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Banksy
versus
Nigel Ayers describes his visit to see the 'expanded-media cartoons' of Banksy in Bristol
As we arrived
outside the
Banksy crossed from subculture to mainstream a
few years back, following his move from Bristol to the art capitals of
the world, a bestselling coffee-table art book, and his work getting
regular exposure on TV and in the international press. Not to mention
the phenomenally high prices being paid for his paintings at auction.
So this is the local boy
giving something back to the hometown that still bears the marks of his
early stencil-work. The flyer says “PG Contains scenes of a childish
nature some adults may find disappointing”.
The queue turned out to be
for one and a half hours. I usually avoid events you have to queue for,
but it was a nice sunny day and we were treated to the occasional sight
of middle aged women joggers dressed in pink bras puffing and panting
their way up the hill in support of a breast cancer charity. Also I
found the queue added to the theatre of the occasion, and as you got
closer to the entrance of the museum, the excitement seemed to build
with the first whiffs of aerosol paint.
The
artist has chosen to hire this museum and cover all the expenses for
what must be his first major show in this country. And admission is
free. And there’s no Banksy merchandising at the museum, apart from the
book “Wall and Piece” (which you find all over Bristol anyway) though
the Oxfam shop across the road is doing a nice line in Banksy stickers
and postcards.
So, we found ourselves
being corralled into this old stuffy museum and being greeted by
friendly museum
At the entrance,
there’s a
As you shuffle down the
corridor, there’s a candlelit shrine in homage to the recently deceased
pop star, Michael Jackson (below). It’s an oil painting in
Victorian genre style of a fairytale cottage in dark woods, with The
King of Pop as the wicked witch Jacko leaning out of the doorway
offering candy sticks to tempt two lost children inside.
Once you’ve got through all
this entrance malarkey, you’re free to wander round the displays, and
the museum is large and not so crowded once you get inside. And you’re
allowed to take photographs.
The first room is
exclusively Art of Banksy, with a militant looking false ceiling of
army-surplus camouflage net. And behind a screen of chicken wire you can
see a full-scale mock-up of the artist’s studio, hung with loads of
cardboard stencils, newspaper headlines about Banksy’s graffiti, filing
cabinets are labelled “good ideas” “bad ideas” “other people’s ideas”
and “porn”, a knitted cardigan that reads THUG FOR LIFE hangs off the
artist’s chair. There’s the sound of a London radio phone-in on some
Banksy controversy or other. On the easel is an oil painting of
pixellated-faced portrait of a hoody in a baseball cap, the same
self-portrait used in the Wall and Piece book.
In this gallery
setting, it is possible to admire the quality of the brushstrokes and to
examine closely the various techniques used to remix and remodel. On a
craft side, it’s obvious that the guy works with a range from hands-on
traditional craft skills to computerised techniques. He can draw, he’s
pretty good at painting and can cut a mean stencil. And he’ll tend to
abandon technical virtuosity or anything “deep” in favour of quick
visual impact.
Rather than calling it the
culturally-loaded term “art”, Banksy-work may be more precisely
described as expanded media-cartooning which plays with the signifiers
of modern urban experience. Each piece within the show works as an
easily-readable visual joke. The humour is often cheesy and has gently
satirical edge, the context and framing of the work is vital to its
meaning. A lot of the jokes are mild, usually visual puns or updates of
familiar old paintings. Both the strength and weakness of his output
lies in the fact that rather than serious message, serious technique, or
serious “cool”, Banksy tends to err on the side of cheeky humour.
The animatronic
effects are of
Throughout the rest of the
museum, there a mixture of the museum’s collection and additions by
Banksy. There’s a burned out icecream van converted into an information
booth, modified faux marble statues and joke oil paintings inserted into
the museum’s existing collection of old masters. You find yourself on a
treasure hunt of Banksy interventions, and sometimes you’re not quite
sure what if you’re looking at is part of the museum’s regular display,
or a Banksy addition. An ornate gypsy caravan has been issued with an
eviction notice. A stuffed fox in a British wildlife display holds a
bloodied Countryside Alliance placard.
