Barry McGee at Deitch Projects

"I am trying to move the work back outdoors," graffiti artist Barry McGee told Rose Art Museum curator Raphaela Platow in the catalogue for his 2004 exhibition there, "out of the stuffy confines of the gallery.... Having license to go into a gallery for a few weeks is somewhat bland." Was it to compensate for the establishment setting, then, that McGee turned One More Thing, his recent installation at Deitch Projects, into an assault on the senses? Comparing it to his first solo show with the gallery in 1999, which more effectively and modestly balanced beauty, ugliness and dark humor, one doubts if bigger and flashier is really better.

One More Thing was a playhouse vision of a loud and lawless paradise for street kids who still believe their rebellion to be transgressive. Visitors accessed the gallery through the rear of an overturned cargo truck, to be greeted by booming and discordant electronic music, the graffito "smash the state" over Dick Cheney's sneering mug, and a mural of McGee's signature cartoonish faces, in red and green, meant to be viewed with 3D glasses.

Towering over it all was a pile of wrecked, graffitied vans, some with their wheels spinning as if they had just crashed. In a den inside an upside-down van, one could watch videos of kaleidoscopic, swirling patterns (created by artist Josh Lazcano from McGee's drawings) with a thumping soundtrack. Behind the pileup, hundreds of feet of walls were painted with a riotous array of brightly colored diamond, rectangle and checkerboard patterns, incongruously pretty in this context. Inside a cargo container under the stack of vehicles, visible only from behind, was a full-size facsimile of a bathroom. In it, before a graffiti-painted mirror, stood an uncannily lifelike robotic figure waving a spray-paint can back and forth as if he were vandalizing the place himself.

A column of old video monitors blared conflicting soundtracks and a smorgasbord of imagery--static, computer screengrabs, yet more graffiti, videos of McGee and friends horsing around, caricatures of a Chinese face (Fong is the half-Chinese artist's alter-ego) and more psychedelic patterns. In a nose-thumbing gesture, found clips argued that graffiti is not art but rather an invitation to criminality. As a subtler riposte, more motorized graffiti painters--monkeys, Chinamen, undershirted hobo types, etc.--like the one in the bathroom appeared throughout the gallery, connecting the disparate elements of the show via the theme of mark-making across species and cultures. In keeping with that theme, dozens of beautifully rusted steel type-setters' trays lined one wall.

The intrepid visitor could descend a ladder to a hidden room in the basement. On the wall hung hundreds of napkins sporting doodles by McGee's father--lots of trippy faces, hot cars and naked ladies--overlooking a sprawl of DVD players and VCRs that powered the display upstairs.

And there was much more. To his credit, McGee did fill Deitch's imposing space with buzzing, electric energy. But the whole seemed over-reliant on nihilism and ugliness for their own sakes, without twisting them into a strange beauty as he has done before. Discussing his use of sound, McGee told Platow, "I am finding out that noise can be as offensive as graffiti," as if offensiveness by itself were interesting. For McGee, it is: he also asserts that offending people leads them to question their own assumptions and sensibilities. He hasn't yet figured out that often, the opposite is true.

--Brian Boucher

COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning