Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  And into this unruffled environment came Banksy. The Observer called the exhibition a ‘sell-out in every sense’ – meaning it was both a crowd pleaser and the moment when Banksy gave up his outlaw past and joined the established art world. In the Sunday Times Waldemar Januszczak, usually a supporter of Banksy, said he would rather he had not done it: ‘Banksy the rebel was an artist you could trust, a free creative voice that owed nothing to anybody. Banksy the respectable museum artist is something else. What is being destroyed here is not the anonymity of Bristol City Museum, it’s Banksy’s raison d’être.’

  Both these judgements seem incredibly harsh. The show was a huge, joyous leap of the imagination. The established context for contemporary art has become the white cube, all cool and focussed without any interruptions. It is seen as a neutral space; it is in fact incredibly loaded, and for many who are not part of the art world incredibly off-putting. But Banksy chose a completely different context and made it work brilliantly. There was no standing, staring, reading the notes on the wall and still being totally bewildered about what it might mean. No, this was part gallery show, with his pictures hanging normally – or relatively so – in one part of the museum, and part treasure hunt. A modern-day treasure hunt, a bit like the one I had enjoyed so much in London, where you had to spot the Banksy amidst the exhibits in the permanent collection, and where almost everyone came armed with digital cameras so they had a record which they could enjoy themselves and email their enjoyment to friends.

  At Middlesbrough Kate Brindley now runs an institute which is all white space and high-end concepts, but she remains a great admirer of Banksy. His work, she says, is ‘smart, it’s intentioned. It’s political, it’s humorous. It’s current. It’s site specific, it’s universal. He thinks very carefully about it but there is also a lightness and playfulness which I really enjoy about it. And there was clearly a great affection for Bristol Museum.’ For, quite apart from what it did for Banksy, the exhibition brought the museum back to life, just over 100 years since it first opened.

  The slim guide to the exhibition came with Banksy’s usual, slightly irritating humour – the exhibition was rated PG, ‘Contains scenes of a childish nature some adults may find disappointing.’ The slightly over-grand ‘Bristol School of Artists’ he demoted to ‘Artists from Bristol’; ‘World Wildlife’ became ‘Wildlife in Glass Boxes’, ‘Pottery and Ceramics’ became ‘Boring Old Plates’, and the room for under sevens became the ‘Children’s Shouting Area’.

  But the exhibition itself was very skilfully and humorously thought out. And it showed too how Banksy could successfully push the boundaries of his work way beyond the limits of the stencil. A scaled-down version of a sculpture he had made at Glastonbury, Boghenge – Stonehenge constructed in Portaloos – was sitting in the entrance hall to welcome visitors. A month after the exhibition opened a rather sozzled-looking Ronald McDonald was to be found sitting precariously on a ledge outside the museum entrance, a bottle of whisky by his side. In the big hall inside there were seven sculptures, and if you hadn’t got the message from Ronald McDonald and the Portaloos that this was a very different show from anything else ever seen in the museum, then there was no escaping it here.

  A satisfied lion with a whip in its mouth and specks of blood on its cheeks had all too obviously eaten its trainer. Paris Hilton, or someone who resembled her, was clutching a heroic number of shopping bags. Michelangelo’s David had a suicide vest strapped around him. A beaten-up Buddha, last seen painted on a wall at the Cans Festival, now came as a statue complete with a neck brace and one of his arms in a sling. A homeless Venus de Milo had her dog and a few scattered coins at her feet. An angel with rather pretty wings had a large tin of pink paint stuck over her head, its contents dribbling down to the bottom of her plinth, but happily stopping just before it reached the dedication on the pillar to Baron Winterstoke. In the centre of the hall, surrounded by these sculptures, stood a partially burnt-out ice cream van, complete with the usual irritating ice cream jingle, with graffiti on one side and on top a giant cone melting out all over the place. Next to the van was a big riot policeman, wearing a badge that bore the words ‘Metropolitan Peace’, all geared up and looking ridiculous as he rode a small child’s mechanical rocking horse (this piece was later reported to have been sold for £140,000).

  Surveying all this from the biplane on high was a new and improved version of the prisoner who escaped from Guantanamo and was last seen in Disneyland. When the life-size orange-suited doll first arrived in Bristol, he was placed on a bench in the museum. But the exhibition evolved as the weeks went on, and soon someone in the Banksy team had the bright idea of putting him in the pilot’s seat of the biplane where he could see and be seen.

