Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  Banksy complained in an email to one interviewer: ‘I have a great little team, but I tell you what – they all hate this fucking film. They don’t care if it’s effective, they feel very strongly that Mr Brainwash is undeserving of all the attention. Most street artists feel the same. This film has made me extremely unpopular in my community.’ But the argument over whether Mr Brainwash deserved all the attention – and indeed whether he was ‘real’ – has rather overshadowed what an incredible achievement by Banksy Exit was. To have had the idea for a film, spotted Thierry’s potential, turned him into a ‘street artist’ of sorts, financed the film, and pushed it through to a very successful conclusion and to a possible Oscar is almost unbelievable, but in this case it really is ‘100 per cent true’.

  Twelve years ago Banksy produced a video for the hip-hop artist Blak Twang, filmed largely at Queens Park Rangers’ football ground, and he declared afterwards that film was ‘the only art form, apart from pop graffiti, that matters’. After Exit he had further pronouncements to make. ‘If Michelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel. Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it.’ He has since made the Antics Roadshow (geddit?) for Channel 4, a quirky compilation of assorted acts of rebellion against society including a custard pie thrower, a streaker and the man who gave Winston Churchill’s statue a Mohawk. His next full-length film might well be like a second novel: it will be difficult to live up to what has gone before, but he is almost bound to give it a try.

  As for Mr Brainwash, John Sloss says he is ‘sensitive’ to ‘some harsh stuff’ written about his talent – and it would be hard not to be. But if his goal was fame, he has that; and if it was money he has that too. The ‘ultimate validation’ of Mr Brainwash’s show, according to the film’s narrator, ‘was measured in dollars and cents – by the end of his opening week Thierry would sell nearly a million dollars’ worth of art.’ Leaving aside the fact that Banksy quite clearly feels this is no validation at all, it did mean money in the bank for Thierry.

  And it did not stop there. Los Angeles was followed by New York and a record cover for Madonna. Being on the Brainwash email list I still receive regular notices of new prints about to be released. There was one in the spring of 2011, for instance, of John Lennon’s face outlined in a sort of ‘join the dots’ manner and called, unsurprisingly, Connecting Lennon. The bulk of the edition was priced at $250 a print, although there were five gold prints costing $600 each, and the whole edition would have made $40,000 if all the various colourways sold. (On Mr Brainwash’s site a couple of months later, Connecting Lennon was marked as sold out.) At the end of the email was the usual impressive warning that comes with Brainwash offers: ‘Please note: Due to overwhelming demand on certain print releases, Paypal cannot process the orders quick enough and may oversell. Any necessary refunds will be made within the hour.’ Not bad for a failed cameraman.

  Fifteen

  Art Without a Theory

  ‘A graffiti artist has taken this year’s Turner Prize,’ wrote The Times’s art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston as she heralded the winner of the 2009 prize. So had Banksy, the man who had once painted ‘Mind the Crap’ on the steps of the Tate. actually won the Turner Prize? Well, no. Unsurprisingly this was someone else entirely, someone who most street art fans had probably never heard of: Richard Wright, a painter memorably described as ‘a thinking person’s graffiti artist’.

  Wright had covered the whole of one of the Tate’s large walls with an intricate, absorbing pattern in gold leaf. It lacked the adrenalin, the speed, the lawlessness of traditional graffiti but it was certainly a painstaking and intricate work. No cutting knife and stencil for him; instead he used both a single needle and a wheel with many needles attached to punch minute holes through paper to create his pattern. Instead of a spray can he used chalk which went through these needle holes on to the wall, and on the faint outline the chalk had left once the paper had been removed he glued the gold leaf. The work, said The Times, ‘pays homage to the cartooning techniques of the great Renaissance artists’. My instant thought on entering Wright’s gallery was that it reminded me of my mother’s heavy brocade curtains. It took some time to banish that thought and really start to enjoy it.

  One of the visitors who left their comments on the noticeboard had a similar feeling: ‘Richard Wright’s work looks like the wallpaper in my nan’s house.’ But most visitors loved it and particularly they loved the impermanence of it, the fact that it would be painted over once the Turner Prize exhibition finished. ‘His theory that nothing lasts for ever is the truth.’ ‘Absolutely breathtaking. Knowing his work will never last makes you appreciate it all the more.’

  The art critics were equally enthusiastic, drawn in particular to the ephemeral nature of his work. ‘He is a painter for our time and only for our time because he does not want his works to last.’ ‘What defiant integrity, what a clever comment on the transience of riches.’ ‘Wright suggests that we question the power of capitalist markets, perhaps. His murals cannot be owned. They will be painted over at the end of the exhibition. All that glitters is not sold in Wright’s glimmering world.’

  But ten months later I was at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park. The smell of big money wafted through the tented encampment and my trail soon led to the stand of Larry Gagosian, contemporary art’s most important dealer with eleven galleries around the world. I had read that Gagosian represented Wright, which seemed rather confusing since it appeared from the Turner Prize that there would be nothing permanent to sell.

