Like what appeared to be most of the Los Angeles slightly-underground-outsider-DIY-fine art-blue chip world, I went to Barry McGee’s The Hole/Jeffrey Deitch hosted 99¢ Store installation, flea market, anti-fair, kinda fair, and deliberately chaotic experience this weekend. I actually went on Saturday evening, a night before the opening, dropped some of The Unibrow’s in a corner near Aryo Toh Djojo’s painting and left a “please take, free” sign on them and wandered about inside. It was crazy. It was messy. There was spirit. Perhaps a spirit of community, but more of a spirit of just-do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want and let it all make sense in the end. There was Stecyk, Alexis Ross, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr, Ozzie Juarez, Polo Cutty, Susanne Berry, Samantha Rosenwald, Bailey Sanders, amongst the hundreds, and hundreds… and of course Barry.
What is interesting in this context is that Barry McGee’s career has been a masterclass in containing, recreating, reimagining, the spirit of what something like this installation is. That is his craft, harnessing and visually the chaos and beauty of graffiti, skate and DIY culture into something that is unique and singular. His art is, and has been, this energy you see in the room. He is the ringleader of what capturing the culture is. Now, his art looks effortless to him now, but even in the most found-object find, or his faces on a spare piece of scrap paper, to his ornate, hypnotic pattern works, he is the fine art of disorder. I’ve always known that, or understood that, but in this room, in this former 99¢ Store turned art universe, his art makes sense in a way that it also makes sense in a museum or blue chip space. It’s about the movement of a community, how it navigates the world, its idiosyncratic obsession with mark-making and moniker name value. It’s untidy and clean.
I purposely went back on Monday just before I walked over to LACMA to see the Village Square, a collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works from the Pearlman Collection, billed as “50 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection in a celebration of art and community. The exhibition showcases expressive landscapes and striking portraits by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Modigliani, Sisley, Soutine, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.” The heavy-hitters of the time. It was an outstanding, stunning, masterclass. There’s a van Gogh that will blow your mind, a Modigliani sculpture that was created from the concrete remnants of the Paris he lived in (very McGee-esque, and vice-versa), a few Soutine’s that are jaw-dropping. But, as I was offered the opportunity to get a tour of the show, Pearlman’s grandson Daniel was talking about how some of the artists of the time shared studio spaces, borrowed materials, canvases, spoke to each other, less competitive but also aware of each’s talents. There was a deep sense of community at the time.
It dawned on me about what we consider community today, what artists as peers think of each other, how movements and periods and eras work. What is striking about the 99¢ Store is that, regardless of how you feel about the art or the ethos of graffiti, it’s a clear community. It speaks of a similar visual language and lifestyle. Village Square, although we have to really think and understand the history by which these artists were living in, has that same sense of artists reacting and communicating with each other in the moment.
Perhaps this observation is a stretch, but in a week of art fairs, openings, hangouts, whatever you will see in LA over the course of 7 days, this thread on Wilshire has struck a bit of a nerve about how we connect the dots of history. And though graffiti and impressionism doesn’t have the connective tissue as say Dada does to graff, the idea of a group of artists together, working together, outside of tradition and making history seems to be a good starting off point for the future… —Evan Pricco
