The Underbelly Project: street art's worst-kept secret

The rumour had been going round since the start of the summer. Somewhere under New York there was a subway station that never opened, and graffiti writers and street artists were being taken down into it, one at a time, to paint. Nobody would say where. For people who follow this scene it was about as exciting as a rumour gets: a hidden gallery, painted in the dark, that nobody was meant to visit.

At the end of October the secret stopped being one. The New York Times and the Sunday Times magazine in London both ran the story with photographs, and the organisers explained what they had done.

What the project was

The Underbelly Project was run by two street artists working under the names Workhorse and PAC. PAC had been shown the abandoned station by an urban explorer, and after meeting Workhorse, whose own work often deals with derelict places, the two began planning in 2008. In the months that followed they brought 103 artists underground. Each was escorted in and given a single night to paint. The location was never officially named, and the organisers said that once the press had seen it the way in would be sealed for good.

The list of contributors was strong. Among the pieces that got most attention were a painting by Jeff Soto, whose characters and landscapes were well known from galleries on the West Coast, and a large, bright wall by the Los Angeles writers Revok and Ceaze, which gave the gloomy platform some badly needed colour. A piece by Spazmat drew praise too. The published photographs were taken by the New York street-art photographer who works as Luna Park, and she posted a wider set online.

A year of coming indoors

The timing did the project no favours. Street art spent 2010 moving steadily into the mainstream. Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop had opened in cinemas in the spring and turned the business of selling street art into a public joke, and two years earlier Tate Modern had put Blu, Os Gemeos, JR and others on its river façade. Auction houses, galleries and brands were all circling. Against that background, a show painted in secret for nobody had real appeal, because it seemed to refuse the whole market that had grown up around the work.

Workhorse and PAC presented it in exactly those terms, as an escape from the institutions above ground. That is why the way it surfaced mattered so much to readers who had been following the rumours.

Why the launch sat badly

The first reaction to the pictures was excitement, and the second was doubt. Nobody disputed the quality: the artists involved were impressive and most of the work was very good. The problem was the ending.

A secret gallery that no one can see is an attractive idea, perhaps the purest form of the “for its own sake” argument that street art likes to make about itself. But the project did not stay secret. It invited a group of journalists and bloggers down before closing the entrance, and it chose to come out through a spread in two of the most establishment newspapers on either side of the Atlantic. That looked like exclusivity dressed up as rebellion. The public was being told about a show it would never be allowed into, by the papers, after a select few had been given the tour.

There were other ways to do it. A properly made film of the space would have let anyone see it. So would an exhibition of photographs above ground, which would at least have put the work in front of the people who never get a guided visit. Either would have kept the mystery and shared the art. The newspaper launch did neither particularly well.

Worth seeing anyway

None of that cancels the work. The images are striking, and it is hard not to be glad they were recorded at all, given that the paintings themselves are now meant to sit in the dark indefinitely. The photographs are there for anyone to look at and judge. As an idea, the Underbelly Project was genuinely interesting. As a piece of theatre about who gets to see art, it raised more questions than it answered.