Barry McGee video on ArtTalk
Watch this two-part conversation between artists Aaron Rose and Barry McGee(Season 1) on VBS’s ArtTalk. While the video features live shots of McGee’s artwork and installations, the interview subjects are recast as animated robotic talking heads, as though the dialogue was fed into a Speak & Spell. As elusive and reluctant to talk about his work as ever, here McGee lets his artwork literally speak for itself.
Berliner Salon: Aaron Rose curates “Passion for the Possible” at Circle Culture Gallery
Aaron Rose, the California-based curator/musician behind the now-infamous Beautiful Losers exhibition, which championed the work of subculture “street artists” like Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen (both Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), has another genre-defying exhibition currently on view in Berlin at Circle Culture Gallery, the city’s preeminent commercial space for urban contemporary art. Entitled Passion for the Possible, this show presents a surprising facet of urban pop art (especially in conjunction with street art and all of its subversive implications), specifically the obsessive print-making efforts of Sister Corita, a one-time Catholic nun.
Actually, Sister Corita was more of a deviant than her sanctified vocation avowed and she ultimately left the church after being labeled “a guerilla with a paintbrush” (according to the press release). Her artistic practice is thus a fitting anachronism for Aaron Rose’s curatorial framework and general penchant for blurring boundaries between disparate cultures. The works on view, a combination of silkscreen prints, murals and sculpture incorporating “popular culture images such as archetypal American consumerist products…alongside spiritual texts, song lyrics and literary writings,” explicitly oppose the conformity typically associated with her brand of Catholicism’s hyper-conservative doctrine.
Sister Corita was predominately active in California during the 1960’s and 70’s. Her use of collective consumer imagery in mass-produced prints is noted in the press release as “the positive west-coast alternative to Warhol, possibly pre-dating him.” She left the Church in 1969, only to be diagnosed with cancer in the early 1970’s and given six months to live. She didn’t succumb to her illness for another seven years, but she nonetheless began an intense period of artistic production immediately following her diagnosis. Her work and her biography are both inspiring and inherently American (in relation to the bygone era that her work represents), bridging the divide between public service and self-expression, social responsibility and anti-institutional rebellion.
Passion for the Possible runs through May 30th. A monograph of works by Sister Corita, aka Corita Kent, entitled Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita, was recently published by Four Corners Books.
Life on Mars: Carnegie International 2008
The 2008 installment of Carnegie International, the oldest international survey of contemporary art in North America, will explore what it means to be human in the world today. CI08, titled Life on Mars, opens to the public on May 3, though related programs and events are already underway. A four-session lecture series, Approaches to Contemporary Art & the 55th Carnegie International will explore how art has changed in the last 50 years. Two sessions remain on Thursday, April 17 and 25.
CI08 is curated by Douglas Fogle, the Carnegie’s curator of contemporary art. On April 6, Fogle posted the following on the exhibition blog:
“In David Bowie’s song, ‘Life on Mars,’ he sings about a world spinning out of control. Bowie poses the question of whether Mars is a place to escape to, or whether we’re on Mars already, because this world we live in has become so strange and unfamiliar to us. The title [of CI08]–appropriated from the Bowie song…poses a poetic question of longing, and of trying to connect. It relates not only to a literal search for extra-terrestrial life, but also to sending out signals in the dark, and hoping to get a response…Every curator is a product of their particular time, as well as their own personal history. This show is the show I had to do right now.”
The forty emerging and established artists in the exhibition include Mark Bradford (Season 4), Barry McGee, Mike Kelley(both Season 1), Vija Celmins (Season 2), Doug Aitken, Cao Fei, Phil Collins, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Ryan Gander, Thomas Hirschhorn, Sharon Lockhart, Marisa Merz, Noguchi Rika, Thomas Schutte, David Shrigley, Rudolf Stingel, Paul Thek, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Rosemarie Trockel, to name just a few. CI08 closes on January 9, 2009.
