FROM DAVE EGGERS TO BARRY McGEE

An ongoing series of profiles, where one interesting person connects us with another. Author Dave Eggers explains

why he chose artist Barry McGee: “I’ve been following Barry’s work since he was a graffiti artist in San Francisco known

as Twist. Then his work started appearing in galleries. Then museums. And every step of the way, he got better.

With every new platform, every grand new stage he stepped onto, he nailed it, expanding his scope and broadening his range. He is a great draftsman, painter, colorist, and wit.”

words chris a. smith photography carlos chavarría

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Barry McGee has been thinking a lot about garbage lately. It’s everywhere in San Francisco, in every possible permutation. Clothing scattered across the sidewalk as if its wearers had just been raptured. Or, after the rains, a mattress and a futon counterbalanced against a couch to form a waterlogged ziggurat. Or a red warehouse door, tagged and painted over in black and then tagged again—this time in white—its surface a running argument over who, exactly, gets the last word. As McGee sees it, there’s something of the sublime in this stuff. He encounters plenty of it on the short commute from his home to his studio, in the city’s Mission District. The studio faces a two-story cement wall covered with creeper vines. Highway 101 is just beyond. The freeway cuts off this section of the neighborhood, giving the place an end-of-the-line vibe, the quiet broken only by the ambient roar of traffic. It makes for an irresistible dumping ground. McGee, a 50-year-old artist and elder statesman of the graffiti world, takes an anthropological view of the garbage. Let’s say a wealthy newcomer moves in down the street and remodels. Soon, the home’s old door will appear on the sidewalk and, a few days later, McGee will notice that it’s become part of a homeless guy’s shack under the freeway. Eventually, after the cops break up the encampment, he’ll spy a sliver of the old door on the side of the road. “I’m interested in how things move along and have a life like that,” he says, his voice a whisper crossed with a murmur. McGee’s speech unspools slowly, full of oracular pauses and hunts for just the right word. “All these forces are in effect, moving things around, and there’s care and not-care. That’s what I’m trying to get into more. I don’t know what that means to my art, but

on an old radio in the back. McGee’s work is everywhere—stuff from previous shows, stuff that’s still percolating, paintings stack-ed against the tables and walls, paintings stacked in the bathroom. On the floor sits a large work in pro-gress, a mosaic of smaller pieces inside one large frame. There are multi-hued, geometric designs, some of which recall the visual illusions of optical art (op art), others the rainbow fractals of a kaleidoscope. There are shout-outs to the 1980s graffiti writing crews in which he learned his craft: “DFW” (Down for Whatever), rendered in bright, chunky letters. And there are some of McGee’s signature portraits, which combine precise draftsmanship with a slightly cartoonish style: two views of a guy with burly sideburns, a couple of chins, and tired eyes—Bill Clinton as a teamster, as I see it. A few of the piece’s grids are still empty, but McGee says it’s never been closer to completion. “It’s a 10-year commission,” he says, then reconsiders. “Maybe a 12-year commission.” Later, with a laugh: “Don’t tell him that it’s still not done.” At this point, McGee is one of the best-known artists of his generation. He’s exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and his work has shown at prestigious acronymed museums from SFMOMA to LACMA to MOCAD. The New Yorker profiled him, and the Times’s style magazine showcased his fashion aesthetic (a “no-frills” vintage-store vibe, it decided, which seems accurate). His images, meanwhile, adorn everything from drinking glasses to bike seats. If you skate, surf, or pay attention to “street culture,” as the marketers call it (McGee winces at such terms), you’ve definitely seen his work. His portraits—often men with sad, baggy eyes, like skid-row Droopy Dogs—are everywhere.

I try to absorb it and take on that same spirit, you know?” It’s a rainy spring day, and I’m standing with McGee on his studio roof. Between storms, the sun is luminous behind the clouds. McGee directs my attention to the street. His Chevy Astro van is parked down there, stuffed with surfboards and papers, but that’s not what he’s focused on. He points to a few old paint buckets, bright white against the creeper vines on the freeway wall. He likes the composition of the buckets, tries to imagine the trajectory that brought them to their current resting place. He returns to these ideas frequently. “How did this thing get here?” he asks. “It’s like it landed overnight. Sometimes I think people are just setting it up for me. It’s like aliens—if there were aliens arranging things, they’re doing it this way.” For decades now, McGee has been trying to translate his finds on the street into art, in one way or another. The unseen, the un-wanted, the ugly (at least by conventional standards)—this all interests him greatly. And at the moment, that means he’s on the lookout for junk. By now, he figures he’s taken 40,000 photos of random crap, whether strewn on sidewalks or thrown down ravines or barfed across paint-splattered walls. “You know how you just fill up iPhones with photos?” he asks. “Mine are of trash.”

