In Conversation: Jeffrey Deitch and Lawrence Rinder on Barry McGee

good evening I'm Larry render I'm the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and it's a pleasure to welcome you here this evening for another fantastic late program which will kick off with this conversation that I'm about to have with my partner colleague from down south jeffrey Deitch director of Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles so before we get into the conversation I want to say a few words of thanks to the folks who put this evening together starting with Steve side who is organizing the late series in conjunction with the Barry McGee exhibition sherry Goodman director of education who helped with this and Shawn Carson of course wave Shawn Shawn does all the great stuff behind the scenes thank you so much and as I said this particular series of late programs is organized to coincide with and to really celebrate the Barry McGee exhibition and so Barry himself of course deserves you know acknowledgment and gratitude and expressions of wonder for all the great work that he's done throughout his career and particularly for this show so Thank You Barry Deena beard Deena raise your hand wherever you are oh my goodness are you still here anyway there she is she's not raising her hand but she is here Deena Mico curator in the show who just did such a tremendous job couldn't have done it without you Deena thank you our tremendous funders beginning with Andy Warhol foundation for the Arts fantastic organization and presenting sponsors citizens of humanity and major support from the National Endowment for the Arts so thanks to all of our supporters wherever they may be jeffrey Deitch probably needs no introduction to this audience but I'll just say that as repeat that he is the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles former director owner of Dyche projects in New York and I think it's fair to say a force within the art world today and someone who I have looked to for many decades at my own career for inspiration but I do want to ask Geoffrey if you can comment on your own background in the arts and feel free to go back as far as you'd like to the crib or however far back you'd like to go when did it all begin for you thank you so much Larry first I want to say it's such a pleasure and an honor to be here and also understand how Larry thinks how he organizes things I think you asked me one year ago to reserve this date though so it's so interesting when you have an exhibition like this where Barry works on the border between order and chaos there's a lot of order behind what you see here and very much appreciate Larry the team here and the amazing organization it's not easy to put on an exhibition like this it's very challenges the walls of the institution he challenges the structure and pushes us and we all have to move and we're all very grateful for the way Barry pushes us I want to say so that Larry has belong been an inspiration for me my favorite of all the Whitney Biennial 'he's going back to the 70s is the one that larry curated and of I've sort of I've spent the years after that mining it for ideas for projects artists to work with so it's a great great pleasure to be here I also want to say that of I've worked with hundreds of artists some of the great artists but I really don't have any hesitation in saying that of all the artists I've worked with it's Barry who's my favorite and it because it's not just working with the art working with the ideas its berries humanity it's the phenomenal circle of other artists musicians other creative people who he brings with him so say Berry changed my life I think a lot of people who have followed Barry's work would say the same thing and I would encourage you probably already have to really immerse yourself in this exhibition and if you stay with berry he'll change your life too great so let's get back to your life for just a moment if we may okay hum okay so well I've done everything in art okay so I've and part of what I believe in what I encourage other people to do is don't put yourself in a box if you're a creative person so I've been an artist an art writer an art dealer and art collector a curator now I'm with administer administrator of a public institution I'm not sure what's left but I'll figure something else out right so how how did you go about starting Deitz projects that was the the sort of the venue for your first engagement with Barry's work and was it a typical gallery or where it was it different from the model of a typical gallery particularly at that time I wouldn't know Dyche projects did not begin as a gallery so that's the more public part of my career but had a long career prior to that dye projects began in January 1996 I actually started in the art world in 1972 my first gallery was it was called away it wasn't really even an art gallery even though we showed art it was called the copper artisan and it was an outlet for this handmade copper where that we made my father's sheetmetal shop and we needed something on the walls so we asked some local artists could we borrow some things when to my astonishment into the artists astonishment we sold these things on the wall I asked for more and the end of the summer one of those artists sat me down said I see you you you have an aptitude for this you like this but you don't know what you're doing you