BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Go ahead, London! It’s opening night for BEYOND THE STREETS at Saatchi Gallery, and two floors are packed with densely layered, sharply curated displays, rare artifacts, and enough history to send a few generations of graffiti and street art fans back to skool. It’s an unruly, sometimes contradictory history, and curator and historian Roger Gastman is taking another crack at telling it on London’s King’s Road.
The location is hardly incidental. This was a breeding ground for British punk, where Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood helped bring DIY rebellion, confrontational fashion, and working-class provocation into the orbit of the well-heeled with their store “SEX”. Fifty years later, tensions around class, race, commerce, and who gets to decide what constitutes culture are hardly settled. If anything, the gallery setting brings some of those contradictions into sharper focus and gives you space to consider the implications quietly.
On view through next May, BEYOND THE STREETS brings together more than 100 international artists and cultural troublemakers across six decades of graffiti, street art, hip-hop, 2Tone, photography, fashion, and activism. Historic works, rare archives, new commissions, and large-scale installations offer a sprawling account of how street-born movements have infiltrated institutions and reshaped popular culture without always asking permission.
Here’s a first look inside the exhibition, along with a few words from Gastman about bringing it back to London, the uneasy marriage of street culture and commerce, and why King’s Road may be exactly the right address for both.
BSA: What does it mean to you to have a show like this in London on King’s Road?
Roger Gastman: It’s exciting to people to come back here for a second time after such a great success. It’s meaningful to know what we did hit so many people that they want to see us again.
BSA: I know there’s often a conflict with the history of punk being commercialized. Some of those same arguments and concerns come into to play when you commercialize this sort of artwork, right? Work that came from the streets, some of who was political… Do you ever hear those conversations?
Roger Gastman: I hear the conversations all the time, but. Yeah. I don’t really care about them, you know? We’re still as street as you can get, and we’re still as, you know, institutional at the same time. And we play both worlds. We work with artists that play in both worlds, and they all respect each other. You know, if you have respect for the culture, you’re going to get it right. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re sort of going to grab someone and throw them in somewhere.
BSA: Got it. Well, and that’s why I think Kings Road is appropriate, because Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood had their store “Sex” up the street – in what would have been a high rent district. They were mixing “low” with “high” from the very beginning. To me, that’s why this seems so appropriate.
Roger Gastman: You can stay in the street, but you don’t have to live in the street.
All week BSA is in London with Urban Nation Museum to talk to people about the street art and graffiti scene and Urban Nations’ celebrations of 10 years of existance.