  The Gagosian stand was staffed by assistants so formidable you hardly dared look at them, let alone talk to them. Of course, when one did speak she was very nice and very helpful. She said she had two Richard Wrights available, one very intricate piece priced at $80,000 and a smaller one at $35,000. So not all his works are as ephemeral as his fans might believe.

  Here are two ‘graffiti artists’ who both produce work that is ephemeral, as well as studio work – in Wright’s case it is work on paper rather than canvas – designed to be hung up and sold. So what does Wright have that Banksy doesn’t have? Why is it that Wright has eleven pieces in the Tate collection while Banksy has none? Banksy has featured only twice in the Tate and one of those occasions was when he hung up his own picture there. (The second time was in 2007, when Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize with a detailed re-creation of the late peace campaigner Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest, for which two paintings Banksy had given to Haw were meticulously copied – at the time of writing the originals were being held in storage in east London by the police, who removed them when Haw’s space was reduced.)

  Wright’s work is praised for being ‘wilfully elusive’, as one critic put it. Banksy on the other hand is seen as almost too obvious, too easy to understand. There is no particular hidden meaning and none of the qualities – ‘violence, chaos and paranoid mania’ – that graffiti writers can sometimes offer. There are of course hidden references in Banksy’s work. To take just one example, his portrait of Queen Victoria enjoying lesbian sex reflects the urban myth that she would not sign a bill outlawing homosexuality unless lesbianism was removed from it, since she did not believe women did such things. And his work does still have some of the qualities – the anti-authoritarianism, the subversiveness – of his past, although perhaps less so as the years roll on. But what you see is what you get, and in the world of contemporary art that is seldom enough.

  Thirty-five years ago Tom Wolfe wrote the classic diatribe about modern art, The Painted Word, basing his onslaught on a paragraph written by the New York Times’s then chief art critic, Hilton Kramer: ‘Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial – the means by which our experie
nce of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.’ They were words, said Wolfe, ‘which gave the game away’. In short, ‘Without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting . . . Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.’

  This, one suspects, is Banksy’s problem, although he certainly would not see it as a problem: there is no theory, persuasive or otherwise, behind his work. The viewer can connect instantly with what they see. Five years ago, just before Banksy – or rather his prices – took off into the stratosphere, Marc Schiller, writing on www.woostercollective.com, put a compelling case in his defence:

  We now see Banksy as the greatest thing that has happened not only to the street/urban art movement, but to contemporary art in general. Most people need entry points to become comfortable with things that are new and for millions of people Banksy is the entry point they need in not only seeing art in a new way, but in accepting art as part of their daily lives. Like Andy Warhol before him, Banksy has almost single handedly redefined what art is to a lot of people who probably never felt they appreciated art before . . .

  Shepard Fairey put it rather more concisely, calling him ‘the most important living artist in the world’.

  ‘Accessible’ was the adjective I heard most often when listening to people talk about Banksy, with sometimes – but certainly not always – the slight undertone that ‘accessible’ art is art that is all too easy. It was an attitude probably best and most harshly expressed by the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, who was on the jury that chose Wright as the Turner Prize winner. Banksy, he wrote,

  appeals to people who hate the Turner prize. It’s art for people who think that artists are charlatans. This is what most people think, so Banksy is truly a popular creation: a great British commonsense antidote to all that snobby pretentious art that real people can’t understand. Yet to put your painting in a public place and make this demand on attention while putting so little thought into it reveals a laziness in the roots of your being. After wallowing in this stuff for a while, I almost found myself hating Banksy’s fans. But actually, it’s fine to like him so long as you don’t kid yourself that this is ‘art’ . . . in Banksy the philistines are getting their revenge.

  But, being so much part of the art world, perhaps Jones underestimates how exclusionary this world can feel. In his recent book, How Pleasure Works, the Yale academic Paul Bloom argues that ‘Traditional art is about what is in the world; more modern works are about the very process of representation. An appreciation of much of modern art therefore requires specific expertise. Any dope can marvel at a Rembrandt, but only an elite few can make any sense of a work such as Sherrie Levine’s Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), and so only an elite few are going to enjoy it.’

  Banksy would almost certainly be happy with the idea that ‘any dope’ can enjoy his work along with that of Rembrandt. Indeed in an (emailed) interview with the New Yorker he dared to mount an attack on the obscurity which seems to be an essential part of contemporary art. ‘I don’t think art is much of a spectator sport these days. I don’t know how the art world gets away with it, it’s not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the DJ says, “If you read the thesis that comes with this, it would make more sense.”’

  His 2009 exhibition in Bristol required neither a thesis nor a short explanation, just a vaguely jokey map showing (roughly) where to find his pieces among the museum’s other work. In contrast, a year later the Saatchi Gallery staged an exhibition of the new generation of British artists, Newspeak: British Art Now, where it was easy to feel completely left out of the loop without the excellent notes that accompanied the exhibition. Faced with Rupert Norfolk’s Wall 2006, consisting of 125 carved limestone rocks, it was comforting to read in the notes that the work requires ‘curiosity and an investment of time to be fully appreciated’. But other works required more than that. For Pablo Bronstein’s Monument in the Style of Michael Graves on the Debris of the Bastille, the notes told us that the painting is based on Jean-Pierre Louis Laurent Houël’s The Storming of the Bastille given ‘a facelift à la pomo architect Michael Graves’ to present an ‘alternate history’. But what if you don’t know that? The painting does not really survive without the explanation. The late Cy Twombly produced work that was, according to The Times’s headline writer, ‘Graffiti of the Gods’; but after visiting an exhibition of Twombly and Nicolas Poussin’s work at Dulwich and reading the gallery guidance – ‘the jittery tangles of pencil seemingly caught between an utterance and a stutter’ – I was still mystified, left with a feeling that Twombly’s work was for scholars rather than spectators.