  The New York animatronics which had started the whole idea of the exhibition had been imported wholesale and given their own space, christened Unnatural History, in the rear hall. Next to Tweetie Bird, the swimming fish sticks, the sleeping leopard skin and the rest of the cast, the museum’s main exhibition space held a mocked-up version of Banksy’s messy studio. The studio came complete with spray paint, stencils from some of his work and preliminary drawings of other work, used stencils of his tag, drawers of a filing cabinet labelled ‘good ideas’, ‘bad ideas’, ‘other people’s ideas’ and ‘pornography’. A pixellated – and thus frustratingly unrecognisable – self-portrait of the artist sat on an easel opposite the artist’s chair with a knitted cardigan reading THUG FOR LIFE hanging off the back of the chair. (The cardigan had a pedigree: in his Los Angeles show he had painted two grannies looking a picture of happiness as they sat in their armchairs knitting contentedly. One was knitting a cardigan with PUNKS NOT DEAD on it, the other was knitting THUG FOR LIFE.) All around were the products of his real studio, a whole new array of Banksys; in total there were just over 100 exhibits in the show. But while these were the bulk of the Banksys on display, there were many more dotted around the museum. As Banksy said at the time, ‘Some of the fake historical relics I’ve inserted among Bristol’s permanent collection should be entertaining – you can’t tell what’s truth and what’s fiction. It’ll be like walking through a real-life Wikipedia.’

  Simon Cook remembers he was wandering around on the last day of the exhibition ‘because I wanted to get a final look at it. And up in the galleries I was watching people looking for Banksys, finding them eventually, but also looking at our permanent collection and not realising we had a Renoir and other major artists.’ Yes, the museum has always had ‘depth’, but it needed either a certain dedication or Banksy to discover that depth.

  There was everything from a dildo nestling amongst the stalagmites and a plastic salt shaker sitting among the Reserve Collection, to a muzzled lamb in amongst the World Wildlife and a hash pipe among the Pottery and Ceramics. Even the gypsy caravan had been got at: one of its wheels had been clamped and an eviction notice stuck on the front door. Banksy was clearly having great fun. Looking at these stunts on the web reminded me of my days as a prep school boy when we were taken on an outing to the local museum and got so bored that a couple of us resorted to swapping around all the exhibit captions, making a nonsense of the whole thing. Banksy received nothing but admiration, while I was hauled up before the headmaster and beaten for it a couple of days later.

  More seriously, a whole string of altered paintings were hidden amongst the museum’s old masters. These interventions ranged from the Virgin Mary with child and iPod, to a rat ‘improving’ one of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings and a couple ‘dogging’ amidst a typical nineteenth-century English landscape scene. My personal favourite is his version of Millet’s The Gleaners, painted in 1857 and showing three peasant women exercising their right to hunt for any bits of grain left over in the fields after the harvest. One of the women had been cut out of the canvas (it’s a copy, the original is in the Musée D’Orsay) and was sitting on the corner of the frame having a fag break. This was renamed, unconvincingly, as Agency Job, but it brought yet
another layer of humanity to this haunting picture. Like most of the other Banksys hidden among the Old Masters, it was attributed to ‘Local Artist’.

  Was anything that Banksy wanted to put up just a step too far for the museum? ‘There were a few things,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘It was very little really, which was quite surprising. There was very little where we said no, that’s not appropriate, and it was negotiated through as you would with any artist.’

  The whole exhibition was mounted amidst great secrecy. Notices were stuck on the doors saying ‘Closed for essential maintenance’ and although the Banksy team had been constructing exhibits off the site for months, they had just two days to bring everything in and set it up. Anyone at the museum not yet in on the secret was told it was closed for filming. ‘It was like a big sort of Changing Rooms,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘We shut and it all came in. The only reason we could do that was because they had the manpower and finances. They were incredibly professional. I am used to putting on exhibitions but it was done in such a large and accelerated fashion. It was a bit like working with a film crew.’

  In television interviews at the time, she was always asked if she had met Banksy and she always gave the same answer with a big smile on her face. She knew he had been in the museum, that he had planned the show in detail. But when asked, ‘So you don’t know which one of the crew he is?’ she replied, ‘No, we still don’t, and that’s part of the real charm.’

  The hype surrounding the exhibition was the least impressive part of it. The show was improbably titled Banksy versus the Bristol Museum and described as an ‘audacious heist’, as though Banksy had suddenly become a true vandal and gatecrashed the museum, when in fact the whole thing had been planned down to the last detail of the pre-show party and the public relations campaign that went with it. The Bristol Evening Post described how two of Banksy’s ‘PR people’ had arrived at the newspaper on a ‘hush hush visit’ a couple of days before the show opened and ‘giggled excitedly’ as they described what was about to hit Bristol – hardly a ‘heist’.

  But even more revealing was the contract that Banksy had the council sign, which was later released – with key sections blanked out – after a freedom of information request. To be fair to Banksy, this contract revealed that he had charged only £1 for the exhibition and that he agreed to give one work to the museum (he actually gave two: the paint-pot angel and an intricate scale model of Jerusalem made in olive wood, which he bought and to which he added 284 soldiers and one terrorist). Given he was paying for virtually everything except the insurance of the exhibits, he was entitled to call the tune – which he very certainly did.

