Barry McGee: Golden Gate
The Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery is exhibiting in Paris until December 18th, 2021 the work of San Francisco-based American Barry McGee, born in 1966. This exhibition, entitled Fuzz Gathering, is the first in France to show a coherent body of work by this artist.
The art of Northern California, and in particular of San Francisco, is little known in our country.Yet it has a rich history, from the Bay Area painters Richard Diebenkorn, David Park and Elmer Bischoff to the Dynaton movement with Lee Mullican and Gordon Onslow-Ford. A younger generation founded the Mission School movement in the early 1990s, which included Chris Johanson, Alicia McCarthy, Margaret Kilgallen, (1) and Barry McGee. Generally speaking, because of its history, San Francisco produces a more popular art than Los Angeles—more “hippy”
The city has given birth to music groups such as Arthur Lee’s Love (a great sartorial inspiration for Jimi Hendrix), and Carlos Santana. San Francisco art is more psychedelic (see Mullican’s painting) and closer to what is called lowbrow, or pop surrealism, outsider art, or even art brut. Already in his time, Jack London, who was born and lived there, showed his interest in the homeless, the hobos, the vagabonds, of whom he was one when he marched on Washington and became a socialist.
MISSION DISTRICT
The Mission School was inspired by the street, skateboarding and road signs, and it was a critic and poet, Aaron Rose, who brought some of these artists together with others (such asTom Sachs, Ryan McGuinness and Harmony Korine) in the exhibition Beautiful Losers at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in 2004. Previously, Rose had run a legendary gallery in New York, the Alleged Gallery, for ten years, in an atmosphere mixed with street art and skateboarding, street culture to use terms that are inadequate to describe what this Alleged Gallery galaxy (2) really was, in which Barry McGee actively worked. In France he took part in the Lyon Bienniale in 2003, when it was organised by the Consortium ( C’est Arrivé Demain [It Happened Tomorrow]): he created an apocalyptic installation of disemboweled vans at the Sucrière. Not far away, he also had a solo show at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2002. In Europe, therefore, not much had happened so far.
McGee is perhaps most often seen beneath our skies as a graffiti artist. For he has this particularity: he has several identities. He is Barry McGee, talented’ renowned contemporary artist who works in galleries and museums. But he is also Twist and Lydia Fong, who covers walls with spray cans. He is even one of the most respected artists in what is known as street art. These diverse identities and practices feed off one another. This can be seen in the exhibition devoted to him by the Perrotin gallery. McGee has not painted the walls (apart from the repeated stencil of a vociferous old man), but the space is filled to the brim as if it were covered with murals: paintings, drawings, ceramics, surfboards, sculptures, painted bottles... And the artist has produced one of those installations that have made him famous:The wall swells, produces a scaly blister of small frames like a reptilian skin; it seems to flow, to spill out, a fleshy mouth reminiscent of those stressed faces that punctuate McGee’s paintings and Twist’s frescoes.
The tight hanging of works, habitual in his work, is typically Californian. It is called the cluster (the galaxy). Thomas Campbell in Santa Cruz and Ed Templeton a little further
south in Huntington Beach (both of whom participated in Beautiful Losers) also practice it, but it would seem that McGee was the initiator, and that this type of hanging originated in a visit, a long time ago, to a South American church.
GEOMETRY
McGee plays an important role in the San Francisco art community, which includes many artists, such as the sculptor Jay Nelson. He does not hesitate to share his fame. At Perrotin’s, an entire wall is devoted to the works of other artists, always hung en cluster. He has done this on several occasions. For example, he curated an exhibition in 2012 at the Paule Anglim Arts Center (San Francisco, Potrero Hill neighborhood), where he showed Bay Area artists. I remember the opening, a joyous mess with drums and saturated guitars on the roof of the building. McGee’s painting, though it includes Twist characters, is primarily geometric in nature, though it also includes writing, the kind that appears on quaint, vintage signs, as in another Beautiful Loser, Philadelphia native Espo (Stephen Powers). But on the whole, the paintings are very compartmentalised and look like English Op Art, like Bridget Riley. I see here another manifestation of the
“hippie” spirit that marks Northern California, whereas the South seems to me to be much more materialistic. In San Francisco there is a kind of neo-gothic, a light that falls in a geometrical way. Another native of the city, Tauba Auerbach, is even more marked by this geometric spirit.
McGee’s motifs are exported from paintings to everyday objects, whether he is creating boardshorts with RVCA, skateboards with Baker, or softboards with Odysea/Catch Surf. One of these boards is a single-fin longboard (long board with only one fin) which does not have a leash attachment, this “leash” connected to the foot which allows you not to lose your board when you fall. In France, it is almost forbidden to surf without a leash, in order to prevent the board from being carried away by a wave and hitting other surfers or swimmers. Good surfers know how to control their boards. McGee surfs almost every day in San Francisco, at least when the ocean allows it. It’s a life discipline. A daily routine. A way of resisting the weather and living in harmony with the elements. Surfing without a leash is a kind of metaphor for creation without a net. In full awareness of the risk, and with generosity. Generosity, I believe, is the key word for understanding Barry McGee’s creation.
Translation: Chloé Baker
1 Until December 5th, 2021, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht is presenting a wonderful exhibition of works by Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001). 2 A book, Young, Sleek and Full of Hell (Drago Publisher, 2005), looks back at this history.