Beyond The Streets London at Saatchi Gallery

Beyond The Streets London at Saatchi Gallery, founded and curated by ‘hip-hop historian’ Roger Gastman, is closing SOON.

May 9th to be precise.

King Mob, DDS Crew, and Malcolm McClaren are just three of more than one hundred featured artists at this blockbuster exhibition that fills all nine rooms of the Saatchi Gallery.

You might (funds allowing, on which more later) want to make at least two visits to absorb it all.

For now, link arms with me (metaphorically) as I walk you through some aspects of the exhibition that I particularly like … and a couple that I don’t.

I like that there is so much London in this show

Well, yeah. Duran forever. Detail from Trash Records installation

The initial marketing led me to think that the Beyond The Streets exhibition was going to be mostly American graffiti with a little bit of London thrown into the mix. I was very pleased to be wrong about this.

It is full of artists and creators that I admire. 1970s Situationists King Mob open the show; Malcolm McLaren (a man Calypso Royale thinks of as the embodiment of The Magician card in the Tarot) gets half a room to himself; and Derek B (he’s a bad young brother in case you didn’t know) can be found in a vitrine upstairs. Best of all, for me – there is an entire wall installation by DDS Crew that had me almost tearing my hip flexor again, as I crouched like an arthritic panther to peer at every foil-wrapped frame they’d stuck into very low spaces. 

My membership card allowed me to make a second visit to this show with a friend who lives in London but is from New York.

It was a joy to  witness her fascination with the photos of the New York trains of her youth. I wish I’d recorded her as she rattled off all the lines she took to get to school and the interchanges required.

“What about the tags, though?” I asked. “Did you have favourites?”

“I didn’t even notice them! I had places to go.”

I like that Beyond The Streets London is so playful

Detail of HuskMitNavn at Beyond The Streets London

My guess is that children of all ages will find something of interest in all nine rooms of Saatchi Gallery, not to mention under the stairs and in the corridors.

If tags and posters and bombing leave them cold (weirdos), there is a whole world of painting, sculpture and installation that includes (but is not limited to) such child-pleasing things as LEGO, life-size leopards, enormo-bunnies, and creepy toys.

The show has loads of stuff that is simultaneously sweet, cute, funny and creepy and also likely to drive your Tipper Gore type personality into absolute paroxysms of ‘must we throw this FILTH at our Pop Kids?’ panic. 

Special mention here for Kenny Scharf’s installation which didn’t appear to scare the younger generation at all, but had Gen X me feeling that I had stumbled into a garden shed collectively owned by all the dirty old men I’d been warned about as a kid.

I like all the Je Me Souviens moments 

I owned both of these books and am now wondering where they went to

Did you know the Greater London Council (honoured be their name) funded workshops for young people interested in learning how to use spray paint? I had forgotten this until I visited Beyond The Streets, but yes, they did. Lesser London Councils have spent endless amounts of our money in a vain attempt to fight graffiti culture ever since.  

Social history note: Look out for the video installation at the end of the first room. It’s stuff shot in Covent Garden in the 80s, when hip-hop was a New Thing over here, and I found it an interesting reminder of how skint the general public looked before Britain joined the EU in the 90s.

I like the fashions at Beyond The Streets

Sweatshirt by Malcolm McLaren: a True Master of Letraset

There are gorgeous clothes and accessories all over the show: Malcolm Mclaren’s World Famous Supreme Team sweatshirts (one pictured above), Beastie Boys’ tracksuits, Bamboo Earrings (at least two pairs), knock-off LL Cool J t-shirts, custom belt buckles (which over here I think were only available from World’s End and cost a bloody fortune) and – of course – Adidas, who are sponsors of the show.

It is therefore both disconcerting and hilarious to get to the end of this show and find that the first ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ is not taking you into an embolism-inducing cave of wonders packed with covetable Adidas merch, but instead into a Ralph Lauren concession. The mocked-up windows need to be seen to be believed.

The Saatchi Gallery gift shop proper has a lot of nice stuff in it. No links here, because either loads of it has sold out, or they’re just not offering it online. This means I will try to visit once more as some of the posters and t-shirts produced for Beyond The Streets are positively screaming ‘Perfect Gift For Self Or Others’.

The ticket prices made me sad though

Detail of Tish Murtha photo from the Elswick Kids series (1978) at Beyond The Streets London at Saatchi Gallery

I know that things have got tough all over, since the ERG came to power under the name ‘Conservative’, and that fancy galleries have overheads too, but bloody hell, £25 for an adult ticket, £15 for a student?

I’ve only been able to see Beyond The Streets London twice because I bought a membership card at the end of last year, when it was priced at £30. Annual membership went up in the New Year to £50, which I would not have been able to afford then, and can less afford now.

In fairness it is a BIG show: if you consider it as two shows in one than £12.50 a floor seems fair. But, if ever a show cried out for a concessionary rate, it’s this one. I felt genuinely uncomfortable to be in the middle of a celebration of street culture, knowing that the unwaged and poorly waged who in the main create street culture are priced out.

I think Saatchi Gallery are aware of this too – you’ll find Jamie Reid’s satirical statement about the key role that Saatchi and Saatchi played in the cultural impoverishment of England hanging under the staircase – but the self-conscious irony of that makes it worse for me, not better.

One of the great benefits of signing on back in the 80s (and into the 90s if I remember correctly) was that your signing-on card would get you into most gigs and exhibitions at a significantly reduced price.

I would like to see low-income concessions make a comeback.

And I got homesick for today’s graffiti

I know that some women (and men) were probably thrilled to see the Guerrilla Girls in the show, pointing out gender imbalance within the exhibition. I just got  annoyed seeing their collective taking up wall space that could have gone to the female graffiti writers active in London today, whose work I had hoped to see.

This photo is NOT part of the beyond The Streets London exhibition

I would have welcomed a big stack of flyers from the Guerrilla Girls, but I would have liked the actual space on the walls to be given to the women they claim to want represented. 

The Guerrilla Girls’ presence made me think of what was absent (as is their intention) and I found myself missing and homesick for what I think of as the ‘everyday and now’ graffiti that makes London feel like home.

I wanted to see represented the artists and writers who paint on the legal walls like Trellick Hall of Fame; I wanted to see the green hearts that signify that the city stands with and will not forget Grenfell; I would have liked a nod to Nat Has Herpes (the unofficial tourist slogan for East London, for a while); or to see an installation by Saatchi Learning in partnership with London school-kids. 

And talking of kids …

I’m looking forward to the next generation of vandals

Paul Insect Rubbish Puppet Repair Workshop detail

We need Vandals in urban spaces. They speak truth to power, challenge, commemorate, memorialise, and entertain. 

Sometimes they console and strengthen us.

In the 90s I’d regularly be all alone on the last tube out of Ladbroke Grove station: feeling tired, poor, defeated, sad, and fully aware of all the structural traps that caused me to be in that position.

Despairing, pretty much.

But sometimes I would catch sight of a Fume DDS tag, sprayed on a door or etched on a window and think ‘yes, I’m fucking fuming too’ and it would be enough to make me feel less alone. Fume’s tag reminded me that I had deep reservoirs of defiance to draw on, and helped me to get through a very difficult part of my life.

I never would have guessed that more than twenty years later I’d be admiring Fume’s paintings in the chi-chi Saatchi Gallery.

But I think that’s my favourite thing about graffiti. It’s always found in unexpected places, hitting in unexpected ways.

This photo is NOT in the Beyond The Streets London exhibition