The history of graffiti in an exhibition: from the dungeon to the museum

• All the graffiti of the Madrid Metro "Although there is vandalism there is art"

The world's most ubiquitous graffiti artist calls himself 10 Foot. His name tops the list of 100 artists who have burst into the Saatchi gallery with Beyond the Streets, the largest imaginable sample of everything that emerged in the last half century from "urban art". It is the exhibition of the moment in London.

Only 10 Foot's final ascent to the Olympus of galleries – in the company of Futura 2000, HAZE, Kenny Scharf, Shepard Fairey and other mythical names – has coincided with his statement in the pages of The Daily Mail: "Britain's greatest graffiti artist, unmasked... The vandal who caused a million pounds of damage, revealed to be the son of a respectable doctor." Art and "vandalism" come together again, as so often, and not even London knows which card to stick with. On the one hand, it promotes street art tourist routes in Shoreditch and Camden, and on the other it pursues the "writers" with the relentless zeal of the British Transport Police, the number one enemy of the spray).

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10 Foot, so known for its height, bombed the bridges and tunnels of London with its crew, the Diabolical Dubstars (DDS). He was arrested in action in 2010 when he was writing his tag on Hungerford Bridge (his fame was such that a policeman asked him for an autograph). He spent more than a year in jail and was convicted of "anti-social conduct": he was banned for five years from possessing markers.

Like so many graffiti artists, 10 Foot took revenge and left its stamp in fifty cities, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, from Lisbon to Monterrey, from Havana to Tokyo. That is why, in his thirties, he has joined the list of artists of Beyond the Streets with a video installation that recreates the experience of the tunnel and the air 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 at night doing graffiti, stole the sprays, did what all the bad guys from all cultures did... And that had nothing to do with street gangs, or political messages. The point was to write your name over and over again until you got 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 honors to Demetrius, son of Greek immigrants, who began to write everywhere his nickname and the number of his street, "TAKI 183", back in 1970.

"The impulse came from the United States, but Europe picked up the torch and ended up kicking us in the ass," says Grastman, who highlights the role of Malcolm McLaren, honored in the Saatchi star hall. There is also the mural Escape London, 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," says Leonard Hilton McGurr, Futura 2000. "I started writing in 1984, the same year the Philadelphia City Council created the Graffiti Eradication Department," recalls Stephen ESPO Power, a writer of philosophical messages ("My abyss is yours," "I finally 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 permission and is often born of anger, as a reaction to what is forbidden."

Lady Pink, immortalized in the documentary Wild Style, earned a reputation painting on New York trains... "I came from painting flowers under the influence of my Ecuadorian mother. I had an academic background, when I was 16 I hung my paintings in the New Museum, but the trains were my best school. I learned to paint with pressure, with my knees shaking, rats around and my heart in a fist."

All his experience of four long decades has been captured in the surrealist mural Graffiti Experience, which he painted in situ for Beyond the Streets... "Although we cannot fall into the romantic vision of that New York: it was a very hard city. That's where hip hop was born, graffiti was born there: the two paths crossed and a subculture was born. Everything that starts underground ends up coming to the surface, but graffiti continues to create controversy."

His colleague Todd James pays his tribute to graffiti at Saatchi with an installation, The Vandal's Room, that any parent of any teenage graffiti artist would recognize. James is also one of the champions of the post-graffiti movement that built the first bridges with the art circuit. another writer represented in the exhibition, And another classic, HAZE, brings his experience, a journey that began in the New York subway and ended in abstract painting: "Graffiti is above all the search for your visual identity as an artist."

The "search" usually begins with the tag, the non-transferable signature. From there it 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, graphic design, installation, 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 began making graffiti in the 90s and has joined Beyond the Streets with an installation, Domestic Wild, in which a cheetah contemplates absorbed 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 play space in which everything is possible, despite the restrictions and that has that magic of the ephemeral ... My drift has gone towards muralism and conceptual art, but I try to be true to my roots, graffiti."

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