Thirty years ago, graffiti stepped off the street to became the darling of the modern art world. With its visual diversity, and despite its defiance of those who viewed it as vandalism, New York galleries came to embrace it during the 1980s in the name of the avant garde. But as Japan's still small-scale graffiti culture only began in the '90s, it has only relatively recently attracted much attention in Tokyo's art world.
But now, the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (Watari-um) in Harajuku is hosting a solo show by Barry McGee, born in 1966 in San Francisco, where he was known as "Twist," among other aliases. Describing the big-city experience as a series of "urban ills, overstimulations, frustrations, addictions and trying to maintain a level head under the constant bombardment of advertising," his work is characterized by dazzling colors and forms interspersed with pessimistic and melancholic motifs — especially his trademark icon of a man with a droopy, unshaven face.
Naturally, the idea of the outdoor, anti-establishment medium of graffiti being shown in the austere white cubes of an art museum (particularly one that charges an admission fee) seems like a glaring contradiction. It is also ironic that McGee's work continues to increase in market value while his "Twist" works would only have had a devaluing effect on the residential and commercial surfaces he besmirched.