need an art education and I listen to him and I've been on my art education ever since so basically I was more in the business side of art I was a private art dealer advisor did a lot of things I started an art market department for a big international bank for Citibank in 1979 and that was that's a whole whole story there and then I took many of the customers I developed city bag started my own art advisory business but I was missing the creative outlet and there was this special building on Grand Street in Soho that I always loved I used to walk by it in the 70s when it was a carpenter shop and my friend Joe Forbush would died and his partner knew that I love this building and he said to me how would you like to take this building over he was desperate he needed $50,000 and if you can give me $50,000 as to help me out I'll turn over the lease to you which was really inexpensive like astonishingly inexpensive like $4,500 a month that's what Soho that's that's what it was like not so long ago in 1996 and I said yeah why not and so it wasn't really as a business it was a project gallery and the idea was that I would invite artists who'd never had a solo show in New York City do you think that they always do because when I visit artists often artists would have some unrealized dream they would be making their smaller paintings drawings but there'd be some big project as I would and knowing that almost every good artist had this I said this is what we're going to do I'm going to go to artists and say I'm going to make your dreams come true and within limits of course and so the limit was a budget of $25,000 and you do whatever you wanted that was the money $25,000 and the idea was don't just do breakage so go beyond it and people love that idea and really went beyond it and the concept was if we sold it great if not I would keep it and be the basis for a collection but what happened is people began buying these artist dreams and artists wanted to be involved and it became both the business and then to my great pleasure the most important part became a community and Barry McGee was a big big part of it's becoming more than just a gallery and became a clubhouse and a platform for all kinds of creative activity so when did you first become aware of Barry's work and was there a major shift and the character of dodge projects before and after you showed his work yes so I was I had the pleasure to be very involved with the wild style graffiti artists in New York in the late 70s early 80s so I was very friendly with that vibe Fred Freddie still AM leakin Onis crash Dandi future Don Dee's passed away but the other guys there's they're still very good friends of mine and I did a lot with them I brought Futura and others to Hong Kong and do many projects but what what happened is that this wild style graffiti was so strong and influential spread all over the world it's like phenomenon with pop art where within a few years wild style graffiti was order but I think it was so strong it tended to stifle additional innovation people tended to copy the wild style artists and so for years I was waiting for some new talent to come out of street culture that showed a new path to achievement in street art and redefining graffiti and I had a wait a long time waited of in plus years until I finally saw the work of Barry McGee and I actually became aware of Barry's work not on the street because he was in San Francisco and I was in New York it was through the brilliant programming at the drawing Center directed by aunty Philbin who's now in Los Angeles at the hammer and they had a great program they had a an exhibition wall painting and I went in there looked and I saw Barry's wall and I was stunned and Annie Philbin told me oh I know you know you're going to want to show the work you're going to want to get but forget it ok Barry doesn't want anything to do with commercial art world all these art dealers want to get involved they sent him letters he never answers the letters you know he doesn't pick up the phone so don't even bother but of course that made me even more interested and it happened that another artist who was introduced to me by any Philbin's program at the drawing Center Shazia Sikander who's from Pakistan was invited to be in a wall painting exhibition with Barry in st. Louis at the contemporary form and Shazia like a lot of artists Aikido doesn't stand on ceremony what do you mean you know you you can't you know he doesn't answer letters just come down with me well we'll meet him and I see you sure that's okay so she was working next to bury in the next wall berries yeah yeah let's think the guy can come down so I flew down to st. Louis and berry was the middle of working I introduced myself berry is very shy some of you know but we slowly began talking and and I began sharing some stories about our heroes from wyldstyle and the names I mentioned and that was very meaningful to berry and by the end of the day Berry said well okay what we're doing the show and his show was transformative so I knew something was happening when we began seeing kids sitting on the sidewalk with her skateboards like two days before the opening and for the opening they came in on Greyhound buses from the Midwest from Canada and I understood that it was something remarkable that was happening here that Berry's work spoke to a generation and it was something that I