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[Barry McGee: Tagging]

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What kids will do just to have their name on something, it's fascinating to me still.

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It's just as fascinating as when I was a teenager.

4
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There's a strong population that lives on the street in San Francisco.

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Almost any time you'd be doing graffiti, you'd be in contact with other people

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that move around in that same type of area, and, like, that time of the night.

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Sometimes you'd have to run or escape getting caught, and you'd be in some bushes,

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and there'd be other people in the bushes already there.

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There was always a presence of other people that were doing things,

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or living or surviving somehow on the streets, or on the edges of the city,

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that were just fascinating characters...

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And always welcoming, like if I was running as fast as I can and ditching my bike in a bush,

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they would just wave me over, like, "Come on over here. Over here--it's no problem..."

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"No one's going to see you over here." [LAUGHS]

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That's immediately how I gauge how healthy a city is--by the amount of tags.

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It's just in direct competition with advertising, I feel like.

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It's still one of the last things that I think hasn't been, like, corrupted,

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[LAUGHS] ...to me. There's still drones and drones of kids that still do it.

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I still do it on occasion.

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It has to be the perfect storm.

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There's something that's uncomfortable about it that's exciting about it.

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There's that rush of being outside and getting away with it.

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The satisfaction that you have something sitting out there, for however long,

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amongst everything else. It just had a life, and it would go and it went,

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and then that was it. You have this memory.

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It's hard to recreate that in a studio. That's a completely different practice.

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[Squeaking and whirring sounds of animatronic metal sculptures in motion]

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The mannequin--those tagging ones--have always been like illustrations to me, like

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of like things that friends and I used to do when we were younger.

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Our situations we'd be in, like trying to get up higher and higher,

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like getting on each other's shoulders.

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You never see, with tagging, the person actually doing the crime, or the art,

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or whatever they were doing.

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So it became really interesting to me to, like, recreate the situation.

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[Whirring sounds of an animatronic metal sculpture in motion]

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You could leave this exhibition with a better understanding of how

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obsessed kids in their mid-20s can be, doing graffiti.

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It's more of a guidebook, I feel like.

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The whole thing is like, "We'll take your hand and walk you through it, if you're interested."