— McGee’s studio, a low-slung warehouse, is an amiable visual cacophony. Over the doorway, a dozen-plus surfboards rise in a tight and clearly not earthquake-proof stack toward the ceiling. More boards—some for riding, some painted for his art—are distributed liberally throughout the space. Off to the right are two office-like rooms devoted mostly to art books; NPR burbles

L I F E M I R R O R S A R TMcGee has two studios, one warehouse space in the city and one at home for paper-based art and photos. As he puts it: “I like working so much that I don’t even like finishing. Does that make sense?”

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It all began with graffiti. McGee grew up in South San Francisco, and one of his first brushes with tagging came when he was nine or ten years old. On a family trip into the city, McGee has said, he saw an image of a pig painted on a wall, accompanied by the slogan “Fuck Cops.” He didn’t really understand the message, but he knew a deliberate provocation when he saw one. It impressed him. As McGee got older, the message began to make sense. The Reagan era was an insur-rectionary time in San Francisco, and McGee gravitated toward shit-stirrers of all stripes: punks, skaters, surfers, and, of course, taggers. He was doing the fine-arts thing, going to art school, but graffiti spoke to him. It was anti-authoritarian, anti-corporate; as Norman Mailer put it in a seminal 1974 essay on the subculture, graffiti was “the herald of some oncoming apocalypse less and less far away.” A group called the Revolutionary Communist Party displayed particular élan, McGee remembers, tagging the Bank of America headquarters in downtown San Francisco in the 1980s. “They always wrote these really antagonizing things on the right buildings,” he says. Then, too, the discipline’s built-in restrictions (cops, angry property owners, etc.) enforced an artistic rigor, an economy of style that McGee appreciated. He chose a name, Twist, and began painting the city’s feral spaces, one midnight mission at a time. McGee rose to prominence in the 1990s, alongside other Bay Area artists like painter Chris Johanson, filmmaker and painter Thomas Campbell, and Margaret Kilgallen, a painter whom McGee married in 1999. Kilgallen died of cancer in 2001, shortly after the couple’s daughter, Asha, was born. Some had backgrounds in graffiti; others didn’t. They all, however, shared a DIY aesthetic—

to reconcile art and mammon. Grants and gallery sales help keep him afloat just like any other artist. By virtue of his street cred, he can also tap into a network of sponsor-ships, collaborations, and corporate one-offs (RVCA, Adidas, Beats by Dre). A little backlash is probably inevitable. A 2008 collabora- tion with Oakley sunglasses, for example, prompted online comments like “guy is a walking contradiction. He has said he hates coprate [sic] america and the consumer nation we have become but he uses graffiti to sell adidas and oakley!?” McGee says he feels good about most of his decisions, but trade-offs come with the territory. “It’s always someone paying for something.” McGee has also attempted to bridge the divide between the streets (where graffiti is vandalism) and the galleries (where it’s art). His methods tend toward the playfully subversive. In some shows he’s overturned old passenger vans, tagged the hell out of them, and planted animatronic graffiti writers on top of them to paint a wall. For a mid-career retrospective at UC Berkeley’s art museum in 2012, he let it be known that he’d welcome the tagging of advertisements for the show. Soon, photos of Muni buses appeared online, exhibit ads smeared with the spray-painted word “Sellout.” So, staring down middle age, the graffiti writer charts a path forward. McGee loves reading artist biographies—most recently, one about the New York painter Philip Guston. The guy lived a full life, painting anti-fascist murals in 1930s Mexico, making abstract art in the ’50s alongside Pollock et al., and then, after returning to figurative art, getting crapped on by the world. His late work is rightfully celebrated today. McGee finds much to admire in Guston’s story: “A blue-chip artist who did it his way, on his own terms.”

