2004

Barry McGee
The stars were aligned…
28 October – 5 December 2004
Metropolitan Meat Market, Melbourne

Water wall mural
28 October – 5 December 2004
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

40 years: Kaldor Public Art Projects exhibition notes Barry McGee 2004

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Compelling art to me is a name carved into a tree. Sometimes a rock soaring through a plate of glass can be the most beautiful, compelling work of art I have ever seen.

Barry McGee in Germano Celant, Barry McGee, Fondazione Prada, Milan 2002

What makes McGee’s work so invigorating is that it draws from within and beyond the parameters of American art almost indiscriminately. In this respect, he’s a very political artist, but not a polemical one. By keeping it real, he also makes it new.

Richard Goldstein, ‘The new real thing: Barry McGee throws up in Soho’, Village Voice, 6 April 1999

 View of Barry McGee’s The stars were aligned… 2004

In Australia for his Kaldor project in 2004, Barry McGee chose the site of the old Metropolitan Meat Market in North Melbourne for The stars were aligned...

He transformed the space into an apocalyptic circus where a mix of autobiography, political comment, urban overload and total anarchy battle for supremacy. His over-the-top audiovisual installation was the kind of thing your average viewer might cross the street to avoid: 11 oddly-angled defunct trucks and vans piled on top of each other with their doors flung open, headlights flashing and wheels still turning; banks of monitors screening op-art harlequin shapes and surveillance camera footage of street gangs like dim transmissions from some deep-ocean diving bell. The walls lined with painted boards and ad-hoc accumulations of totemic objects. Writhing mechanised mannequins poised to graffiti mirrors and booze bottles painted with McGee’s abject outcasts completed this image of the underside of contemporary consumer culture.

At the National Gallery of Victoria across town, McGee painted a mural over the glass waterwall at the front of the building, which served as a kind of alternative billboard for the event.

Read more about Barry McGee.

View of Barry McGee’s The stars were aligned… 2004 at the Metropolitan Meat Market in Melbourne. Photo: Garry Sommerfeld Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects

 

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Kaldor Public Art Projects listed on Australia's Register of Cultural Institutions

14th Kaldor project Barry McGee’s The stars were aligned… is installed in Melbourne’s Metropolitan Meat Market along with Water wall mural at the National Gallery of Victoria