Randall McGee. Save the Ocean or Perish in My Fury. July 17, 2013. Winston's, Ocean Beach.
A monumental aquatic piece covers an entire brick back wall of Winston’s Beach Club in San Diego's Ocean Beach district. It is an imposing futuristic work showing a cut-away of an ocean filled with geometric structures and a half-submerged aquatic sea god with an angry robotic face and a fish tail water holding a forked scepter. The figure is huge – a small ship gives him scale. The color palette is black, sea blues and greens against a soft sunset sky. The sea is barren of fish and plants. The feeling is one of foreboding.
Authorship of this masterful work was claimed by graffiti artist Randall McGee, an eighty-five year-old Ocean Beach local. According to a 2011 article in the San Diego Reader it took McGee nine hours to spray paint the mural and it was completed a couple days before the summer solstice. Randall McGee explained that the male figure is Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. When asked about his intention, McGee stated “It seemed like the perfect spot to get the message across that the ocean is in crisis and its protector is girding for battle. We're facing mass extinction - the eradication of man from the planet. That's really the point of all this…trying to help people wake up." (San Diego Reader).
It is clear that Mr. McGee intended this graffiti to send a message to the public. Anna Waclawek, in her book Graffiti and Street Art explains, “Street artists replicate and subvert the signs and symbols of urban environments, sometimes with an overtly political agenda...By replacing the stylized written word with the graphically designed image, street artists have expanded the communicative potential of their visual language”(33) Similarly, McGee uses his symbols as a powerful communicative tool. He calls on Poseidon to send the warning inscribed on the wall “Save the ocean or perish in my fury”, McGee is sending an urgent political message to the public through his art.
Randall McGee’s creation became controversial in 2011. At the same time that Mr. McGee was trying draw public attention to his environmental cause, city officials urged that the piece be removed because it is was not “safe” for the public to receive such information. Deputy City Manager Richard Phillips argued, “But there were issues of protocol and safety; if you tell a whole town that they're about to find themselves underwater - well, after Japan, people have been feeling a mite panicky." So while city officials claimed they were trying to ‘protect’ the public by covering or removing graffiti, but in effect what they did was to attempt to silence public voice. The city issued a fine of $50,000 and the requirement he remove the work. He must have prevailed, because today the piece still stands.
As Banksey writes in one of his street art stencils “If graffiti changed anything, it would be illegal ” implying that because graffiti has the power to effect change, it is considered illegal. This constant struggle between the people and the rules of society is a prevalent theme in graffiti and street art. Often times the purpose of street art is to communicate a message to the general public, and it is the societal regulations that aim to prevent that from happening. Randall McGee was able to get his message through using his talent, his artistic voice and a big brick wall.
Work Cited:
Mencken, Walter. Stabbing Poseidon Ordered Removed From Wall of Winston's in Ocean Beach, "San Diego Reader." Last modified June 27, 2011. Accessed July 25, 2013. http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/almost-factual-news/2011/jun/27/stabbing-poseidon-ordered-removed-from-wall-of-win/.
No comments:
Post a Comment