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Watch Barry McGee Do Graffiti, Art


April 10, 2013 | Bucky Turco

Art21 made a short video profile of Barry McGee and it includes footage of his street-bombing alter ego TWIST painting trains and other things. The clips of him doing graffiti are not exclusive, but the interview with him is. It was conducted in 2012 during his retrospective exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives and contains this gem about the stifling nature of creating work for art institutions versus tagging:

I know how it works with the street: you have the maximum amount of exposure that you’ll ever get. Going indoors is like marching backwards. I’ve tried over the last ten years to do more things on a museum’s façade or outside, still in the public view. But I have varying degrees of success with that because it’s all kind of fake, or they become illustrations of what the real thing is…The whole exhibition is more of a guidebook.