This is a huge, vast, awe-inspiring, ginormous exhibition, full of riches and surprises and fun. The Saatchi Gallery is housed in a grand and spacious building just off the King’s Road. It has three floors of exhibition space (ground, 1st and second floors), some of its rooms are huge, plus little side-rooms, nooks and crannies, corridors and the stairwells you go up to move between floors.
Every inch of this space, all the rooms and all the walls are covered with wild and vivid examples of the exhibitions subject, for this is a huge, comprehensive exhibition of Street Art and Graffiti. Wow, is it big! Wow, is there a lot, a huge amount, to take in! It aims to be the most comprehensive exhibition of graffiti and street art ever held in the UK and surely it is.
The Cosmic Cavern by Kenny Scharf – a dayglo party installation, inspired by the night-clubs and discos of the 1980s in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
To give a quick sense of the scale, here’s a list of some of the participating artists:
10Foot, AIKO, Alicia McCarthy, André Saraiva, BÄST, Beastie Boys, Beezer, Bert Krak, BLADE, BLONDIE, Bob Gruen, Brassaï, Broken Fingaz, C. R. Stecyk III, CES, Charlie Ahearn, Chaz Bojórquez, Chris FREEDOM Pape, Christopher Stead, Conor Harrington, CORNBREAD, Craig Costello, CRASH, DABSMYLA, Dash Snow, DAZE, DELTA, DONDI, Duncan Weston, Dr. REVOLT, Eric HAZE, Escif, Estevan Oriol, Fab 5 Freddy, FAILE, Felipe Pantone, FUME, FUTURA2000, Glen E. Friedman, GOLDIE, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gregory Rick, Guerrilla Girls, Gus Coral, Henry Chalfant, HuskMitNavn, IMON BOY, Jaimie D’Cruz, Jamie Reid, Janette Beckman, Jason REVOK, Jenny Holzer, Joe Conzo, John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, José Parlá, KATSU, KAWS, KC ORTIZ, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, KING MOB, LADY PINK, Lawrence Watson, Lisa Kahane, Malcolm McLaren, Maripol, Martin Jones, Martha Cooper, Maya Hayuk, Michael Holman, Michael Lawrence, Mister CARTOON, MODE 2, Ozzie Juarez, Pablo Allison, Pat Phillips, Paul Insect, POSE, PRIDE, PRIEST, Richard Colman, RISK, Robert 3D Del Naja, Roger Perry, Shepard Fairey, SHOE, Sophie Bramly, STASH, Stephen ESPO Powers, Stickymonger, SWOON, TAKI 183, Toby Mott, TOX, Tim Conlon, Timothy Curtis, Tish Murtha, Todd James, VHILS , ZEPHYR.
Site-specific mural by selected group of participating artists in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Room after room is packed with paintings, artefacts, sculptures, installations. There are standard gallery rooms with paintings hanging discreetly on the wall but there’s also some vivid installations, namely a mock-up of a 1980s record shop whose walls are plastered with old posters, complete with racks holding real LPs you can browse through.
Interior of Trash records, including interactive record player, t-shirts, skateboards, and a multitude of youth culture ephemera in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
There’s a life-sized shop full of colourful clutter and bric-a-brac. There’s a corridor lined with black and red graffiti, which is illuminated in pinky-red light, giving you a full visual experience as you walk through it. One of the best bits is a room covered with dense black-and-white patterns giving you pleasantly zig-zaggy optical illusions, in the middle of which are some stands with squiggly over-coloured zoomorphic swirl sculptures. All pleasantly weird and wonderful and disorientating. Some toddlers in it at the same time as me loved it.
Into the New Realm with Felipe Pantone: installation in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
There are 13 rooms in all and each one is given a theme, within which what seem like floods of artists are explained and displayed.
The exhibition sets out to give a historical account of the genesis and development of modern graffiti sometime in the 1960s and from then on twines the development of graffiti in basically two places, London and America, specifically Los Angeles.
Accompanying the explanation of the development of street art was a lot about contemporary music, which also came in two essential flavours. First of all there’s what I thought was a surprising amount about English punk, with several walls made up of fabulously retro old posters for scores of punk bands.
There’s a lot about the Clash who in 1980 left sleepy London town for America where they entered into all kinds of collaborations with US hip-hop and rap bands. The show includes FUTURA2000’s legendary 30-foot-long painting, made on stage with The Clash during a performance.
There’s a passage devoted to Don Letts, film director, disc jockey and musician, collaborator with the Clash among many other groups. To my surprise a whole section is devoted to bad boy impresario, Malcolm McLaren. There’s a series of photos depicting the mutations of his shop on the Kings Road, Sex, which morphed into Seditionaries and several other incarnations, and then to his post-punk attempts to stay ahead of the trend by moving to America and exploiting the new sound of hip-hop.
