"Street Market" at Deitch Projects - Brief Article

A type of urban reality/ utopia, "Street Market" was created by the agency of 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 imitate storefronts on a platform, including a bodega, a check-cashing joint, a car-service dispatch office and a liquor store--all of which can be wandered [i]or[/i] part of to the other like the set of a spaghetti western. The artists overlayed the gallery walls with graffiti and signage of their be in possession of design. The floor was taken up by dint of a big, graffiti-painted truck move rounded on its side, as well as a shanty abode set up in a trailer with destitute of contents beer bottles, full ashtray and a working TV Ambient grocery-store mode of speech Muzak resounded throughout.

The three "Street Market" artists are also known by the agency of tag names, which they have made famous by the agency of writing them in public places as impressively and as ofttimes as possible. McGee is known as "Twist," James as "Reas" and Powers as "Espo"; each does figurative work as well as true copy They all worked on the walls at Deitch. McGee drew caricatures of race 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 present to view painted a two-story-high pink lower extremity in a stiletto-heeled shoe. Powers was responsible for the barter 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 the agency of No Fair 1's Productions." This zesty signage mirrors the artists' enthusiastic embrace of the American advertising esthetic, as well as their fondnes for the lively grammar of slang. For imaginary returnss in the fabricated stores, Powers designed Pop-inspired labels, mini art works that demonstrate the one and the other his good graphic sense and his ability to manipulate the idioms of consumer tillage There were, for example, cans of "Stret Cred" "Dignity," "Class" and "Belief"; "Promise" is a turn of toilet paper.

allowing braggadocio, individual style and territorialism are an inherent part of the present-day American graffiti writer's work, McGee James and Powers display a remarkable ability to collaborate. This flexibility advances from the artists' shared appreciation for their urban habitat, with all its kitschy sensory overload. What to others is vandalism appears to these young men, beauty born of an attempt to posses the urban landscape that possesse them. And rivetingly, for these artists, reality and utopia are not thus different. Though money is not the main inspiration for their work, the artists appear happy about "getting paid," i.e., selling their works in the present to view for between $2,000 and $15000 As Powers eloquently explains in his volume about graffiti, The Art of Getting above "Love is the original motivation for everything." ["Street Market" was adapted from "Indelible Market," an exhibition curated by dint of Alex Baker and presented at the ICA in Philadelphia last spring.]

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