  With Banksy no one is made to feel inferior. And that’s a considerable relief, relief born from the fact that we don’t have to figure out the meaning of Twombly’s stutters, Hirst’s spots or Tracey Emin’s tampons (actually Tracey Emin often explains things for us in long handwritten notes that accompany some of her pieces).

  Riikka Kuittinen, who acquired several Banksy prints to add to the V&A’s continually updated Print Collection, is one who uses ‘accessible’ as a term of approval. Having first seen his work on the streets, she was overjoyed to find he produced prints as well. ‘People get it. It appeals to a wide range. You don’t have to know anything about anything necessarily to get it and I think contemporary art, sometimes unfairly, has this reputation of being difficult, whereas Banksy’s work isn’t difficult . . . I don’t think accessible means bad at all. The Van Gogh show at the Royal Academy would have got how many thousands of people visiting and still the work is good. Because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s bad.’

  So yes, Banksy’s work is much easier for the viewer than many of his contemporaries’, and while the critics might not like it he has managed to attract a whole new audience into the art world. It can get embarrassing at times. The Boston Globe interviewed a cyclist who had ridden over to see a new Banksy put up to publicise Exit Through the Gift Shop in the spring of 2010. ‘I have never seen something like this in Boston before,’ said this fan, who was in his early twenties. ‘It gives Boston a strange sense of worth.’ How could Boston with all its history need Banksy to give it a sense of worth? But the Croydon builder buying a Banksy wall, many of the crowd queuing for hours to get into the Bristol Museum, the financial adviser turned gallery owner, Banksy’s followers on the web, are all new converts to the incredibly broad church who have been gathered from the wilderness by Banksy and led into the art world.

  In 2011 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) put on the most far-reaching display of ‘street art and graffiti’ yet seen. It was three years behind Tate Modern’s exhibition but it set out to be considerably more comprehensive. Banksy was there in impressive style, but so were about fifty other artists. The exhibition could certainly have survived without Banksy but it is impossible to believe that it would have happened in the first place but for the Banksy effect – the drawing power that both his painting and his film have given the street art world.

  Matt Gleason, who runs the web-based Coagula Art Journal, admitted, ‘I wanted to trash this show,’ but in a generally favourable review he called it ‘a show meant for people who don’t go to museums . . . it was also MOCA putting all those academic artists on notice that “you are no longer welcome, you are no longer wanted.” Your art world is over, your theory is dead. We want bodies here, we want popular artists, popularity. We want a critical mass and you are not going to get that with a lot of minimal art, you are not going to get that with a lot of abstract painting.’

  One thing he noticed at the preview for the show was that people would walk up to artists and ask for their autograph – another sign, as the Financial Times had noted a year earlier, that ‘art and artists are attracting the fans, the adulation, the attention – and the bank balances – that were once the terrain of rock stars.’ It was an exhibition, Gleason said, that signalled, ‘
This is the new art world and it already has its own art history dating way back.’

  Of course the contemporary art world is not over – as Gleason suggests it might be – but Banksy has almost single-handedly produced a new art world for a new audience, running alongside the existing world and now, slowly but surely, within it. And there is room for both.

  Banksy’s problem lies not in his art but in the fact that he now makes considerable money from this art market and the fans who collected him from the beginning can no longer afford him. Richard Wright can say ‘I like all my work to disappear’ and then sell his work on paper via Gagosian and no one seems bothered in the slightest. But it sometimes seems as though Banksy is almost considered a criminal for making money from his art. He himself recognises the problem, telling Time Out in New York: ‘I wouldn’t want to be remembered as the guy who contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities. I do sometimes question whether I’m part of the solution or part of the problem . . . There’s obviously nothing wrong with selling your art – only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it’s confusing to know how far you should take it.’

  On the one hand he has to deal with the likes of the Splashers, a short-lived group with, one suspects, a minimal membership, which sprang up in New York towards the end of 2006 and was dedicated to splashing paint over street works by the likes of Swoon, Shepard Fairey and Banksy. The Splashers called the work of such street artists ‘a trough for gallery owners and critics’, arguing that once street art is introduced into the museum or the advertising world it becomes nothing more than ‘bourgeois-sponsored rebellion . . . both utterly impotent politically and fantastically lucrative for everyone involved’. (The Splashers attempted to make sure that none of their work would find its way into collectors’ hands by adding a short warning at the bottom of the communiqués they pasted over or next to a piece of street art. It read: ‘The removal of this document may result in injury, as we have mixed the wheatpaste with tiny shards of glass.’)