Barry McGee in Newcastle
There are only twelve days left to catch Art:21 Season One artist Barry McGee’s - aka Twister - first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Disrupting ideas of property, surveillance, and control, They Don’t Make This Anymore includes found objects, “tape”paintings, flash movies, and a site-specific installation in the centre’s Level 2 Gallery.
The exhibition runs through April 27th. For more information, please visit the Baltic website.
Pettibon and McGee at Riverside Art Museum
Two shows featuring Art:21 artists open simultaneously on March 30 at the Riverside Art Museum in California.
The Big Sad, a two-person show by Barry Mcgee (Season 1) and Clare Rojas, examines the way these two artists draw upon street culture and utilize found objects and urban scraps. Both Mcgee and Rojas have bodies of work that mix a variety of styles and traditions, from folk art to graffiti writing, and combine both the craft of handmade painting and contemporary ideas about installation.
Thank You for Staying is a show of drawings by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) during a performance at the Riverside Art Museum earlier in the year. During the performance, Pettibon made drawings which legendary Minuteman bassist Mike Watt played music. The drawings contain references to Watt’s career, his lyrics, and the way he played that night, also well as a variety of other sources.
Both shows will be up until May 17, and you can find more information about the them here.
Barry McGee photograph available through Iconoclast Editions
Released today through Iconoclast Editions is a new Barry McGee (Art:21 Season 1) photograph. View and purchase here.
Untitled, 2007
C-print
16 X 20 inches
Edition of 200
Numbered and signed by the artist
Iconoclast is a project-based studio working in collaboration with artists and institutions to produce a wide variety of multi-media endeavors. Since 2002, Iconoclast has produced a multitude of exhibitions, books, editions and other projects including the widely acclaimed touring museum exhibition, Beautiful Losers.
Beautiful Losers at SXSW
Headed to Austin, Texas this weekend for the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference? Don’t miss the world premier of Beautiful Losers, a film showcasing the work of artists Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen from Season 1 of Art:21, and Spark-featured artist Chris Johanson.
Pioneer skateboarding legend and musician Tommy Guerrero, also featured on Spark, will perform at SXSW this weekend with Money Mark, the composer of the Beautiful Losers soundtrack.
Educator guides related to the Spark films on Tommy Guerrero and Chris Johanson are available for free download.
Barry McGee interview in SWINDLE
The current issue of SWINDLE magazine features an extensive rare interview with Season 1 artist Barry McGee. In it, Barry talks about surfing, getting his start as an artist, and more. Read the full interview (conducted by Philadelphia-based artist Andrew Jeffrey Wright) here.
[via C-Monster]
Beautiful Losers trailer
Beautiful Losers, the new film about contemporary art and urban creative culture‚Äîprimarily springing from an East- (NYC) and West-coast (San Francisco/LA) do-it-yourself ethos‚Äîthat follows the book and exhibition by the same name, will hit theaters in Spring 2008. The film showcases a roster of artists whose work, inspired by the subcultures of skateboarding, surf, punk, hiphop, and graffiti, brought them together from the early 1990’s on. It also features exclusive footage of Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee shot by Art21. Other artists profiled in the documentary include Ed Templeton, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Geoff McFetridge, Mike Mills, Steve Powers, Harmony Korine, Shepherd Fairey, and more.
Watch the trailer here.
Barry McGee’s Advanced Mature Work at REDCAT
Advanced Mature Work is a site-specific installation by Season 1 featured artist Barry McGee opening today at REDCAT in Los Angeles. The exhibition, McGee’s first solo show in L.A. since one at UCLA’s Hammer Museum in 2000 (featured in his Art21 segment), includes a selection of existing works as well as a new sculptural/environmental construction.
McGee, who lives and work in San Francisco, presents in Advanced Mature Work a newly commissioned installation that draws upon the attitudes and processes of unsanctioned acts of expression. In these new works on display, he continues to develop a destabilized art practice that suggests nostalgia for direct forms of communication, an insatiable appetite for discarded and recycled remains, and an ambivalent relationship toward consumer society.
Barry McGee: Advanced Mature Work runs through November 25, 2007 at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in L.A.