showed a lot of good artists who had good reviews good audience but there was nothing like this there was nothing like this of an artist whose work really connected and connected with people who didn't come necessarily out of an academic art training so what was the reaction of the wyldstyle folks was there any geographical rivalry you know people like what was this San Francisco guy coming into New York like like between like these walls and no 2-pack I don't know so you know there are unfortunately beefs in the graffiti world but somehow berry is beyond that but so when I asked very who would you like to come to the opening who should we get here and he's very retiree didn't really mention any things that you should I get Futura to come and li and he was so excited you think those people had actually come to my opening and said look at them and so he was thrilled they all came and they're they're all friends now and so yes that group totally embraces Barry Barry embraces them and how about the rest of the New York art world how did the the critical establishment and the collectors of New York City respond to Barry's shows well you know so this is a very big issue okay so you know we did a big history of graffiti and street art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in terms of attendance it was popular exhibition in the history of the museum but out of the art establishment refused to accept that this was part of the art dialogue and this has been my mission for a long time this has been my mission since the early 80s when I was a big advocate of the what about this and then of Basquiat Keith Haring you know at the beginning Basquiat Haring weren't accepted like there's a famous Limerick thing a vibe of it no it's it's a sonnet by the late Robert who characterized jean-michel Basquiat and Keith Haring the most derogatory terms that they weren't really artists they were like MEK Scots and simply there was a quote that I don't know if it's real that was widely repeated in Los Angeles during art in the streets you know that this was the most esteemed person in the LA art world John Baldessari supposedly said street art belongs in the street you know not in the museum and so I've been on this mission say for a long time say the art that comes out of street culture is not second-class art it's not some subspecies the best art that comes out of the street is art and it's good to have a mission and I'm just 25 plus years later still sort of fighting the courts I'll give you an example of so we had a great show Barry McGee some of the work from that show is here the famous bathroom piece so I offered to donate that bathroom piece plus all these other works to the Museum of Modern Art and they turned it down they didn't even want it for free so you know it's we have still a ways to go to convince the art establishment that this is important art and that is part of the mainstream of contemporary visual culture one of the things that I think confuses a lot of people is when you use the terminology not you personally but when one uses terminology like street art they imagine that one is talking about a kind of a parallel universe that is separate from you know art history and has nothing to do with art history and has its own criteria and its own you know lineages and whatnot but I think it's you know Barry for one of course studied art formally at the San Francisco Art Institute and you in your essay for the catalog have pointed to some specific resonances in his work with artists from Carl Andre to Andy Warhol so can you talk a little bit about how in Barry's work in particular if you want to talk about street art in general there are resonances with mainstream art history sure well I've always been fascinated by how a lot of the most innovative new material art in the cap new vocabulary comes out of subcultures so let's look at couple okay so the band Picasso with the group coming out of these sort of underground cafes in Barcelona and this bohemian world and mul Mart of this this is really the Picasso as you know had great academic training his father was an art professor but he mixes that with this bohemian subculture and otherwise he might have just become an academic if he was never immersed in that subculture so was we watch and see where artistic innovation comes from a lot of it comes from these high quality subcultures graffiti subcultures skateboard subculture of musics pent punk rock subculture but very in addition to all that being very very much a part of that in a real way we had an excellent education at the San Francisco Art Institute had a fellowship where he went to Brazil studied folk art and whatever else he could take in but Barry is a very astute observer of of contemporary art and contemporary art history and so if you look around you will see a grid structure that relates to Carl Andre of a use of materials that relates to our tip-over artists like Kanellis and the the the modular structure that connects to the way Warhol would construct a composition with all the pictures of Marilyn or other celebrities and uses of text numerals that connect with so many artists of Joseph Kossuth a Jewish a very is very very aware of all this a part of them connections installations with Ed Keane holds so you can spend a lot of time we could go through this whole show and talk about all these or historical precedents