And the names were put up so that they resembled graffiti except on a massive scale and with permission, subverting the traditional expectation that a mural should look nothing like graffiti, or even cover it up. Murals like this are nothing new for McGee, but I am still explaining it in detail because it was one more subversive move to highlight more authentic graffiti and shine a light on a couple of the deserving artists whom the ICA would otherwise ignore or not be aware of at all.
So is McGee successful in his efforts? Yes and no. He is successful in bringing those close to him into the museum along with him, but what is less clear is whether or not anyone has noticed. Given Valentine’s review of Barry McGee in Berkley and questions by visitors that went unanswered or poorly answered, it seems that McGee has only succeeded half way. Has anyone who was not already in on it has noticed his subversion? If you do not already know what DFW and THR mean, you probably are not going to discover their meaning by staring at one of McGee’s paintings. On the other hand, those who have been included seem happy, and the irony of OKER’s name being included in such a respectful way on a legal wall while he sits in prison for illegal graffiti is likely to be appreciated by the graffiti community. So maybe McGee’s subversion is a sort of secret subversion. For those who know, the show is bit of a coup. For those who do not know, things are business as usual, and that’s fine.
Barry McGee is the ICA/Boston’s fourth time bringing someone from the street art or graffiti world into their museum, and of the other attempts I have seen (with the work of Os Gemeos and Swoon) it is the most successful. Barry McGee is full of strong work, it provides a good introduction to McGee without being repetitive, and McGee still manages to let his true self shine through by subverting the museum’s goals somewhat and turning the show into a show about real graffiti and community, if you are in the know. At the same time, I fear that the ICA has missed the point of their own show and failed to see McGee’s true brilliance, so the success seems somewhat accidental.
For more photographs of the show, check out Brooklyn Street Art (who seem to agree that this show is really about community) and Arrested Motion.
Photos by Pat Falco, Chase Elliot Clark, SRIMA, and RJ Rushmore