Wall-sized photo of Malcolm McLaren and the arted-up boogie box he’s carrying in a display case in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
And then of course, there is hip-hop itself, with several galleries devoted to massive photos of key bands such as Public Enemy, NWA and many more rappers and DJs with colourful confrontational soubriquets, juxtaposed with the graffiti and street artists who inspired or were inspired by them.
Classic photo of Public Enemy by Glen E. Friedman in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
I found the jumping between black American culture in the 1980s and essentially white punk culture from the late 1970s quite confusing, but in a fun, disorientating kind of way. London, punk, tower blocks and concrete subways, the Clash, Mrs Thatcher and so on, I immediately get, relate to and remember. Life in some American ghetto, bling and baseball caps, and the complex social legacy of the civil rights movement or Black Power, a lot less so. In fact, not really at all.
I guess there are two ways to approach such a funfair, such a festival of art, such an overwhelm-ment of paintings, installations, set-ups and so on: one is to read the sensible wall labels, which attempt to give a coherent account of the birth and growth of street art, and go slowly mad with the level of detail. The other is just to stroll around and react to the scores and scores of vivid, vibrant setups and displays. Here’s the cluttered shop of bric-a-brac I mentioned. What has it got to do with graffiti, what is it trying to do? To be honest, I don’t know, but I loved it.
Puppet Workshop ‘Rubbish Stuff’ by Paul Insect in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
So far I’ve given the impression it’s mad and cluttered and busy, and some of the rooms or spaces definitely are. But others are the complete opposite, big traditional gallery spaces with sensible wood floors, white walls and all kinds of works hung on them.
Some are sets of paintings on wood (or concrete) because one of the things that comes over is that, among the 100+ artists on display, some began as street artists but have been going for 30 years or more and have evolved a more studied conventional practice. Hence a very conventional display which looks like this:
Installation view of BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
In other places, works have been sprayed directly onto the gallery walls by contemporary artists.
Wall art by Kenny Scharf, created specially for BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Running the entire height of one of the big stairwells is what amounts to a dense wallpaper made up of hundreds and hundreds of photos of New York subways trains entirely covered with classic urban graffiti. There’s a room devoted to the work of Lawrence Watson (born 1963) who worked his way up through the New Musical Express and The Face, during which he was commissioned to do a photojournalism on the New York hip-hop school and took classic snaps of artists like Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Public Enemy.
Lawrence Watson installation featuring contact sheets and a performance video of one of the many hip-hop acts he photographed, at BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
There’s what you could call a busy but essentially orderly displays, such as this one of brightly coloured rectangles with catchy images or logos.
Site-specific poster installation LONDINIUM 2023 by C.R. Stecyk III in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Then there’s politics because young people are constantly rebelling, bless them, before they grow up, get married, get a mortgage and kids and vote for people like Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab.
I warmed to the rebel imagery of the English punk strand of things, and especially liked a huge long wall covered in posters for punk bands and gigs in the late 70s, mixed up with posters execrating Maggie Thatcher and weathered old copies of the magazine Class War, which I used to get when I was a student, mainly for the hilarious covers, like the satirical covers of Private Eye, only with added venom. Ah, the Miners Strike, the Battle of Orgreave, bombs in Northern Ireland, Exocets over the Falklands, those were the days, eh?
Part of the punk poster collage in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Some definitions
1. Graffiti
Graffiti is a name-based, usually illegal art work which can range from simple tag signatures to elaborate, multi-coloured designs.
Graffiti is probably as old as civilisation i.e. cities. We have graffiti from ancient Rome (displayed at the British Museum’s Nero exhibition). Modern-day graffiti arose in 1967 in New York and Philadelphia as a form based on repetition of the artist’s name or tag, embellished and stylised. Graffiti movements or communities arose round the increasingly popular. Generally, you gained respect the more daring and illegal your work.
Untitled by ZEPHYR, a venerable graffiti artist who’s been ‘working’ for over 50 years, in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
2. Street art
Street art is usually illegal work that falls outside the scope of ‘graffiti’, for example, image-based posters, stickers, stencils and installations. In a modern art context, street art dates from as recently as 2000 when a critical mass of artists, many of them originally graffiti-ists, crystallised the practice and attracted attention from curators and art scholars.
3. Murals
Murals are large-scale wall art, whether legal or illegal.
Exhibition contents
Let me try to give a more structured overview of this huge, unwieldy phantasmagoria by, basically, copying the press release.
The curators’ stated aim is to zero in on exceptional moments in the history of street art. These include the emergence of punk, the birth of hip-hop (celebrating its 50th anniversary, happy birthday, chaps) and street culture’s growing influence in fashion and film.
What comes over just from that preliminary introduction is that the exhibition is nowhere near complete. These are just a tiny fraction of works from an art form or movement which was spontaneous, undisciplined and often ephemeral by its nature. It’s a tiny selection of what could arguably be seen as the only really global universal art form, found as much in urban centres in Latin America, Africa, Russia, China, the Far East, as on the mean streets of Brixton or Philadelphia.