but one thing I love about Barry is there is an equivalence between the most esteem artists say like somebody like a Carl Andre and then behind us there's certainly of a dialog with geometric tradition with op art but also with the floors of old buildings in Rome with all the the tile work that you might see so with these accumulations of drawing frame drawings that's something that connects with let's say Allan McCollum who well-known in the so called Geo Neo Geo movement but Barry also was influenced by images relics of saints and images in churches in Brazil so he's someone who can mix all of these sources with this kind of equivalence where something from street culture something from religious folk art and something from the tradition of Mondrian and concrete artists is treated with equal respect so speaking of synthesis and hybridity one of the things that is really not unique about Barry's work but certainly distinctive is the role of collaboration and I wonder if you could talk about your observations about the role of collaboration and his work sure well tell you a little story so our first exhibition with Barry Barry says you mind if I bring an assistant with me from San Francisco - of course horse can bring an assistant so Josh Lazcano comes with him a lot of you know Josh you recognize him he's always the figure on the top that's that's Josh so also a maze so it varies working there by himself and I say hey Barry where's your assistant isn't he going to help and very well he's getting the word out I didn't quite understand what he meant until the next day walking all around the neighborhood on every mailbox there's twist stickers and twist tags and then the day before the opening a gigantic ugly amazed roller tag on the facade of the building next door that remained there for ten years or so until the building finally collapsed you know it was sounds familiar yeah yeah no no no one could miss it right right so so Barry the first day he comes in allocated two weeks for him to do the installation first day comes in about 1:00 in the afternoon and putters around 4:00 until 6:00 7:00 when the gallery staff leaves nothing's really happening he's just kind of moving around looking at things and boxes of then we come back the next day and there's terrific stuff that he's done at night then second day Barry arrives right around 6:00 when just as we're leaving and puttering around for a little while and then again works night by the third day the gallery staff leaves gallery Garrett and Bette Barry has not even shown up okay so you know it's it doesn't even come in during the day then the next morning we come in and amazing things have happened he's covered a half the wall amazing works some fragments of it are here and with most intriguing thing there are I could 30 pizza boxes and like 50 beer bottles and it will you know trays with all kinds of ashes with butts and you know I wonder what who's been there this is humble and then by like the sixth day or so people began to say oh I was in your gallery last night with Barry and so what I realized is that very you just even want to mix it with our business but every night while he was working there were 30 40 people there it was the whole scene of his all the people from skateboard scenes other graffiti writers musicians people are actually playing instruments there and so it was an amazing thing going on I've actually you know surprise witness the whole thing it was though but at certain point very was comfortable enough with me so I could actually hang around myself with all this but this collaborative spirit is really important and so a work like this buried cannot physically do by himself so he has a whole team of people working with masking tape or doing everything you need to make these geometric shapes Mike who's here is a crucial part of the team and Mike works with Barry and all the motors of these tagger figures and their whole group of other people and who are there's a longtime collaborators we mentioned Josh there's a team that makes the animatronic Kevin and so yeah Kevin Ansel is very important so when you invite Barry to do a show all these people come with him and he bid he's very open with them and allowing them to do their thing within Barry's aesthetic so Kevin is doing his own work but it's also Barry's work and it reminds me a lot of the antiwar whole factory where Andy would have his Superstars and his crew and they did their own thing but they had completely absorbed Andy Warhol's aesthetic and they were extensions of Andy and the work and it allowed Andy to do so much more than he could do on his own and Barry in his very low-key way has the same thing going so there's no way you could do a show this ambitious with just Barry he needs his team and they keep going with him and make it happen all right so those of you who came in the front doors would have seen the wonderful amazed tag that covers the front doors which Josh and Bette with Barry's help did amazed is Josh's tag but you will have noticed that on top of that there are some additional tags including one that says sellout which does not refer to the catalog unfortunately although we're close but I wonder Jeffrey if you could talk a little bit about the tension with Barry around the issue issue of commercialization there's so much to the street cred if you will of his work that has to do with