A wild child busts out

Art institutions used to have the kind of unquestioned authority that parents had, but times have changed -- and so has parenting. In the boomer-run home, rules tend to be relaxed, boundaries permeable, power shared, all in the name of giving the expressive self room to thrive.

Sounds like many a contemporary art venue. And if boomer-bred kids are prone to a sense of entitlement at once liberating and burdensome -- All that freedom! All that self-esteem! -- artists who have come of age in the last few decades are similarly challenged by an open-ended sense of possibility, a lack of limits.

Spectacular flailing has been one popular option for claiming attention in this anything-goes art moment. Mustering an attitude of rebelliousness is another. Barry McGee dabbles in both in his thrumming, boisterous, frustratingly thin show in the Gallery at REDCAT.

McGee started out tagging on the streets of San Francisco in the mid-’80s. Graffiti still inform his work -- not the look of it so much as the feel, its relentless energy and obsessive self-declaration. His REDCAT exhibition, like those he has installed at numerous galleries and museums in recent years, thrusts together paintings, drawings, stacked television sets, overturned cars and mechanized mannequins. It pushes with undirected force against unidentified boundaries. It is perfumed with defiance.

On the show’s title wall, McGee has spray-painted a friend’s tag (Amaze) in huge, dripping red letters. Holding the can up to the wall, as if the writing were still being applied, is an automated figure of a young man sitting on the shoulders of another, who sits on the shoulders of yet another. The topmost figure’s arm moves back and forth, back and forth, as if perpetually caught in the act.

Sprinkled throughout the show are several other motor-driven figures, all appearing to spray the walls except for one: a carved wooden head that ceaselessly beats against its appointed wall with flinch-inducing futility.

The presence or even evocation of action feels all-important to McGee’s enterprise, overriding purpose, depth, direction. The show has plenty of momentum as pure spectacle. Walls bulge, swollen with patchwork scraps and framed pictures. An overturned minivan spills its safety glass in a glistening puddle on the floor. Like an oversized toolbox for subversives, the vehicle is loaded with cans of spray paint. Scattered within the dense collages of paintings and drawings on the walls are also photographs of taggers at work. The show as a whole reads as a giant ode to continuous, irrepressible action.

The most absorbing elements in the mix are the hundreds of small paintings that sheathe the gallery’s long back wall and spread onto the two walls adjacent. All are variants of the same basic format -- illusionistic patterns of stacked cubes painted in vibrant, sometimes searing color. Painted on cheap, perhaps found panels of different sizes, marred by nicked edges and nail holes, they cover the walls like a brilliant, makeshift quilt, undulating with implied motion. The paintings stir the pot of hard-edge abstraction, Op Art and Pattern and Decoration and deliver a hearty, optical buzz.

Also throbbing through the gallery are interwoven sounds coming from a heap of television sets in a rusted shipping container. Discards (old chairs, a shopping cart, suitcases, dangling electrical cords) litter the top of the structure, and one open side allows passage in, to a noisy sanctuary of sorts.

Some of these screens broadcast static, some show animated versions of McGee’s ballpoint drawings of hairy, sad-featured men. A few repeat what looks like a snippet from an old news show, the reporter broadcasting from a crowded urban street. Another screen plays an animated short featuring Fong, a recurring Asian character in McGee’s visual repertoire, on the phone with Saul, an equally caricatured Jew. On another set, two men brawl, and on another, drivers in a small arena perform an odd theatrical ritual of bashing into one another.

Unrest pulses through these images, to a soundtrack of insistent, incessant rhythm. It is within this well-stocked, shabby shelter that McGee’s installation takes on a social dimension only obliquely touched on elsewhere. Even here, in the sound and imagery, it remains generalized, vague but evocative of the uneasy energy of the street.

For all its rawness, McGee’s show has an incongruous preciousness, an atmosphere of staged spontaneity. The work is betwixt and between, its ragged, street-smart impulses tamed and domesticated. The irony isn’t lost on McGee, who titled his show “Advanced Mature Work,” melding earnest yearning with self-conscious spoof.

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Barry McGee

Where: The Gallery at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles

When: Noon to 6 p.m. or curtain time daily except Mondays

Ends: Nov. 25

Contact: (213) 237-2800 or www.redcat.org