I know Barry McGee; Kiki Smith I want to know. That was the vibe I went with as I walked into both McGee and friends and Smith’s semi-retrospective at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery’s two spaces in West Los Angeles this past Friday night. After all, McGee was the cover artist of Issue 01 and Kiki Smith was the renowned and much-read featured artist of Issue 02. There was a connection I was trying to make in my head that fully formed as I visited both shows back to back.
With McGee’s, the work is bursting at the seams: loud but soulful jazz being belted out, with art strewn about the floor and the walls. Even his signature bloating, brilliantly alive wall installation pushes its belly into the gallery like a rhythmic wave. It’s truly everything everywhere all at once. McGee is a legendary conductor of controlled chaos, bringing along his friends from all walks of life, stimulating and simulating the feeling of graffiti, of travel, of collecting, of bohemia, of surfing, of urban life, but also of something rather environmental and recycled. That McGee called the show Another Round feels so perfectly apt because each of McGee’s shows is a practice in the past, present, and future. He is fine-tuning his vision with pieces of what was and what will be. There really is a graffiti conversation here, like the buff just cleared up enough space for something new to be tagged over, and the cycle repeats and repeats until you have decades of art that you are participating with. It’s a subcultural journey that few artists can match, and I can’t help but find it thrilling every time I see it.
Kiki Smith’s show is the antithesis of McGee’s in terms of layout and presentation, but there is harmony here. For Untethered Journey, Deitch and Pace Gallery teamed up for a historical view of an artist who has always occupied a singular space in contemporary art. Where McGee is about unbridled energy and collaboration, Smith is cerebral and spacious, a never-ending conversation of politics, gender, and mortality. But Smith is equally poetic and spiritual. Before I even read the press release this afternoon, all I could think about in this show was how much Smith has dedicated her practice to the body. Even her incredible sculpture of an owl in the middle of the gallery, with all its detail and roughness, evokes the feeling of how our bodies react to space. Smith once said, “I always think the whole history of the world is in your body,” and it’s quite confrontational in the way she presents the works here. If it’s about your body, then you have a lot of space here to walk around and under and with the works. As in McGee’s show, the floor-to-ceiling effect is here. One show is about maximalism, the other about minimalism.
When we spoke to Kiki in Issue 02, she told us about installing shows, something I wonder if McGee has thought about, too. She said, “I like installing shows and making arrangements of things because it’s like an alphabet, putting materials together, one thing with another, one feeling with another. It’s like building sentences. I used to be really bad at sentence diagrams in school, probably because I put words in the wrong order for some reason. I like the idea of building these trains of information, these conglomerations. There’s something deeply pleasurable about ordering information.” In that last sentence, I felt the connection between the two artists. They are singular entities, outsiders to the normal contemporary art lexicon but embedded and highly influential in that canon as well. They are obsessed with their “thing,” so to speak, and I would argue that both are thinking about mortality throughout their process. “You can spend ten years on one small thing that gets into your head by accident,” Smith told us, and looking at McGee’s career, I think you can see his laser focus on how energy can be transferred from one action to another. They feel like kindred spirits in that way, and I feel rejuvenated having seen them together. —Evan Pricco
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