resisting commercialization and the establishment but as he becomes more and more successful that inevitably does become a factor in the life of his work if not in the life of Barry himself well yeah there's this illogical canta of complaint that's put onto artists who come out of the street culture that's you know that you you you shouldn't show with a gallery your work should be stolen it shouldn't be sold and you know you should stay on the streets to preserve your street cred but I don't agree that you that anyone has the right to say to an artist you cannot participate in the dialogue of contemporary art history so almost every artist whether they start in the Academy or whether they start on the street they want to be part of they're ambitious they want to be part of our history they want to be part of this big dialogue you know they don't want their work to be measured ultimately against some other taggers an artist with the talent and vision of Barry McGee wants to ultimately be part of the dialogue of with Andy Warhol others met Carl Andre Jeff Koons and he wants to be in this dialogue in this place so there's a joint difference between commercialization and wanting to participate in the serious dialogue of art wanting to show your work in a gallery that's inside that system to show in a museum so that's where artists want to be and there I think is a big misunderstanding of that an artist can certainly keep their personal integrity their social beliefs all of this and present their work in a serious way to be considered as part of the art historical dialogue in a museum it's not selling out at all that's following the artists dream so a question we we sort of had a chuckle about this earlier that many people would like to ask but perhaps are too shy to ask is what is it about what it what is Barry's aren't actually about right so Larry sent me a short list of questions including the questions what as Barry's are about and it is funny because inside the art academy you never ask that question you know you know kind of go around it but all my years as an art dealer like standing at an Art Fair you know just anybody can come in they look at a Barry's work and say tell me what's this about okay so what is Barry's work about well first there's something very important to understand about Barry that it is an entire artistic world so Barry doesn't just paint a picture it's it's a whole aesthetic world that he invites us into it's a whole vocabulary it's it's a vision and we can immerse ourselves in it we we can really feel it and it's the social connections the music these of all these other aspects are part of Barry's world oh then there's another essential thing about Berry's work and this is how it connects to people it speaks to people Berry's work is infused with humanity and so you look at the images of the sad old man on the bottles and there's figures on the big red panels there is an amazing sympathy for the people who have been left behind by society and so some people just walk down the street and they see no the winos passed out with a bottle of Thunderbird next to them people bury stops to look at them to photograph them to think about them and to paint them and so to have images like that here in the museum he asks us who are in this privileged world here sometimes to remember these people who were there lying on the sidewalk but it's not just that kind of humanity it's a wonderful absorption into people's lives humor look at the at the Ray Fong shop over here so if this is this is an amazing installation and Barry's taking this tradition that goes back to someone like Ed Keane Holtz and but he's taken into a whole new level and he's created a character here so Barry is in a way a kind of novelist as well that you can look in you can see the person who has this crazy shop selling you know the obsolete VHS tapes and hanging out in the back on his bed you know doing something nasty and up and then you see the Josh character tagging in the back bathroom so there there is a whole narrative about people that we can all relate to Barry has a wonderful sense of humor and if some people don't always get it you know there's that sign there of Rafe along with a buck teeth when Barry used that image on some athletic shoes people went crazy said you know it's discrimination against Chinese Americans but that's actually the character of Barry as a young kid himself and he can look at himself with that kind of humor so what I think Barry is able to do is he's able to take his unique experience of life growing up in San Francisco growing up in an ethnically mixed family Oh unlike a lot of people who were in the art world it's more of a kind of a working-class background his father had an auto body shop he was very involved and very involved in car culture as a kid so he's taking this whole world and taking his life experience and connected that with his knowledge of our history his exploration of folk art his interest in old signs he sees these declining manual arts and he's mixed it all together to create a remarkable artistic worldview that we can enter into so one of the virtues of a retrospective or a mid-career survey like this is that you get to see a trajectory of an artist career is there any have you had any revelations or do you notice anything in particular as you look here at work Barry did from the late 80s to the to the