Labour’s landslide win in the general election saw many Conservative MPs experience a Portillo moment. Top Tories including Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt and Jacob Rees-Mogg were unseated by discontented constituents. But, a few days before, something a wee bit different took place: a Portaloo moment.
Overnight, a mobile toilet popped up on the streets of Shoreditch, east London, complete with a Polling Booth sign and ballot paper loo roll. A true safe seat, if you will. It was the latest potty-mouthed installation from Pattern Up, a collective of young artists formed in Brighton but now operating across the UK and Ireland. The stunt encouraged voters to consider spoiling – or, in an act of dirty protest, soiling – their ballots. “Obviously not everyone should spoil their ballot. But any vote was already spoiled anyway because the main two parties were so similar,” a spokesperson for the group says.
It was not the only stunt Pattern Up pulled for the election; the group also mocked up a set of Stuck Up Starmer and Soggy Sunak action figures and put up posters suggesting Tory voters should go to Specsavers.
They started out three years ago, aiming to draw attention to child exploitation in the UK after they were involved in organised crime at a young age. Since then, the group have been prolific, creating fake shopfronts such as bootleg bookmaker BrokeLads, producing cardboard boxes with instructions for turning them into homeless shelters, and dumping a sewage-filled water cooler outside the offices of Southern Water.
Pattern Up are part of a new movement of guerrilla creatives making mischief to make a statement. Armed with parody posters, fake objects and eyecatching installations, these artists mostly choose to stay anonymous and put up their art undercover at night, ready to be discovered by bleary-eyed commuters in the morning. Often, they join forces, working as a loose collective.
These creatives – including likeminded types Foka Wolf, Imbue, Bonus Prize and Spicebag, alongside Pattern Up – all feature in a new exhibition Cease & Resist, taking place at Camden Open Air Gallery in north London. Trailed by the polling booth toilet stunt (a proposed XL bully petting zoo didn’t get off the ground) the show brings together a collection of rebellious artists. “They’re visualising what everyone’s thinking in a bit of a risque way,” says the gallery’s 26-year- old owner, Finn Brewster-Doherty.
Birmingham based Foka Wolf, who also worked on the polling booth toilet, started in construction before moving into street art. Soon, he was putting up posters across the city offering penis augmentations to Range Rover drivers and a new Antivax vaccine to protect your body from every other vaccine. Fittingly, they went viral.
“The Industrial Revolution started here. We’re sort of responsible for the fuckery that’s going on in the world. It’s only fair we do something,” he laughs in his studio, shared with fellow offbeat artist and charity shop fiend Tat Vision, and stuffed with puppets, fake cleaning products and various trinkets.
Elsewhere in Brum, multimedia creative Imbue stuck cigarette packet-style warning labels to tabloid front pages on supermarket shelves ahead of the election. “It was half a joke and half a real idea,” he says. Two decades after raiding his college’s art supplies to make his own stickers, he now produces large installations, including a blood-dripped cashpoint currently stored in Wolf’s studio.
Round the corner, Bonus Prize screen prints his own scratchcard-inspired art. He’s not excited by Labour’s big win. “We need some radical, ambitious leadership to deal with the current state of affairs, and all we got is a choice between Tory and Tory-lite,” he says.
But it’s not just panic in the streets of Birmingham (and Brighton). Over in Dublin, masked artist Spicebag is up to similar tricks, making work about British occupation and Irish culture. Sometimes, it is overtly political, such as a reimagining of a Daniel McDonald painting replacing a famine scene with a modern-day eviction, or a football scarf designed to support a ceasefire in Gaza. Other times, it riffs on nostalgic, low-cultural objects such as Billy Roll processed ham, Amber Leaf tobacco and Murphy’s stout. “It’s the debris of capitalism. Everyone can find commonality in it,” he says.
What unites the artists is this subversion of advertising, or “subvertising”. Coined by the cultural critic Mark Dery in 1991, the term refers to fake adverts that are part art, part activism. Instantly recognisable logos and slogans are twisted, creating an image that disrupts reality and demands a second glance. The practice has gathered momentum recently thanks to political groups such as Brandalism, who hijack billboards across the UK.
The subvertisers’ playful approach is good fodder for social media feeds. “I find it fascinating watching my stuff go viral, seeing this thing travelling around the world in different languages and getting passed back to me. It’s like a creature or an organism that we can’t see,” Wolf says. Across the world, thousands of Instagram followers are buying the artists’ prints and downloading pdf templates, sticking up posters in their own cities and helping to spread the word.
Sometimes, it can come unstuck. Pattern Up and Spicebag faced online criticism for a joint stunt that saw them put up posters in Dublin advertising designated crack and heroin zones, intending to draw attention to addiction issues. “If people are getting upset you’re doing something right,” Spicebag says.
And while social media is a useful tool for subvertisers, tangible art is more powerful. “People are yearning for fucking real things,” Wolf says defiantly. Even if these real things are fake.
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But why is subvertising art so appealing? Perhaps it’s the rush from making something so immediate. “You can’t really beat it, because you could have an idea in the morning and then that afternoon you can put it out there,” says Imbue. “Maybe people really like it, and maybe it flops, but either way, it doesn’t really matter.”
By using the same fonts, graphics and logos as the work they are aping, the fakes carry the same power as actual adverts. “It’s calling people out in a way that people understand. It’s a really effective way to send a message,” says Brewster-Doherty.
Wolf agrees: “As soon as you put art into the format of advertising it’s a language everyone can relate to, which is fucking dark. It’s comforting for people. Objects have power.”
So much so, the collectives believe that it is possible to change people’s perceptions through their pranks. “It’s nice to put a spin or clever twist on something familiar and make someone do a double take and maybe question their perspective,” says Imbue.
With Labour winning in a landslide, the polling booth portable toilet turned out to be a portent of the Conservatives’ own journey down the pan. But what do the subvertisers think of the election result?
“Hopefully it brings some needed change and fewer cuts to the creative industries,” says Imbue.
Wolf is also optimistic: “I feel relieved. Even though Keir Starmer is probably a bit of a dick, he’s a human rights lawyer and better compared with Rishi and all the pricks that came before him.”
Pattern Up are less upbeat; they have already put up a billboard featuring Starmer with Thatcher’s back-combed barnet. It is clear that a change in government won’t stop them from making politicised art. Starmer has talked about putting an end to sticking-plaster politics for years. But plastering political stickers on walls isn’t stopping any time soon.
Cease and Resist takes place at Camden Open Air Gallery, London, 2 August to 6 September.