  Buried amidst all the memos, the rewrites and the rewrites of the rewrites there are odd little titbits to be found in this contract. In the list of exhibits needed for the insurers, for example, it was possible to discover some but not all of the secrets of the animatronics. Tweety Pie was made of marine ply and Jesmonite (a solvent-free resin). The swimming fish sticks were constructed of iroko hardwood and birch-faced ply. In another report which ended up online with the contract documents it was clear that the fish sticks were causing problems for the museum’s Health and Safety Working Group. ‘Concentrated chemical required to keep water clear in fish tanks has been risk assessed. Chemical now locked in plant room – large container to be taken away as only small amount will be required.’ The ‘trip hazards around the ice cream van’ were also being monitored – it was all a far cry from an aerosol can and a wall.

  But for the most part there were just pages and pages of legalese – there was the main agreement, plus a separate confidentiality agreement for the council to sign and another for individuals to sign. The museum agreed to use ‘all reasonable endeavours’ to ensure that the ‘privacy and anonymity of the artist and those working with him is preserved . . . and acknowledges that such obligation includes an agreement not to store, distribute or in any way seek to make profit from the sale or release of CCTV footage to any third party’. If the museum was forced to make any disclosure of CCTV footage because of legal requirements ‘it shall obscure the faces of all personnel including the artist’.

  As for the press, Banksy was again in complete control: ‘the Museum shall obtain written approval over all publicity, media, print and website information relating to the exhibition.’ He wanted to protect his identity from the press, but certainly not his presence. All media relations were to be undertaken by Banksy’s PR agent, who would supply the press with any images needed. The museum merely had to provide the staff for the press call. But perhaps the arrangements for the private view of the exhibition, all laid out in great detail, demonstrated most vividly how far he had come from his days as a Bristol vandal. There were to be three sessions and reasonably enough, since Banksy could hardly apply for it himself, the museum had to be responsible for obtaining the licences for alcohol and music. In addition the museum had to submit a list of its guests twenty-one days in advance (the contract did not say what would happen if Banksy did not like any of them). Six hundred guests could be invited to each session. The first session was from 4 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. and for this session the museum had the right to select all the guests. The second session was from 4.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. and here Banksy could select 500 guests and the museum 100. The hours of the third session – party time – were from 7.30 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. and Banksy was entitled to select all the guests. No guesses as to which session everyone wanted to be invited to. Some old friends arrived at the museum to find that with their correctly coloured wristband came a note from Banksy thanking them for their silence over the years – but rule by wristband disintegrated somewhat as the night wore on.

  But this control-freak contract should not be allowed to drown the fact that the show was an absolute triumph. In July 2008 the museum had 20,861 visitors; in July 2009, the year of Banksy, the total was 111,285. With just under 4000 visitors a day it was the second most visited exhibition in Britain in 2009 in The Art Newspaper’s annual attendance survey, just beaten to the top by the Saatchi Gallery’s The Revolution Continues: New Art from China. Banksy’s team had warned the museum that they knew from past experience they were going to be inundated. ‘We couldn’t even envisage what that meant actually, if I am frank with you,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘I think it surprised everyone and we had to manage it.’ The queues sometimes stretched for three or four hours. Simon Cook says, ‘I used to feel quite embarrassed driving past.’ The museum had briefly considered timed ticketing, but Banksy had been against it anyway – the idea of kicking out hardcore fans on the hour every hour would have been hard to stomach. At one point in the queue you had to have your hand stamped but some were so desperate they managed to forge this, forcing the museum to come up with a couple of rather more complicated stamps.

  The Bristol Evening Post ‘Souvenir Edition’ included a map of where the visitors had travelled from – Uruguay and Taiwan being two of the more unexpected countries. But perhaps most important was the fact that a large proportion of the visitors had never been to the museum before, or had not visited it in many years – Banksy was drawing in a new crowd. However, when the visitors were categorised in the way that statisticians delight in categorising, the great majority of them were ‘wealthy achievers’, ‘urban prosperity’ or ‘comfortably off’, so even this, the most populist exhibition imaginable – and free at that – could not quite reach the audience that Banksy might have hoped for.

  The museum did ask if they could extend the exhibition – without success; all they could do was extend the opening hours for its last two weeks. The following summer they put on Art from the New World, described as ‘a big brash exhibition of the new American art scene’. It came with the burlesque queen Dita Von Teese at the opening party and a huge fifteen-foot-high double-scoop ice cream cone in the front hall, created by Buff Monster, just to try and show that the museum would never be quite the same again. The year after that, they reverted to more familiar but very popular territory, with
an exhibition of the late Beryl Cook’s work. But without the magic missing ingredient, these exhibitions were never going to have quite the same pulling power.

  ‘I thought it was a real gift that he gave us actually,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘He could have worked with anyone from the Guggenheim to MOMA in New York but he chose to work with the Bristol Museum. I didn’t do any of the work. I allowed him through the door, that’s all I did. People enjoyed it, they came out smiling, saying “I’ve never seen the collections before, I’ve never seen the museums before.” They loved it.’