Robert Pimple

Barry McGee’s playfully anarchic multimedia installations blend the transgressive and antiauthoritarian impulses of graffiti with the considered techniques of a formal artistic practice. While he has said that the two are relatively separate- “I do indoor work and I do outdoor work” - undeniably, McGee attempts to bridge the immense chasm between the spontaneous and uncontrolled atmosphere of the street art and the meditated white cube of the gallery. Reflecting punk, outsider, folk, and other noninstitutionalized art forms, his multimedia environments combine detritus from urban culture with formal, traditional, or painterly elements, generating am ambivalent dialogue between the two spaces. Found, discarded, and recycled objects, overturned vehicles, motorized figures, audio components, and video monitors exist alongside portraits, text, assemblages of framed photographs and drawings, and geometrical sections of optical color-field “wallpaper.” His installations also have a degree of humorous obstinacy: a recent exhibition included a sculpture of a hand clutching a bottle of spray paint and protruding from a leafy bush- comical graffiti camouflage- giving literal and metaphorical form to the artist's desire to see “the evidence of the human hand at a place, at a time, and then gone into memory”

An empathy with youth culture and a desire to propagate an alternative discourse to that of commercial advertising are at the heart of McGee’s work. “Disgusted by the culture of desire and consumption,” as he describes it, McGee conceives of the inherently disruptive practice of graffiti- one that floods the landscape with (by definition) unsolicited potentially disturbing marks- as a corrective to the corporate imbalance. For city governments, graffiti is vandalism. For others, namely those who engage in it, it is a form of expression, an identity, a community and a release. McGee emerged as an important figure in the history of San Francisco Bay Area graffiti beginning in the 1980’sunder the tag name “Twist”. His trademark images of morose, droopy, caricatured faces inspired by the transient and homeless people on the city streets,frequently combined with text, formed a poignant-if fleeting-commentary on the overlooked status of outsiders within a community. These characters appear throughout his installations in various forms, including drawings, photographs, and tags. The temporality of this visual language and the immediacy of its communication convey a history that is continually rewritten, erased, and written again. As McGee has commented “I enjoy the feel of work on the street-its like a glimpse or something that you’ll just catch.” Willem de Kooning, an artists whose chaotic abstractions could by some stretch be compared to the uncontrolled gestures of graffiti, once referred to the “slipping glimpse” of an unquantifiable moment on inspiration that is briefly experienced and then incessantly pursued. The manifestation of this ephemeral and perpetually ungraspable sensation is present in McGee’s working method both a frustration and a sustaining momentum. His marks, both in the gallery and on the street, have a finite existence, part of the revolving door of time and memory. Amid the temporal cacophony of McGee’s works, we find the messy evidence of life and the absurd pathos of the human existence.