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"Street Market" at Deitch Projects
A model of urban reality/utopia, "Street
Market" was created by accomplished graffiti artists Barry McGee,
Todd James and Stephen Powers. Like the landscape of any city, their
installation provided an abundance of visual stimuli. They built
mock storefronts on a platform, including a bodega, a check-cashing
joint, a carservice dispatch office and a liquor store - all of
which can be wandered through like the set of a spaghetti western.
The artists covered the gallery walls with graffiti and signage of
their own design. The floor was taken up by a big, graffiti-painted
truck turned on its side, as well as a shanty home set up in a
trailer with empty beer bottles, full ashtray and a working TV.
Ambient grocery-store style Muzak resounded throughout.
The three "Street Market" artists
are also known by tag names, which they have made famous by writing
them in public places as impressively and as often as possible.
McGee is known as "Twist," James as "Reas" and Powers as "Espo";
each does figurative work as well as text. They all worked on the
walls at Deitch. McGee drew caricatures of people, often sad-sack,
block-headed drunken men that could be stylistically associated with
the art work of Nicole Eisenman or Inka Essenhigh. James contributed
images of scantily clad hipster chicks and, for this show, painted a
two-story-high pink foot in a stiletto-heeled shoe. Powers was
responsible for the truck and trailer in the middle of the room,
Covering the walls were signs
announcing, for example, "Buck Fiddy's 50 cent store," "Super Savior
Just for You" and "Run Yo Shit, Brought to you by No Fair 1's
Productions." This zesty signage reflects the artists' enthusiastic
embrace of the American advertising esthetic, as well as their
fondness for the lively grammar of slang. For imaginary products in
the fabricated stores, Powers designed Pop-inspired labels, mini art
works that demonstrate both his good graphic sense and his ability
to manipulate the idioms of consumer culture. There were, for
example, cans of "Stret Cred," "Dignity," "Class" and "Belief";
"Promise" is a roll of toilet paper.
Though braggadocio, individual
style and territorialism are an inherent part of the present-day
American graffiti writer's work, McGee, James and Powers show a
remarkable ability to collaborate. This flexibility comes from the
artists' shared |
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appreciation for their urban
habitat, with all its kitschy sensory overload. What to others is
vandalism seems, to these young men, beauty born of an attempt to
possess the urban landscape that possesses them. And rivetingly, for
these artists, reality and utopia are not so different. Though money
is not the main inspiration for their work, the artists seem happy
about "getting paid," i.e., selling their works in the show for
between $2,000 and $15,000. As Powers eloquently explains in his
book about graffiti, The Art of Getting Over, "Love is the original
motivation for everything."
["Street Market" was adapted from
"Indelible Market," an exhibition curated by Alex Baker and
presented at the ICA in Philadelphia last spring.]
By Sarah Valdez |
Barry McGee, Stephen Powers,
Todd James: Installation view of "Street Market," 2000; at Deitch
Projects. |
