Last summer, in Mexico City, the very first tag I saw coming into the city was 10Foot’s. The summer prior, enroute to NYC, 10Foot. My daily on the way to work coffee in London, also 10Foot. This level of international yet comfortingly familiar fame is seldom realised in practice.
Cultural criminologist Erik Hannerz argues that fame in graffiti is often seen as a competitive individual endeavour, with uber-prolific kings, like 10Foot, TOX and Fume valorised (or demonised and imprisoned) for their highly visible ad-infinitum claims over the city’s surfaces. However, Erik points out that this individualistic version of fame misses the actual point of graffiti:
The problem is that fame is assumed to be a highly individual effort, rather than a collective one… This stress on instrumentality and the competitive element takes away the passion and the fun. To be sure [writers] note that graffiti involves a competition for space, for visibility. But it is a game you play to play, not to win. What matters more… is friendship, creativity, fun, thrill, and the collective.
10Foot, TOX and Fume’s Long Dark Tunnel goes some way towards animating this seldom represented subcultural and pro-social playful aspect of graffiti. This is a collective and multi-generational show, which also references the long-standing DDS crew. The exhibition includes a tribute to Robbo (1969-2014) behind caged TFL mesh, featuring quietly quotidian objects – football scarves, spray cans, headphones, blurry photos, his worn overcoat – which demonstrates a depth of detail, care and respect not often evident in more commercial graffiti exhibitions.
Before the opening of The Long Dark Tunnel, the venue was a closely guarded secret. There was widespread speculation about the location, with people wondering if this would be in an abandoned warehouse or a disused hidden underground station. It turns out to be housed at Arts ARKADE, just a few steps from Piccadilly Circus station.
But unusually for central London, this is not an upmarket white cube. Every available surface has been painted, tagged, etched, or interfered with in some way. From the entrance, hand sprayed tiles seamlessly continue the colourway of Piccadilly Circus station tiles to the upper level, where these are replaced with hundreds of brown hand sprayed tunnel bricks of maddeningly irregular sizes. Mushrooms and various tunnel creatures are painted directly onto the walls, plump spiders hang from the ceiling. Cameos abound. An angry fox looks like it is about to destroy what appears to be a BTP (British Transport Police) motion detector.
Ascending the escalator to the gallery, a jagged diagonal side-line of framed posters are placed at familiarly regular intervals. These battered frames are amongst many of the purloined treasures (CCTV, cabling, lighting, fencing and much more) borrowed from the TFL and embedded in the space, making it feel like an illegitimate yet affectionate extension of the network. The main gallery space features a wall length life-sized replica of a thoroughly graffitied underground train. And the very title of the exhibition, The Long Dark Tunnel, references both the tunnels of London’s underground and the jungle track “Valley of the Shadows” by Origin Unknown.
Despite its location in touristic Piccadilly Circus, The Long Dark Tunnel somehow achieves a level of authenticity in its ‘artification’ of graffiti’s subcultural practices - to a degree seldom realised in gallery or museum space. Since the 1980s, the white cube has been accused of killing graffiti – in rendering a form of ‘wild’ and anarchic subcultural expression into something ‘dead and inauthentic’ when reproduced on canvas in sterile gallery space. Curatorial strategies to overcome this entropy often include process videos or site-specific photography, and sometimes also graffiti-related artifacts encased in glass display units - spray cans, gloves, blackbooks etc. But these have – so far - been for the most part top-down curatorial strategies.
The impact of The Long Dark Tunnel lies not just in clever curatorial strategies, but in the multilayers of multimodal references woven throughout the space. Seeking out at least some of the details in this show means you feel almost part of the game. Many viewers, especially those visiting on the joyous crush of opening night, or the clueless tourists wandering in from Piccadilly Circus, will likely appreciate this immersive show, but may well miss this level of rabbit hole detail.
But isn’t this just how graffiti works? Through signs that everyone can see, but not everyone can read?