A common technique in
Banksy’s art is to play on the edges of the surface on which he is
painting. Figures wander out of holes to take a break, a waterfall
spills out of the bottom of a painting, UFO's fly out of the canvases
zapping ancient galleons with death rays. The grit and mess of the urban
environment is integrated into the stencilled paintings, giving texture
and trompe de l’oeil visual puns: painted figures engaged in the act of
painting.
Everything in this show is
humorous, and it’s just as often daft, trite and sloppily done as it is
carefully executed. The work is both about messing with illusions and
creating the illusion of Banksy as pixellated superhero dodging the
surveillance cameras, breaking free from Disney-matrix mind control and
sticking two fingers up at Burger King. The meaning of these images is
created by the way they are set up in this particularly stuffy kind of
museum: the kind of museum you get dragged round on school visits, and
not all
I really enjoyed the show,
it was far better than I expected. The dodgy quality of a lot of the
work humanised it and made it seem more intimate and uncontrived. As
well as there being more jokes, there is an ethical dimension to
Banksy’s work which makes a refreshing change from a lot of contemporary
art-bollocks.
Looking at criticism of
Banksy, I think a rather false argument arises about whether his art is
“subversive”. Certainly Banksy consistently plays with the idea of
subversion, in the imagery used, in the means of production, and in his
pseudo-anonymity. Throughout his work there is a constant ridicule of
authority figures and institutions, including contemporary art
institutions. This is in common with a lot of youth- or
subculture-oriented cultural product. It has a broadly
leftist/anarchist/punk/environmentalist undercurrent and consistently
celebrates “street” culture. Twenty or thirty years ago this kind of art
might have been seen as more subversive than it does these days. Back
then, along with the CND, Trades Unionists and new age travellers,
artists like this might have attracted the attention of the security
services, and even found themselves on Maggie Thatcher’s hit list.
Nowadays a few minutes on Google will tell the shape-shifting lizards in
charge of the secret state all they need to know about this artist’s
real name, what he looks like, where he went to school, who his Facebook
friends are, etc.
Nigel Ayers 25//7/09 |
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And
it also added to the irony of the occasion, as you’re shepherded into a
really old-fashioned museum by security guards employed by an artist who
has built his reputation on dodging security guards. And this is to see
art that has an image that is supposed to be way too rebellious to be
sanctioned by fusty old institutions such as this. 
The
walls of the rest of this gallery are covered in “original” Banksys (as
far as “original” work is concerned, just about every image in the show
is a remix or update of existing cultural product), paintings on canvas,
modified reproductions of paintings, small drawings. 
In
the next room are the pieces that I’ve really come to see, the
animatronic petshop. There are surveillance cameras acting like roosting
birds, fish fingers swimming round a goldfish bowl and lots of little
cages with pet sausages wiggling about in them. 
cool
and white-walled and trendily-converted former industrial-space like the
Tate, Arnolfini, Exchange, etc etc. 
If
being subversive means it undermines the way we currently relate to art,
globalised capitalism, and the mythology of artist-genius, then of
course Banksy’s work isn’t subversive at all. The way the world is at
the moment, to work as an autonomous artist and to live out the myth of
individualism by “expressing yourself” requires an amount of financial
cushioning, whatever scale you work on. Banksy is best-known for his
unsanctioned painterly interventions into the civic landscape. Remaining
anonymous may be sensible to remain ahead of the legal repercussions
associated with this kind of activity, but this is a pseudo-anonymity,
as the signature BANKSY has often featured heavily. The artist with the
Banksy tag has been using the celebrity-commodity system in a very pure
form, creating the specific artist name, artworks related to this name
and the idea of one person as a genius behind it. Speculation about the
“real person” behind the name creates a media story which Banksy
continues to exploit. So the artwork follows the specific rules of
capitalist production, aimed to accumulate economic capital and/or
symbolic capital which is the currency of all scenes and subcultures.