the antithesis of contemporary art world slickness. The scene came to be called the Mission School, after the San Francisco neighborhood. Things got big, fast. Huge crowds and massive hype, pitches from wanna-be-hip companies, a starring role in a traveling exhi-bition with an indoor skate bowl. Fans often stole McGee’s pieces from his shows, which he found funny. Soon, due to both theft and graffiti abatement, little of McGee’s work remained in the wild. The only remaining pieces in San Francisco, he says, are buried deep in the subway tunnels, like a modern-day Lascaux. While McGee still occasionally tags abandoned cars or couches bound for the dump, it’s been a long time since he mounted a clandestine mission. He’s both too famous and too old for that stuff, and his continuing association with “youth culture” both puzzles and amuses him. There’s no shortage of young graffiti writers out there—even in the rapidly gentrifying Bay Area—doing “abrasive” work, McGee says admiringly. But he’s not the guy. “It doesn’t make sense,” he says. “At this age, I shouldn’t know anything.” He’s similarly unimpressed by references to his work as “street art”—a term conjured by gallery curators and ad reps to transmute graffiti’s essential hostility into something that moves product, divorcing aesthetics from politics. “Anything that involves using a scissor lift and having permission is, like, already two strikes for me,” he says. “If it was all done illegally, I’d be a lot more into it. Now I just see people on lifts, in the middle of the day, just spending hours on sub-par murals. It feels gentrified. It becomes just a beautiful thing.” Since the beginning, McGee has wrestled with the contradictions of his faith, trying

W O R K S I N P R O G R E S SOpposite Panels on the floor of McGee’s studio: a patchwork of geometric patterns, kaleidoscope-type fractals, and his signature portraits. “When I look around here I know where everything’s headed,” he says. “It’s simmering. It’s kinda mapped, but certain things need attention at certain times. I know what’s on the way out. I know what’s coming in.”

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As it happens, McGee and I often surf the same break, a utilitarian spot a bit south of San Francisco where the waves, though usually mediocre, are mellower than their typically murderous cousins on the city’s edge. Just off Highway 1, the beach is a funny mix of pastoral and urban. Wind-gnarled cypresses cling to the surrounding hills, but there’s a surprisingly tasteful Taco Bell perched over the sand—all weathered wood and modernist lines, like a Mendocino guesthouse. On mornings when the wind’s right, you can smell the doughnut holes frying from the lineup. McGee surfs most days. Sometimes he goes with his wife, Clare Rojas, a prominent painter originally from Ohio (the two married in 2005). More often he goes alone. Surfing serves a purpose beyond exercise for him, scratching an itch he can’t entirely identify. “Sixty feet off the land is just enough, don’t you think?” he says. “It’s just enough to satisfy something in us.” One sunny morning after my studio visit we run into each other in the water. The swell is mixed up—not big, but messy and tough to get a read on. He squints toward the west. “I’ve surfed worse.” He likes to ride old boards, the heavier and more beaten-to-hell the better, in the interest of seeing what’s possible. His board today boasts a chunky, sawed-off-looking fin, an atavistic thing that’s more dinosaur tooth than sporting equipment. On the horizon, an irritable-looking wave rears up and I paddle toward it, trying to get over it before it breaks on my head. McGee makes the opposite calculation. He catches it, and his head disappears under the feathering crest. Later, from the beach, I watch him surf for a couple of minutes. He sits by himself, closer to the shore than anyone else,

catching one seemingly unpromising wave after another. He crouches low and then arches into standing position, stepping forward and then back on the board as needed, carving playful lines into waves others deem worthless. He tells me that it’s “the garbage waves that I like that nobody’s competing for.” That word again: garbage. There’s so much in this word for McGee. It’s a stand- in for what’s out there in the world, on the streets, and its relationship to his art. It points to a way of seeing that he’s been developing for years, through exhibitions stuffed with found objects: old VHS tapes, street signs, office chairs. He finds this approach increasingly compelling. In the studio, he nods to a worktable piled with flotsam from his urban travels, and grabs a broken-down pastel cushion. It could be from a Denny’s banquette, maybe, or a hospital waiting room couch. McGee is excited by the cloth’s faded pattern, its Escher-esque geometry. Some artists build this stuff from scratch, but McGee’s process is more mysterious, the endpoint unmapped. Sometimes he plops the whole thing into an installation; other times he’ll paint on it. In others still, it serves as subterranean inspiration. “It’s a weird thing when it transforms,” he says, eyes alive, trying to quantify the unquantifiable. “I don’t have a better word than magic. It’s just the transformation that happens, when all things are elevating. There’s a better word than magic for sure. But there’s something where it just magically…appears to me. I’m just like, ‘Holy crap!’” In the days to come I find myself noticing artfully arranged junk piles all over the city. The invisible made visible. Some bells you can’t un-ring, as they say.

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