ART
Barry McGee: Mature Works
/ Zoey Mondt
10.12.07
Barry McGee: Mature Works
Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles
One of the basic tenets in Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art is the idea that a generation of jaded and detached artists has created a desert of creative superficiality. Rather than creating art, these cultural death-mongers produce “postart,” a coarse reflection of our materialist society and social indifference, absent beauty, intention, spirituality, despair and hope alike. In his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since his project at UCLA’s Hammer Museum in 2000, Barry McGee’s site-specific installation at REDCAT in downtown LA is a manic outburst of postart multimedia, paintings, drawings and sculpture. The show is McGee’s second exhibition with former REDCAT gallery director and curator Eungie Joo. Their first collaboration was “Regards, Barry McGee” in 1998, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While I take issue with much of what Kuspit posits in The End of Art, the work exhibited in McGee’s show at REDCAT tends to support Kuspit’s central premise and leaves me pondering the case he’s made for art’s end.
Presumably ironic, “Mature Works,” includes a new sculptural/environmental construction and a selection of existing works that transform the cavernous 1-room gallery into a sort of crackheads’ bazaar, the kind you might stumble upon in MacArthur Park early Sunday morning, rows of tarp shanties festooned with paraphernalia painstakingly collected overnight, fussy sidewalk assemblages stretched from grass to curb. Among the clutter at REDCAT, a predictably overturned car oozing spent cans of spray paint, cases displaying empty bottles painted with McGee’s iconic grizzled hobo, a rickety raw wood scaffolding stalagmite projected horizontally from a wall of clunky Day-glo geometric abstractions, buzzing kinetic sculptures, a box crate filled with throbbing noise and staticky stacks of scavenged TVs, and animatronic taggers perched on each other’s shoulders in an effort to reach the only blank wall space left on which to throw up their mark.
Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles
One of the basic tenets in Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art is the idea that a generation of jaded and detached artists has created a desert of creative superficiality. Rather than creating art, these cultural death-mongers produce “postart,” a coarse reflection of our materialist society and social indifference, absent beauty, intention, spirituality, despair and hope alike. In his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since his project at UCLA’s Hammer Museum in 2000, Barry McGee’s site-specific installation at REDCAT in downtown LA is a manic outburst of postart multimedia, paintings, drawings and sculpture. The show is McGee’s second exhibition with former REDCAT gallery director and curator Eungie Joo. Their first collaboration was “Regards, Barry McGee” in 1998, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While I take issue with much of what Kuspit posits in The End of Art, the work exhibited in McGee’s show at REDCAT tends to support Kuspit’s central premise and leaves me pondering the case he’s made for art’s end.
Presumably ironic, “Mature Works,” includes a new sculptural/environmental construction and a selection of existing works that transform the cavernous 1-room gallery into a sort of crackheads’ bazaar, the kind you might stumble upon in MacArthur Park early Sunday morning, rows of tarp shanties festooned with paraphernalia painstakingly collected overnight, fussy sidewalk assemblages stretched from grass to curb. Among the clutter at REDCAT, a predictably overturned car oozing spent cans of spray paint, cases displaying empty bottles painted with McGee’s iconic grizzled hobo, a rickety raw wood scaffolding stalagmite projected horizontally from a wall of clunky Day-glo geometric abstractions, buzzing kinetic sculptures, a box crate filled with throbbing noise and staticky stacks of scavenged TVs, and animatronic taggers perched on each other’s shoulders in an effort to reach the only blank wall space left on which to throw up their mark.