‘Toy Alley.. after the Murder’ installation by PRIEST in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Anyway, the exhibition is divided into what the curators call ‘chapters’.
1. Vandal
First thing you see on entering the gallery is a graffiti-filled installation of what looks like a teenager’s bedroom, ‘The Vandal’s Bedroom’ by American artist Todd James, presumably to establish several themes: predominantly that this whole worldview is by and for youth, angry sullen teenagers and students or – in America more than England, I suspect – black kids from ghettos who felt outside all existing norms and social structures. The other theme being mess, it’s a mock-up of the bedroom of the messiest teenager in history, covered in posters and magazines and rubbish and sci-fi paperbacks but mostly festooned with scrawls and tags and ‘toons. Looked like my son’s bedroom on a good day.
Vandals Bedroom by Todd James in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
2. Music and art converge
The socio-political turmoil of the late 1970s and 80s, where the decline of cities met artistic resistance, a shift which was felt in both the US and UK. Youth culture responded by painting graffiti on walls and public transport, creating art that reflected and reimagined the times in an explosion of expression on the streets. It was about identity in the face of oppression, self-awareness, and self-discovery in a moment of a depleted economic outlook.
3. Dream galleries
A selection of American and European originators, photo documentarians and cultural icons who helped contextualize and spread graffiti culture around the world. In André Saraiva’s Dream series, there is a visual articulation of how graffiti, street art, hip-hop, punk, fashion and break-dancing all sprung from the late 1970s and early 1980s into the 90s and today, and became a hybrid celebration of underground culture.
Featured artists also include Mister CARTOON, known for his tattooing and Los Angeles murals; a Beastie Boys installation featuring fashion and ephemera from the band’s prolific history; and LADY PINK’s feminist murals, illustrations and paintings.
Feminist mural by LADY PINK, an Ecuador-born artists who started painting New York subway trains aged 15, in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
4. Legends
Hosts icons such as legendary NYC artist, Eric HAZE, a torch bearer for generations to come; a new large-scale painting by abstract expressionist artist José Parlá; advertisement posters by KAWS; and ephemera by Keith Haring, one of the most popular street artists of the 1980s.
5. Blockbusters
Works commissioned specifically for this exhibition by graffiti trailblazers Shepard Fairey, LA-based activist, and FAILE, a Brooklyn-based artistic duo taking over the streets of NYC since the late 90s.
6. Larger Than Life
A site-specific installation by LA-based icon Kenny Scharf, the largest version to date of his immersive and interactive installation Cosmic Cavern, consisting of Day-Glo paintings, ephemera, and reused materials found in the streets of LA (see first photo in this review). Also the signature puppet characters made from recycled materials by Paul Insect, one of London’s original street art pioneers.
7. Timeline
A deep dive into street culture history through archival photography, ephemera and fashion to examine the cross-pollination of influences across music, fashion and film. Includes a large wall vinyl by feminist collective Guerrilla Girls.
8. Art with conscience
Works by hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy.
9. Consideration into innovation
Lisbon-based artist, VHILS, who repurposes waste and found materials to reimagine city walls.
Doors by Portuguese artist VHILS , in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
10. The Next Phase
The final ‘chapter’ is titled ‘The Next Phase’ and contains new op-art works by Valencia-based artist Felipe Pantone, whose high-contrast, geometric patterns challenge perspective, creating a distinctive digital age aesthetic.
Summary
It’s huge, and there’s loads of wall labels which are on two levels: high-level ones introducing each room and giving overviews of particular moments, themes and places (New York and London, but plenty of others); and then more specific labels zeroing in to give the biographies of the scores and scores of artists featured and descriptions of specific works. If you studied all of them you’d be here all day. It’s a feast of colour, creativity and information.
Rules and respect
The visitor handout includes 6 rules we visitors should comply with, for example ‘Respect the artworks’ and ‘Do not touch them’ etc. Rule 4 is ‘Do not sticker or tag the gallery’. Now I entirely understand why they say that – it is a very nice, clean gallery, staffed by nice, clean visitor assistants who are extremely helpful. Still – I couldn’t help finding it funny that an exhibition all about the wild, anarchic, street culture of the 70s and 80s is held in such an atmosphere of politeness and respect and silence, in beautifully maintained and utterly sterile white spaces.
Selection of works from the Afterlife Series by CRASH (2022) in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Where’s Basquiat?
I was surprised there was no mention of New York’s most famous graffiti artist, the devastatingly brilliant, cool and beautiful Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 to 1988), subject of a brilliant exhibition at the Barbican.
Related links
- BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON continues at the Saatchi Gallery until 9 May 2023
Related reviews
- Basquiat: Boom for Real @ the Barbican (November 2017)
- The Clash: London Calling @ the Museum of London (January 2020)
Books & Boots 