Beyond Outlaw: New Paths for Aging Taggers

Street art is in a funny place. More than 50 years since its invention as the urgent, unruly markings of kids scrawling their names on walls and the flanks of subway cars, it has evolved into a worldwide language and commercial behemoth — from a position outside the mainstream to one in its center. Its progenitors, having reached late middle age, are still searching for ways to push the form forward, even if that way moves beyond its improvisatory and outlaw mode into something tidier and more well mannered.

Two exhibitions of new work by the artists Osgemeos and Barry McGee at the Lehmann Maupin gallery in Manhattan illustrate divergent paths for the aging tagger. Neither represents a significant departure for either artist so much as retrenchments of their well-defined practices, honed for gallery consumption over the last 30 years. But familiarity can be instructive, a map for longevity over novelty. Their work suggests the street is more of a mind-set than a medium.

Their presentations here are linked, but not by style, which could scarcely be more different. Osgemeos (Portuguese for “the twins”) — the Brazilian identical twin brothers Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo — are enamored with the nascent hip-hop culture of late 1970s New York City: style writing, break dancing and D.J.-ing, which the ’80s had floated down to South America. The brothers began making work as teenagers, bombing fat letters that chugged along like a rail car around their native São Paulo.

Eventually they expanded into baroque murals featuring cartoony humanoid figures rendered in an obnoxiously lurid palette that looked more like a hallucinatory children’s television show than anything happening on the street. (Even now, it’s easy to imagine their characters launching into an extended reverie on words that start with the letter A, say, or listening intently as an adult patiently explains the concept of anxiety.)

McGee, about eight years older at 58, is a product of San Francisco’s countercultural tendencies. He came to tagging as a reclamation of public space from the incursion of commercialism, and as an empathetic witness to those whom that commercialism dispossessed; his work is often punctuated by a slumped caricature with sagging eyes and defeated air.