present the level of complexity you know it keeps being pushed and pushed something we certainly notice here is Barry's increasing interest in abstraction and so I was talking with Barry some years ago about graffiti and about what he really liked and we talked about the graffiti with cartoon characters and the big big machines with interlocking signature piece of that artists would do 40 feet on a wall and Barry said what really began to interest him was the smaller abstract tags though really the ugliest ones that one's done with big dripping big tip magic markers because he loved the abstraction of those I could see he was getting increasingly interested in the abstract quality what really surprised us is when he began coming up with what he calls the geometrics and that was really a breakthrough that opened his work into a new place and he was able to take what he did into the geometrics and bring it back into the accumulations and he keeps on pushing each one of these forms so I love this accumulation with what he refers to as the bump so with the accumulations used to be flat and take up just a portion of the wall then they began taking up the whole wall and then he added this bump element to make it more sculptural it's also humorous it's like a pregnant body of but it's all who is it something that makes you smile I am fascinated with the latest of innovation in Barry's work and that's well the one with the numerals you can see it back here with a 99-cent store and it sort of very take on a new digital type imagery it's like he's it's a kind of a his folk art approach to being inside a computer or of maybe not really a computer it's lent an adding machine but it's I think this work up here is absolutely stunning and it's a breakthrough in understanding how to apply another kind of vernacular imagery and abstract it and so it's something that comes both from studying painting and serial imagery maybe a an artist like Romina palca who just goes through with numerals and it's also just thinking about the humor of the 99-cent store it comes both from of the Hren ocular and from a very sophisticated place so you as you mentioned have been a big champion of street art for many years against the tide of sort of the greater wisdom of the art world and I want to ask are there other sort of sub cultures that you're following now or sort of cultural you know areas that the art world is not paying attention to that you think really do deserve a second look well okay so I think some of you have followed there's a bit of controversy that's trailing me in Los Angeles so people really went crazy when it was leaked that I was planning a an exhibition about the history of disco they people went crazy that that led John Baldessari to finally just resign from the MOCA board but say I'm I'm fascinated by and how subcultures produce cultural innovation and I'm very interested in phenomenon like punk rock like disco that are these vast cultural movements that encompass the visual arts fashion course music dance and also have this important social impact so I've become very interested the new electronic dance music some of it you know is really like music it's it's awful you know some of these big names like who get $250,000 a night it's a kind of like it's a high-tech music but there are others it's a DJ harvey does this some of the godfathers of this Daft Punk who are just total geniuses and so I've been so interested in this and I've immersed myself in this this group and a lot of the people like Daft Punk they also do visual art and they're so there's a whole group of artists musicians dancers filmmakers who are into this group around electronic dance music and that's one of the reasons I wanted to do the disco show because disco is the historical foundation of this so is is the disco show happening are you curating the disco show yes of well it's whether we can actually pull it off in Los Angeles or not I'm not sure but two things happened there was a story in The New York Times about James Murphy some of you might know James Murphy it's one of the great musicians of our time he was the person behind LCD Soundsystem and he just abruptly the height of LCD soundsystem decided to shut it down and pursue new projects and so immediately I said to James I've got a project for you how would you like to be a co curator of a show on the history of disco and its impact and he said I'm on I'm you know III you know so we're doing it so in a profile on him in the New York Times they said what are you doing he said oh I've just been in LA talking with jeffrey Deitch about curating a disco show and so all this negative stuff happened on one side but on the other it's unbelievable but maybe a hundred plus notes calls emails from people that I want to be and I want to be part of this and amazing stuff coming out of the woodwork I like every innovator in this a person was part of the history of disco wants to be part of the show so VIN silletti who was a great writer on photography who wrote the disco files he's now the curator of photography for the show so it's going to be an amazing project and we already have a European venue and I'm going to enjoy working on this for the next five years I'm seeing a big disco ball I really have okay well as sharing it here alright so I have a sort of another question that's sort of an equivalent to the what's it all about