You had to pass through the body of an overturned truck to get into Barry McGee’s exhibition, and you then found yourself immersed in a sort of global urban periphery, the terrain in which this young California artist and his imagination operate. It was like crossing to the other side of a mirror, not to a world in reverse but simply one you’d rather not see. Yet this unpleasant parallel universe harbors its own expressive rules and creative and interpretive capacities; and despite the encompassing social entropy, fires of revolt (not revolution) flare up every now and then.

McGee’s roots are in