The world’s most ubiquitous graffiti artist calls himself 10 Foot. His name tops the list of 100 artists who have stormed the Saatchi gallery with Beyond the Streets, the biggest imaginable showcase of everything that has emerged in the last half-century from “street art.” It is the exhibition of the moment in London.
Only that the final ascent of 10 Foot to the Olympus of the galleries -in the company of Futura 2000, HAZE, Kenny Scharf, Shepard Fairey and other mythical names- has coincided with his remark in the pages of The Daily Mail: «The greatest artist of British graffiti, unmasked… The vandal who caused a million pounds of damage, revealed as the son of a respectable doctor. Art and “vandalism” come together again, as so many times, and not even London knows which card to take. On the one hand, it promotes street art tourist routes in Shoreditch and Camden, and on the other it goes after the “writers” with the relentless zeal of the British Transport Police, the number one enemy of the spray).
10 Foot, so known for his height, bombed the bridges and tunnels of London with his crew, the Diabolical Dubstars (DDS). He was arrested in action in 2010 when he tagged him on Hungerford Bridge (his fame was such that a policeman asked for his autograph). He spent more than a year in jail and was convicted of “anti-social conduct”: he was banned from possessing markers for five years.
Like so many graffiti artists, 10 Foot retaliated and left its mark in fifty cities, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, from Lisbon to Monterrey, from Havana to Tokyo. For this reason, in his late thirties, he has joined the list of Beyond the Streets artists with a video installation that recreates the experience of the tunnel and the crash of the train.
Roger Gastman, curator of Beyond the Streets, also went through his time as a “writer” in America and that has allowed him to approach the experience from within: “Graffiti became our sport and our addiction. We stayed up all night doing graffiti, we stole the spray cans, we did what all the bad boys of all cultures do… And that had nothing to do with street gangs, nor with political messages. The question was to write your name over and over again until you achieved recognition ».
Beyond the Streets began its journey in Los Angeles in 2019 and made the leap that same year to New York, with the idea of ??building a cultural and generational bridge with the rest of the world, to the rhythm of hip hop and with an honorable mention for the such a Demetrius, son of Greek immigrants, who began to write everywhere his nickname and his street number, “TAKI 183”, back in 1970.
“The impetus came from the United States, but Europe picked up the torch and ended up kicking our ass,” says Grastman, who highlights the role of Malcolm McLaren, honoree in the Saatchi starroom. There is also the Escape London mural, painted “live” in 1981 by Futura 2000 for The Clash.
“My world was that at any moment the police could show up and beat you up. Those are my roots, and you can never duplicate that feeling in a studio,” Leonard Hilton McGurr now tells Futura 2000. “I started writing in 1984, the same year the Philadelphia City Council created the Graffiti Eradication Department.” , recalls Stephen ESPO Power, writer of philosophical messages (“My abyss is yours”, “At last I agree with myself”). «My intention was always to communicate, starting with a tag, as a pure form of creative freedom. Everything I have done is indebted to that: art does not need permits and is often born of anger, as a reaction to what is prohibited».
Lady Pink, immortalized in the documentary Wild Style, earned her reputation by painting on New York trains… «I came from painting flowers under the influence of my Ecuadorian mother. I had an academic background, at the age of 16 I hung my paintings in the New Museum, but trains were my best school. I learned to paint with pressure, with shaking knees, rats around and my heart in a fist ».
All his experience of four long decades has been captured in the surreal mural Graffiti Experience, which he painted in situ for Beyond the Streets… «Although we cannot fall for the romantic vision of that New York either: it was a very tough city. There hip hop was born, there graffiti was born: the two tracks intersected and a subculture was born. Everything that starts as underground ends up coming to the surface, but graffiti continues to create controversy.
His colleague Todd James pays his tribute to graffiti at the Saatchi with an installation, The Vandal’s Room, which any parent of any adolescent graffiti artist would recognize. James is also one of the leaders of the post-graffiti movement that built the first bridges with the art circuit. another writer represented in the exhibition, Y otra clásico, HAZE, brings his experience, a journey that began in the New York subway and ended in abstract painting: “Graffiti is first and foremost the search for your visual identity as an artist.”
The “search” usually begins with the tag, the non-transferable signature. From there he jumps to dub, with large letters and relief; and, finally, to “the piece”, a work in colors and three-dimensional effects, on a space or plot chosen for its high visibility or its difficult access. The next steps are the mural, the graphic design, the installation, the conceptual art… The roads fork again and again like a crossroads…
“Vandalism is transgression, the fundamental source to understand where all this comes from,” says the Valencian ESCIF, who started doing graffiti in the 90s and has joined Beyond the Streets with an installation, Domestic Wild, in the that a cheetah gazes absorbed at its own framed skin. “The art that reaches the galleries is a domestication of what is done in the streets,” says Escif. «The city is a three-dimensional workshop, a game space in which everything is possible, despite the restrictions and which has that magic of the ephemeral… My drift has gone towards muralism and conceptual art, but I try to be faithful to my roots, the graffiti».
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