"Artist Focus: Barry McGee: Street Art Steals A Berkeley Show" in @wsj

By RACHEL WOLFF

In the vein of pioneering New York street artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barry McGee got his start spray-painting San Francisco walls in the 1980s with "Wild Style" graffiti and cartoony faces. His work quickly grew to include sculptures, immersive installations and elaborate murals, painted both in and out of doors.

[image] 
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - Barry McGee's 'Untitled,' acrylic on glass bottles from 2005.

Like many of today's street artists and unlike Basquiat, whose work set an auction record in June with a $20 million sale at Christie's, Mr. McGee, 46, is formally trained. He earned his BFA in 1991 at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he specialized in painting and printmaking but found himself drawn to the street rather than to more traditional galleries. Mr. McGee—who is represented by Cheim & Read in New York—and his ilk have made street art more complex while finding homes for it with private collectors willing to pay from $25,000 to $500,000 for a new installation.

In the past decade, mainstream museums have embraced this generation of artists too. Tate Modern commissioned a handful of street artists (including the Brazilian duo Os Gêmeos) to make massive murals on its exterior walls in 2008; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles hosted a major survey dedicated to the movement in 2011, in which Mr. McGee's work was featured prominently.

"Barry McGee," the first comprehensive look at his career, opened Friday at the University of California's Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) and remains on view through Dec. 9. In April, the show travels to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

Street-Art Standouts

[image]Christies Images Ltd. 2012

A Keith Haring ink on vinyl tarpaulin piece executed in 1982 that sold for $2,840,000, more than double the estimate.

[image]Christies Images Ltd 2012

An acrylic by street artist Kaws, the alias of artist Brian Donnelly.

Mr. McGee is widely admired for his ability to create in-gallery environments that evoke the street, and insisting that museum exhibitions include an outdoor display. "There is a tension in artists between wanting to exhibit our work in galleries and wanting to make work that defies that same system and maintains our sense of being individuals," says John O'Connor, an artist and visiting assistant professor in the fine arts department of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Mr. McGee's approach has inspired unknown graffiti writers, MFA hopefuls, and younger New York street artists like Swoon. The wider art world embraced his aesthetic, and he was exhibiting his work regularly by the mid-1990s, often enlisting friends and collaborators (including his late wife and fellow street artist Margaret Kilgallen) to aid in his large-scale installations and make contributions of their own. He has shown everywhere from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to the Prada Foundation in Milan.

The Berkeley show features dozens of framed drawings, prints and bright Op-art-like abstractions clustered tightly on gallery walls; little-seen early etchings; and murals bearing his signature "'toons"—expressive, often droopy faces with deep-set eyes and heavy lids inspired, in part, by the homeless population in San Francisco's Mission District. There's also a sculpture of five hoodie-clad animatronic kids stacked on each other's shoulders as the top one tags a gallery wall with the word "Amaze."

As part of his usual effort to bring his art outside, Mr. McGee has also spray-painted "Amaze" in a graffiti-like scrawl on panel that sheaths the museum's exterior facade. "The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still—it's not something that a museum would really embrace," he says. "And even if they let me do it, I like to make it look like it's done illegally to some degree."

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Love Keith Haring - "'Keith Haring - 1978-1982’ at Brooklyn Museum"

Inside the show were walls of sceney photographs, a re-creation of one of Haring’s installations at Performance Space 122 and another blast of music (accompanying a slide show of his famous subway drawings). It looked as if the museum had simply repackaged the mythic Haring — club kid, Warhol protégé and maker of friendly street art — for a younger generation, glamorizing the permissive culture of downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s.

It has done that, stopping well short of Haring’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, at 31. But within the exhibition’s party atmosphere other Harings emerge in early drawings, collages and journals, and, especially, on video. And each one is just as relevant, to young artists today, as the figure celebrated in shows like last year’s “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and on the reality television series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.”

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria, this show includes equal quantities of works on paper and rarely seen archival objects (about 300 pieces in all). Also here are seven videos, a medium Haring took up as a student at the School of Visual Arts but later abandoned.

He shouldn’t have. He was great at it from the get-go. In his first video, “Painting Myself Into a Corner” (1979), a spry and shirtless Haring bops along to Devo as he works on a large drawing at his feet. He’s simultaneously a Bruce Nauman testing the limits of a confined space and a Jackson Pollock hovering over the floor. In “Phonics” and “Lick Fat Boys,” both from 1980, he plays games with language: breaking words into phonemes and rearranging them, physically with letters on a wall and orally by recitation.

These works sound dry but aren’t. Neither is “Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt,” in which Haring makes eyes at — and eventually makes out with — the camera while dancing spastically to a New Wave beat. One of the little gems of the exhibition, this piece does double duty as a dig at oversexed advertisements for designer jeans and an exuberant expression of queer identity.

The notebooks provide more evidence of Haring’s interest in linguistics and semiotics. The words from “Lick Fat Boys” reappear as poems, puzzles and anagrams, alongside studious jottings about Roland Barthes and the information theorist Abraham Moles.

