Mutate Britain: One Foot in the Grove

A 15ft aardvark constructed from raw timber with a light-up robotic face and gigantic hands is climbing up one of the support pillars of the Westway, next to the body of a full-sized helicopter the front of which has been shaped into a grinning skull. Life-size rearing horse torsos made of white marble-like resin, with real horse skulls instead of heads, are mounted on the wheels of Victorian perambulators, while a man rides a clanking, hissing, fire-spitting motorised beast with stamping front legs and huge rear wheels around through the crowd as children caper about and their parents drink rum punch to the sound of militant 1970s funk. It's a bit livelier than White Cube, that's for sure.

It feels quite bizarre sometimes how far this world of “street art” (or “low art” as it is known in some quarters: a catch-all term for graffiti, comics art, car customisation and other grassroots forms) is from the art establishment in this country. Painfully grudging semi-acceptance of Banksy into galleries notwithstanding, we remain decades behind the US, Netherlands, Germany and Spain in nurturing home-grown talent from outside the self-regarding gallery/ Goldsmiths/ Turner Prize/ YBA circuit – so it remains for outsider collectives like the loose gathering of Notting Hill's hip hop heads and festival trash sculpture stalwarts the Mutant Waste Company to pull it all together at exhibitions like Mutate Britain.

Admittedly, looking at last night's launch party, it was easy to see how art world folk could look down on this stuff or even suggest inauthenticity. On the one hand, it was a genuinely grimy affair – puddles on the uneven floor, some pretty crusty individuals and pungent odours in evidence – but on the other commerce was highly in evidence on a major scale. A central stall in the gallery section had cashiers' credit card machines whirring away nineteen to the dozen, and wolfish designer-clad collectors could be seen hungrily circling teenage graffiti artists. And taking a superficial glance around, one could, if one were so inclined, write off the art as gimmicky rearrangements of popcultural iconography and studenty adolescent politics – the Queen weeping, poledancing babies in army helmets, heavy representation of the machinery of war and lots of clunking macho robots loomed large, and the immediate impression was more Glastonbury as Guggenheim.

But anyone expecting this stuff to be worthy, wholemeal “alternative” art is fundamentally missing the point: although a good deal of the artists and organisers here can certainly be seen as taking a rebel stance, it's a stance with deep roots in this country's punk, rave and hip hop subcultures, all of which have always been about a gleeful, piss-taking scorched-earth capitalism as much as they are about autonomy, community and self-expression. And as to the content – well, yes, there was a lot of visual brashness up in your face, and yes, graffiti culture has always had a machismo in its competitiveness and drive to cut through urban visual noise. But browse around the exhibition for a while, allow the sensual bombardment to subside, and plenty of subtlety and variety emerges – even the pieces making seemingly glaring political statements are revealed to be more than merely Banksy-style visual puns, but bring out sadness and nuanced complexity in their reflections and representations of media-saturated culture, while other pieces in media from handmade ceramic tiles to shopping baskets, and even straight photo portraits show a gentle, wry wit to match anything in the world of mainstream conceptual art; there was certainly nothing here to match, say, a Chapman Bros show for crassness.

Anyway, maybe it's for the best that the Saatchis and Joplings aren't interested in this world, yet. Because this stuff doesn't need academic or curatorial approval, it is self-sufficient; even clubbable 'name' artists here like Shepard Fairey – the stencil/sticker artist known for “Andre The Giant Has A Posse”, “OBEY” and most famously the Obama “HOPE” image – or veteran British grafitti writer Mode2 of the revered Chrome Angels crew (left) remain part of grafitti's culture, its networks and mores, and retain an air of illegality. But more importantly, the lack of establishment approval means there was none of the sourness, the fraudulently theatrical air-kissing and “someone's daubed poo under my nose” screwfaces of so many art openings last night. The visual carnival that covered every surface was matched in the atmosphere: people danced, drank, smiled; children leapt around a laser controller that projected impossibly intricate animations onto a giant face above the soundsystem; the art felt part of a living event, and part of life. And if there were a few annoying look-at-me “eccentrics” around, you would find far more intensely irritating ones in a Saatchi-approved opening or east London art-students' gathering. If having a couple of smelly crusties in the crowd is the price to pay for that, it's a price worth paying to be surrounded by living, breathing art that reflects our culture and not the whims of a few soi-disant artworld kingpins.

Mutate Britain is open over weekends for the whole of December. Information here