WHAT happens when the streets of London, New York, and LA are packaged up, shipped into Chelsea, and reassembled on the walls of the Saatchi Gallery? Curated by graffiti historian Roger Gastman, BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON is the most comprehensive graffiti and street art exhibition to open in the UK. Taking up all three floors of the Saatchi, the exhibition is meticulous in tracing the history of street art – its role in underground and mass culture, its influence on film and fashion and politics, and its relationship to the cities which are its canvas.
Saatchi Gallery, London presents BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON, 17 February – 9 May with headline supporter adidas Originals
This is a large, sprawling experience of an exhibition, featuring an intriguing and vast variety of artists – PRIEST and Fab 5 Freddy sit alongside Jenny Holzer, the Beastie Boys, the Guerrilla Girls, and Malcolm McLaren (notably, and, one assumes, intentionally, Banksy is not featured or mentioned at all throughout the exhibition).
It seeks to ‘examine the fundamental human need for public self-expression’, taking street art’s use of the city as a lens to view the history of modern art. Graffiti, banners, and flyposters sit alongside canvas art, sculpture, photography, and experiential installations, brought together to create a narrative of street art which extends, as the name suggests, far beyond the streets.
Saatchi Gallery, London presents BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON, 17 February – 9 May with headline supporter adidas Originals
Divided across thirteen rooms into loose ‘chapters’, the exhibition begins with a large photograph of Same Thing (1972) by King Mob, a London-based radical group with roots in anarchist collectives. The piece consists of a slogan painted along the Westway in West London: “SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY – TUBE – WORK – DINNER – WORK – TUBE […] HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE”.
It remained for over a decade, a throughline of stark, messy lettering which inspired artists from Pink Floyd to The Clash to graffiti writer FUTURA2000. As an introduction to BEYOND THE STREETS, it’s an effective reminder of the ephemerality of street art – and its existence within the context of the city, forming part of commuters’ every-day lives in a way that gallery art does not. What we’re seeing is an image of the original piece, which no longer exists – precisely because the original was never granted the status of artwork until long after its evisceration.
Saatchi Gallery, London presents BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON, 17 February – 9 May with headline supporter adidas Originals
Questions of originality and ephemerality haunt BEYOND THE STREETS, but are not always attacked head-on by the exhibition itself. The next piece is a life-size recreation of the (imaginary) Trash Records store, intended to represent ‘the familiar independent record store, adorned with scribbling, murals, doodles, and stickers’ and filled with real records which viewers are encouraged to play. Trash Records emerges as one of the least convincing parts of an otherwise rich exhibition – when placed alongside so many pieces taken (literally) from the streets, it’s hard to ignore the artificiality of constructed experiences like this one.
At many other points, though, the exhibition is vivid and thought-provoking. The decision not to belabour the argument that “graffiti is art” is a wise one – at this point in popular culture, there are much more interesting things to say about the genre. BEYOND THE STREETS is at its best when exploring ideas of the city as a canvas, street art as a readable sign of revolution, and the role of play and fun in the creation of graffiti.
Pieces by Fab 5 Freddy, Gordon-Matta Clark, Jenny Holzer, and José Parlá are some of the strongest in the entire exhibition, as is the documentation of the people behind these cultural moments, such as Dash Snow’s Polaroids of Dionysian debauchery (and a lot of fun) in the New York underground art scene. There’s also a welcome detour via the Guerrilla Girls, which head-dives the exhibition into a room-long meditation of street art as a means to deconstruct and critique the canonical art landscape.
Saatchi Gallery, London presents BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON, 17 February – 9 May with headline supporter adidas Originals
As a whole, the exhibition is a feat of comprehension and loving detail, and in many ways it’s also a compelling – and exhaustive – account of street art and its reverberations through culture, politics, art, and identity. The intensity and scale of the artworks are used to their best advantage here – this is a colourful and often exciting experience which brings up concepts of appropriation, space, ownership and art.
But it’s also difficult to ignore the space in which all of this is set. The presence of street art in a gallery like the Saatchi is an obvious recognition of its status, but that recognition is simultaneous with it being removed from its original context – the streets themselves.
The power of Same Thing (1972), our very first introduction to the exhibition, comes from its presence in the city. Street art insists on seeing a stretch of concrete, a layer of scaffolding, a construction hoard, as a canvas. A video installation depicting a group breakdancing on the tile floor of Charing Cross station in 1985 makes this point particularly well: the presence of underground art transforms a ‘commercial area into a sacred space of self-expression for British youth, proving […] that the streets and walls belonged to them as much as anyone else’.
Saatchi Gallery, London presents BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON, 17 February – 9 May with headline supporter adidas Originals
It is unfortunately unavoidable that in order for this scale of exhibition to exist, it is necessary to supplant the art from the streets, but you do feel that the city and the experience of the city could have been made more present here. There is a distinct lack of sound, except in specific spaces in which music is played, a silence where the art would originally have been accompanied by the noise of the cityscape. Moreover, the psychogeographic experience of street art – the fact that, most of the time, you do not seek out the art but rather stumble upon it – is lost here, replaced with the structured pathways which the gallery intends for you to follow.
BEYOND THE STREETS is an undoubtedly riveting labour of love, and certainly an exhibition worth visiting – but the question I left with was this: have we gone too far beyond the streets?
by Ismene Ormonde