In these books Haring also formulated his own theory of spatial relationships. “Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature,” a part of it reads.

And in his drawings he put those ideas into practice: first in a series of 25 individual Tetris-like shapes in red gouache, and later in his interlocking forms made from wriggling lines of Sumi ink on large scrolls of paper. The largest and most striking of the examples on view (“Matrix,” from 1983) generates unlikely synergies among pregnant women, U.F.O.’s, clocks, televisions, men with dog heads and crawling babies.

Some of the earlier works remind you that Haring started out, in Kutztown, Pa., as a cartoonist. In the silly series “Manhattan Penis Drawings” (1978), the World Trade Center appears as two phalluses. But other drawings from that same year evoke pre-Columbian art, Paul Klee, Stuart Davis and the Swiss outsider Adolf Wölfli.

Interspersed with the works on paper is plenty of archival material, which isn’t just there for ambience. It makes the point that Haring was a social-media savant in a Xerox and Polaroid age, distributing his art in the form of buttons, fliers and graffiti. (The Keith Haring Foundation is picking up where he left off, posting pages from Haring’s journals on its Tumblr account.)

In 1980, for instance, he photocopied and pasted around the city provocative collages made from cut-up and recombined New York Post headlines. One reads, “Reagan Slain by Hero Cop”; another, “Pope Killed for Freed Hostage.”

More famous are the chalk drawings he made in subway stations, on the sheets of black paper that covered old advertisements. The Brooklyn show ends with an entire gallery of them, though the accompanying slide show of photographs by Tseng Kwong Chi preserves more of the original, semi-illicit context.

At this point you will either have succumbed to the blaring punk and New Wave soundtrack — compiled by DJ Scott Ewalt and available as an iTunes playlist — or fled the galleries altogether. The show was organized by Raphaela Platow, the Contemporary Arts Center’s chief curator; the Brooklyn Museum’s nightclublike presentation has been supervised by its project curator, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, and Patrick Amsellem, a former associate curator of photography.

My advice: Go, and enjoy the party. Relive the Paradise Garage, if you are old enough to have been there; celebrate the progenitor of Banksy, if you weren’t. But keep an eye out for the other Harings: the theory head, the video whiz, the impresario, the cartoonist from Kutztown.

“Keith Haring: 1978-1982” continues through July 8 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

 

via nytimes.com

 

The Biggest Art Basel Miami Beach Yet


Karim Masri, Meir Teper, Tony Shafrazi, and Gianni Nunnari check out Keith Haring’s Untitled (1988) at the VIP Preview at the Miami Beach Convention Center for Art Basel Miami Beach 2011

Just how overheated was the atmosphere at this past December’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach? Start with the record-size crowd of 50,000, including an opening-night vernissage crush that had the Beach’s fire marshal in a panic, hollering, “Nice and easy! Nice and easy!” as he forced hordes of VIPs to march single-file into the Miami Beach Convention Center, like so many kindergartners in high heels. Gaze over the swarm of Hollywood A-listers who winged into town, from Michael Douglas and wife Catherine Zeta-Jones to Sean Penn and Will Smith, turning Basel’s week of velvet-roped parties into a tropical take on the Sundance Film Festival.

Then add the sudden transformation of louche celebs into discerning cultural mavens: If the sight of Sean “Diddy” Combs dropping $70,000 at the fair on one of British neo-feminist Tracey Emin’s sculptures wasn’t jarring enough for you (Emin’s solo exhibition at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art is already scheduled for 2013), there was New York Yankee A-Rod trading in his baseball bat for curatorial duties, having a set of It boy Nate Lowman’s “bullet-hole” paintings installed in his waterfront Miami Beach home (including inside his indoor batting cage, naturally), while a who’s who of visiting Basel-ites ooh-ed and ah-ed over his burgeoning art collection.

Not least, there was a dizzying array of, ahem, art-themed corporate product launches: a pop-up shop hawking a new line of Dior handbags customized by German abstract painter Anselm Reyle? Why not! Perrier copresenting a night with drag queen-cum-videographer Kalup Linzy and post-punkers TV on the Radio? Sure! A poolside fête with alt-rockers Soulwax, courtesy of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Maybach autos, and… the Kingdom of Morocco? “The same publicist who brought us Maybach was working with Morocco,” LA MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch helpfully explained to The Wall Street Journal. “Everybody wants to connect with contemporary art.” Well, pass the lamb tagine.

Maybe it’s best not to overthink this blurring of art and commerce, as evidenced by the spirit inside the Basel booth of Leipzig, Germany’s Eigen + Art. There, a woman stood transfixed before Neo Rauch’s Die Jägerin, a fiercely imposing, nearly eight-foot-tall, bronze statue of a female falconer readying for battle. “Where will this go?” she asked earnestly. It seemed like a fair question—sporting a fearsome necklace of four disembodied heads, the statue seemed best suited for display inside Qaddafi’s revolutionary palace. “Where will it go?” thundered back gallery head Gerd Harry Lybke. “To whoever gives me $850,000!”

via oceandrive.com