by Keith Evans
Did I stand in an unruly, clubland-style line that wrapped around the block to get into a defunct 99 Cents Only store to share space with Barry McGee, a hundred of his closest friends, and a terrifying quantity of imagery for a giant pop up during LA’s art week?
Yes, yes I did.
McGee, if you are unhip enough to not know, is a San Francisco street-art darling that made his name working New York and San Francisco in the late 1990s, graduated to having an exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and just now took over every square inch and aisle of the derelict 99 Cents most proximate to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
After parking behind LACMA and finally getting inside, I was hit with a forcefield of heat, sweat, and fashion-conscious humanity.
Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. The real draw here was the graffiti artists themselves, the graffiti-adjacent hipsters, and the graffiti groupies on display. However, the nominal draw beyond the decidedly-younger-than-average crowd was aisle upon shelved aisle of prints, drawings, sculpture and paintings—some which would regularly sell for $20K at a white-walled gallery—next to broken floor tiles and dented shelving.
The center aisle contained an installation room showing a video projection, there was live screen-printing and a scrappy-if-generic indie rock band trying to play and then, in the last 20 minutes, actually playing, in the corner. There were impromptu skate ramps and boys using them.
A 13-year-old skate kid would’ve loved it. It resembled nothing so much as the tag-thick juvenile delinquent-lair where all the kids Shredder had duped into becoming soldiers in his criminal army hung out in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
Much of the work looked like what you would expect to find at Superchief Gallery on a slow day–casual works by graffiti artists who’d removed any reference to graffiti, leaving only an impression of someone trying to display their “touch” in NFT-like isolation in the center of paper or canvas. The cattle-call nature of both the curation and the crowd seemed to preclude artists from including much that was physically fragile, complex, or big, which worked to stymie street artists’ most radical and energizing tendencies: show-off displays of scale, skill, or mechanical invention. It was also, for whatever reason, oddly devoid of provocation: while a few requisite “Fuck Ice” sentiments and caricatures of the Commander-In Chief appeared scrawled and sprayed throughout, there were more bare breasts and signs of imminent violence among the spectators than in the work.
Attendees could use official 99 Cents Only shopping baskets to purchase work in the check-out lanes, regular announcements were made over the store’s intercom, and hundreds were left outside, pressed to the glass, participating only as spectators of the spectators.
Was the exhibition a success? By several metrics, yes. Did they sell art? More than they would have otherwise.
Somehow, all-in-all, a refreshingly Los Angeles start to what might otherwise shape up to be an uneventful art week.
Image: Staff