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2004Barry McGee Water wall mural
Download education notes (PDF 7pp) Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. Visit the Adobe website to download a free copy. 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 |  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 | WORLD EVENTSAthens hosts the Olympic Games Boxing Day tsunami devastates Asia Tasmanian-born Mary Donaldson weds Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark Term ‘podcasting’ coined for downloading a program as a digital file Social networking website Facebook takes off Wi-fi cellphones, or internet phones, introduced Bomb outside the Australian embassy in Indonesia kills 11 people and injures up to 100 Riots break out in the Sydney suburb of Redfern over the death of an Aboriginal teenager Fire in the Momart storage warehouse in London destroys works by Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and others Art Gallery of NSW establishes the biennial Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts Biennale of Sydney, On reason and emotion, curator Isabel Carlos 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 | ||
