Barry McGee’s Anarchic Snapshot Vision

Spontaneous, raw, intimate, and anarchic, the photographs of Barry McGee are as fundamental to his artistic vision as the graphic paintings, drawings, zines, and installations for which he is so well known. Until now, the focus has typically been on the relationship of McGee’s art to graffiti, but here we acknowledge the significance of his photographed world: his family, the communities he engages with in the daytime, as well as the makers of marks often left at night. This presentation of the artist’s decades-long photography practice concerns the whole artist. It also considers more formal concerns, inviting us to see this iconic artist’s vision from a different, and arguably more complete, perspective.

Born in 1966, McGee was raised in San Francisco. Coming of age in the 1980s, during the Reagan years, he was interested in surfing and cars. He was also drawn to radical politics and inspired by the constantly vibrant subcultures of the city. He followed activists who expressed outrage at the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America and opposed corporate advertising targeted at the poor and disadvantaged. Venturing out each night to write, he blanketed bus stops, billboards, walls, and trains with his graffiti. After completing his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, he expanded his practice, finding an audience in the institutional spaces of galleries and, soon after, museums. While he is acknowledged as a key figure of the Mission School in San Francisco, McGee has always insisted on the broader social relevance of his artwork.

McGee makes photographs to remember; these are snapshots for private delectation. His cameras are nothing fancy—just point-and-shoots—first film, then digital. Now, he mostly uses his cell phone. While the pictures can, at a glance, seem arbitrary and generic, that is in fact their appeal. In the context of McGee’s whole practice, they assume a particular authority.

These images share his story. They show us his family, his friends, his art, and his realm. Some of the pictures early in the sequence were made by others—mostly family members and friends—and appropriated by McGee. It starts with his family on the California beach, his mother, friends in the car world, surfer pals, and fellow taggers. One central, early photograph shows him as a child on an imposing three-wheeler, which he constructed with his dad and brother. It’s a one-of-a-kind instrument that fashioned a special relationship between him and his father, a high-end mechanic who customized and repaired old cars.

Beyond the intermittent appearances of cars in McGee’s images, a montage of early black-and-white photos of cars from the late 1950s—wherein McGee focuses as much on the vehicles’ exaggerated tail fins as on the people inside and around them—suggests that car culture, though peripheral to his best- known work, has been central to McGee. Along with the cars, there is McGee’s commitment to surfing, which, for many practitioners, is often a solitary endeavor. But here as well he’s part of a group, their surfboards hauled in a trailer, stacked in the back of a van, and displayed upside down in full sunlight so we can see their wonderfully maimed and deformed scars.

Before all else, tagging—monikers thrown up on a wall for all to see—is what McGee is excited about, and what he is known for. We see taggers in the street, scaling fences, bending saplings out of their way, and variously contorting to reach walls. There are pictures that preserve their effort, showing them posing with their handiwork, or out in the city wielding a spray can in each hand. A picture of someone working inside of what may be a deserted bunker gives us brief access to one of the many ingenious places they manage to break, climb, or crawl into. From spontaneous tags to highly ambitious, enormous pieces, each of these photographs marks a memory and preserves a moment for later reference or appropriation into McGee’s installations.

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Some pictures describe a community, yet we see mostly solitary individuals. The photographs record conspiratorial energy and daring acts: spraying a truck, climbing over each other to mark a wall, working on a mural in a remote space. There is a delicacy to these exchanges, and a bravery that is exciting and important to McGee.

Tags are an assertion of a community not usually acknowledged, and rarely seen. And the marks are amazing. A cluster of McGee’s familiar drawn heads appears opposite a watchful face, crowned with a starry hat. There is a huge head, a masterwork drawn in black spray, eyes alert and brow furrowed, neither startled nor fearful but amazingly alive. What gradually emerges are recurrent, straight-on pictures of decay and of things painted out—messages, drawings, other graffiti—or of detritus so transformed that we can barely read them. Some are signed “Twist,” McGee’s nom de plume. In others, there is a beauty so ravishing as to resemble Agnes Martin’s Minimalist paintings or the abstract geometries of Ad Reinhardt.

These pictures urge the imperative of looking at and accepting what the street reveals. There is plenty of humor, yet also pathos, even tragedy, and a sympathy for the thrown-away, the cast-off, the junked. A heap of scraps is captured bathed in vigorous, beautiful sunlight. Potent messages sprayed on fences and walls preach: “Living well may be the best revenge but just surviving sure pisses some people off…” Others, in their anonymity and simplicity, can terrify: “BLOOD,” and elsewhere, “DEATH.” McGee has an eye for the resonance of anonymously made art. Even in pictures of obliterated tags and painted-out walls, he recognizes and celebrates their role as minimalist, elegant cancellations.

Trash is noticeable everywhere in McGee’s world, growing and accumulating, and finally, in the last pages of Reproduction eliding with the hulking objects that he has created for museum presentation. The “boils,” as he has named these strange forms, seem to grow from the walls they are attached to. They are shown to be fragile, awkward, and vulnerable, patched together with sheets of the artist’s geometric abstractions, his drawings, and found objects. While they acknowledge the rot that gave birth to their strange, singular form, they are refined and personal concretions imbued with the inimitable hand of this unique craftsman. The bulbous objects lean into our space, each a completely unique and alluring growth representing McGee’s particular take on the meeting of art and life.

This essay originally appeared in Barry McGee: Reproduction (Aperture, 2022)