question which is what is the purpose of a museum today though that's it see that that's a great another great question a giant question so well one thing I say is that that for a Contemporary Art Museum we've been privileged to have experienced an absolutely amazing time in the history of art so I think that art in America from late 1940s it's a little we're too close to the present but certainly through the end of the 60s it's like the Renaissance in Italy or you know that it's maybe even beyond that because it's it's built out into shaping contemporary culture as well and hard to know is it still is dynamic right now as it was in 1968 I hope it is I'm part of it don't know but we have an amazing opportunity human mandate in the Contemporary Art Museum to articulate to write this history so that's one of my motivations and so that's one of the important roles at the Contemporary Art Museum we've just been to make concrete and to interpret what we've witnessed now then there's the whole social side of this okay of the visual arts changing a lot because visual language images of is becoming something that people are more comfortable with than written language and so a younger generation is remarkably fluent in visual images and understands visual images in a different level and it's an international language and but like I do maybe some of you do say there's a gallery show someplace in Los Angeles it can take an hour and a half to drive just a one gallery well I won't bother driving I'll look it up on the internet everyone has a website and stuff so I just see it digitally but I've noticed in Los Angeles where you have this problem where you have so no way everybody's people fluent in using the Internet the museum say the middle of the week Thursday afternoon is almost nobody there in the museum it's really sad but we put on an event and 5,000 people are there as people need this platform for connection so this is a very interesting thing the museum and people in visual culture musical culture are looking toward the Contemporary Art Museum to give them a platform to make these social connections intellectual connections and so one way we're very challenged the other one we have a very very interesting opportunity but it's it's a it's very challenging to be in the nonprofit sector so I was very lucky in our gallery didn't really have to try so hard to make money but we just walked into a booming market so I could do a completely crazy show with Barry McGee and spend say $200,000 on the show and just whatever we want it's okay no problem we'll order that and then UAS will add up the works of berries that sell over the next year at art fairs and that's the sort of thing you easily cover the two hundred thousand you don't have to worry about it but to actually put on an exhibition in a museum and raise the money it's it's unbelievably difficult and the museum's have to compete now with the galleries that can finance projects of equal ambition without even giving a thought particularly if you're working with an established artist were a single work sells for a couple million dollars and the dealer's Commission completely it pays the for the show twice over so we're it we're in a position now where the museum is really needed it's more important than ever in our culture but we've got a lot of challenges well thanks do you have any final words for our audience here well I think it's it's just is a thrill to see this exhibition the thrill to see how Barrie use the space and this installation gives a good idea of how Barry works so it's not just hanging pictures on the wall it's conceiving this as a whole unit inside and outside from the Snitch that's crudely sprayed on the outside to the unexpected sort of a semi vandalism of the front doors to this remarkable structure here so it shows the Barry is is somebody who thinks of the whole environment rather than just putting something up and that's something that characterizes the best artists who come up from working out on the street because they're looking at the context at the environment they're not looking for that not working in the studio and then putting the work in a perfect place so they're very used to how the work functions finding the best all that many drivers can see from the highway so it has high impact so it's very interesting to see how that background working on the street can really step up an artists ability to use a space and you can see it here well thank you Jeffrey I just want to make a few announcements on October 19th we will have Jim Frigga from sitting right here speaking about the history of graffiti through photography right here at the Museum tonight of course we're open late and I encourage all of you to visit our this show of course and the other galleries that are all open and to stay for Justin Hoover and Chris trew jari and then Devendra Banhart who will play as well thank you so much to all of you who have come to talk to us perform for us this evening and I want to give special thanks to Jeffrey for coming up from LA for supporting Barrie throughout his career and for your great words tonight thank you so much

Channel: BAMPFA

Views: 8,049

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: UC, Berkeley, Art, Museum, Pacific, Film, Archive, BAMPFA

Id: mR3afr1XcTE

Length: 51min 31sec (3091 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2012