Take for example 10Foot’s A406 zine. Flipping through it activates a sense of déjà vu, as the printed text clearly echoes the audio track from 10Foot’s section of the show. Pared down to the text alone, the cadence of 10Foot’s words on the page offers a more reflective and less frenetic entry point to this work. In gallery-space, this is voiced by a posh robotic train announcer, intermixed with music and layers of site-sampled sounds including the crunch of gravel underfoot on the tracks, muted train doors opening and closing, and the whoosh of traffic. This phenomenological level of attention to detail was on opening night unfortunately drowned out by the crowd.
Further, 10Foot’s physical pieces in the show playfully subvert the form of British racing green motorway signs, replacing destinations with mundane micro-decision points – beans and cheese? Or just beans? These are multimodal experiential works designed to be viewed in the context of this immersive audio-scape. The full audio file is available online.
TOX’s unrelenting principles are reflected in his contained colour palette, which draws strictly on the colours representing London’s underground lines. His works for the show also reference the once plush yet now often threadbare interiors of the trains, with abstract pieces that rework the moquette threads of the trains’ worn seats, with a level of drip that captures the slow decay, yet relentless energy, of the transit network.
At first glance, Fume’s works perhaps most closely resemble older and more traditional ‘outsider’ graffiti canvases. However, on closer inspection, these intricate pieces also engender a radically multimodal move. Fume incorporates actual materials from London’s underground in the form of subway tunnel dust. Anyone who has braved the London underground - let alone traversed its network of long dark tunnels by foot - is intimately familiar with the ancient metallic blood smell of this dust.
This is how London actually smells, once you scratch the surface. Fume’s works also provide a remarkably detailed and mischievous re-enactment of a legendary moment in London’s graffiti history. His Operation Big O tetraptych animates DDS’s infamous Covid 2020 Christmas takeover of Oxford Circus tube station. For graffiti writers, Christmas provides a golden moment of opportunity for intervention, as the stations are deserted.
Beyond The Long Dark Tunnel’s many layered subcultural references, and the artists’ considered and focused work, this show also takes care to convey subcultural ethics in practice. Not least in the palpable resistance to commodification which retains the artists’ integrity as a collective, despite hosting an exhibition in central London. During the launch week, 10Foot took over The Big Issue (a magazine which supports the unhoused), with tightly curated content including an unprecedented interview by Banksy with TOX, the first-ever published photographs from Bas DDS, and an iconic interview with Fume – the first since Bomb Alert 2003.
This is now officially the best-selling Big Issue ever. No commercial advertisements were included and proceeds from the sales from the show will fund the sans-corporate-advertising production costs. If nothing else, this ultimately exhibits, in practice, the ethics of The Long Dark Tunnel.
The extraordinary attention to detail and its playful critique are mirrored in the merch prices. Some are more evident than others. In the gallery, 10Foot’s A406 zine is priced at £10.10 (and the A406 book now available online is priced at £13.12 - ACAB). The Regina vs. TOX 01 to TOX 25 zine is priced at £20.25. A self-evident, but nonetheless satisfying date reference. This slim and unassuming monochromatic booklet contains an anonymised barrage of a multifold of legal records attesting to every single charge TOX has encountered in getting up, plus a carefully concealed full colour concertina centrefold.
In TOX’s own words, these charges range from “nine prison sentences… for high-value criminal damage, all the way to a month in HMP Wandsworth for failing to possess a £3 train ticket from Vauxhall to Clapham Junction.”
Finally, the basic but elegant black exhibition poster is priced at an affordable £16.49. This might be a bit of a stretch, but historically the year 1649 does indeed mark an important date in the fight for expression of freedom. In that year the Levellers - a political movement dedicated to the then radical democratic ideals of equality under the law - saw many of their members imprisoned and key leaders executed. The Levellers were pioneers in reaching the public through unauthorised self-printed material - or proto-zines. In their wake, some left an indelible record through carved name graffiti that persists to this day.
Just don’t flip it.
Text by Dr Susan Hansen for Juxtapoz. Read our feature on 10FOOT, TOX and FUME from our Winter issue here. All photography by Si Mitchell
