Gough, Paul, “Bansky: What’s the fuss and why does it matter?”
in Joseph M. Siracusa (ed.) Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences:
It’s everyone’s business, Routledge. 2016, pp. 1-13.
ISBN 978-1-138-20555-0
Paul.gough@rmit.edu.au
http://www.paulgough.org
“Bansky: What’s the fuss and why does it matter?”
Paul Gough
Prankster, polemicist, painter, Banksy is arguably the world’s most
famous unknown street artist. To the press and public, the
question of Banksy’s identity is more intriguing than the
legitimacy of his work and the price that celebrities, dealers and
other wealthy patrons are prepared to pay for it. His greatest
triumph has been his ability to keep that identity swathed in
mystery, even though the artist’s name is said to be in the public
domain beyond all reasonable doubt, readily available on
Wikipedia and subject to myriad press revelations in the past five
years. Anonymity is less important than the impact of his art,
which is more than likely created, fabricated and situated by a
group of collaborators. For this reason alone Banksy might best be
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understood as a ‘he’, ‘she’ or even ‘they’, but for all intents and
purposes Banksy is widely-held to be a white male, now in his
early to mid-forties, born in Bristol, western England and brought
up in a stable middle class family, a pupil from a private cathedral
school and a one-time goalkeeper in the infamous Sunday soccer
team The Easton Cowboys. At least that is what we think we know.
These are the known unknowns.
Notoriously cryptic, darkly humourous, Banksy is a global
phenomenon, a personality without a persona, a criminal without
a record, and a paradox within the world of art. The New Yorker
described how Banksy tries to flip ‘off the art world...[and begs] it
to notice him at the same time.’ For his part he has described that
same world as ‘the biggest joke going...a rest home for the
overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak’.
Banksy has amassed a remarkable reputation for his provocative,
wittily politicized interventions, what one critic has termed his
‘red nose rebellion’: he has radicalized the art of stenciling; painted
peace motifs on the West Bank barrier in Israel; secretly located an
inflatable figure of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner in DisneyLand’s
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Rocky Mountain Railroad Roller-coaster Ride; and hung hoax artifacts
in the greatest museums in the world. He is ‘both a lefty and a
tweaker of lefty pieties’, he is a champion of just causes and in the
same breath a caustic lampooner of those very same causes. His art
appears to takes sides, but he rarely does. At a London anti-war
demonstration in 2003, he distributed stencilled signs that read ‘I
Don’t Believe In Anything. I’m Just Here for the Violence.’ He has
that disarming habit of ‘satirising his own sanctimony’, or to put
in his words: ‘I have no interest in ever coming out, I figure there
are enough self-opinionated assholes trying to get their ugly little
faces in front of you as it is.’
Contrary by instinct and with a love-hate rapport with his home
city in England, it was no surprise that he chose an adversarial title
for his 2009 blockbuster retrospective show: ‘Bansky versus Bristol
Museum’. ‘This is the first show I've ever done’, he is said to have
commented, ‘where taxpayers' money is being used to hang my
pictures up rather than scrape them off.’ Few of the hundreds of
thousands of visitors who attended were put off by the
provocative title. Indeed its anti-cultural message may have
aroused and encouraged them to queue patiently to enter, possibly
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for the first time, the marble halls and civic grandeur of Bristol
Museum and Art Gallery. Greeted by a burnt-out ice cream van,
which doubled as an information booth and anchor-piece for the
show, the artist’s work was secreted throughout the labyrinth of
rooms, corridors and galleries, hidden amongst the fossils, the
stuffed animals and the museum’s notable collection of Chinese
pottery. Few visitors were disappointed; indeed, most were
delighted and invigorated. Not only had Banksy radically remixed the permanent art collection but he, and his team of
fabricators, scene painters and animatronic engineers, had
mastered the art of surprising and irreverent juxtaposition, mixing
wit with outright vulgarity. In addition to his trademark stenciled
paintings there were walls of wittily modified canvases and a
menagerie of life-sized stuffed and animated beasts: a muzzled
lamb; a rabbit applying lip-stick; a cheetah transformed into a fur
coat; Classical plaster cast statues laden with Gucci shopping bags;
aquaria full of wriggling fish fingers; a full-size policeman clad in
riot-gear gently bobbing on a child's rocking horse, and hotdog
sausages that writhed disturbingly inside their buns.
Nearly 309,000 people flocked to the six-week long event in
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Bristol. Most had queued for an average of just under three hours.
Popular reviews were ecstatic. Visitors from all over the UK, from
Europe and beyond spoke enthusiastically of the wit and the
subterfuge, the caustic edge, the colourful cynicism. How, wrote
one commentator, could you not like someone who said about his
own exhibition:
The people of Bristol have always been very good to me – I
decided the best way to show my appreciation was by
putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets
in their museum. I could have taken the show to a lot of
places, but they do a very nice cup of tea in the museum.
Banksy as ever was notoriously elusive. Apparently, one of his
staff told a journalist trying to get an interview, that ‘Mr. Banks is
away polishing one of his yachts’. Elusive perhaps but always in
full control. Banksy and his team laid down strict guidelines about
opening times, sales of related merchandise, and the fulfillment of
a carefully drawn up legal contract between the museum, the city
council and his office. As one rather disgruntled former
collaborator told me during an interview for my research; ‘The one
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thing you have to remember about working with Banksy:
everything gets done by his rules. Never forget that.’
Through such exhibitions and interventions Banksy cocks a snoot
at ‘high’ culture whilst acknowledging its impact on his own
formation. Many critics feel otherwise, regarding his exploits as
merely the interventions of that fondly regarded folklore
character, the harmless renegade. A significant segment of the
city’s elders have little time for cocky graffiti artists with their
mindless scribble, their unreadable ‘tags’ and their wanton
vandalism of ‘innocent’ property. To many citizens Banksy and his
posturing is far from cosy: his work is held to be offensive by
some, criminal damage by many. Banksy’s art is predicated on the
tension between these two positions; he thrives on gross
dichotomizing, on wilful polarization, what has been termed the
modern ‘versus’ habit. One thing must always be opposed to the
other not in the Hegelian hope of achieving synthesis, or a
negotiated peace, but with a determination that neither side
should concede, that total submission of one side or the other is
the only resolution.
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BANKSY’S STREET ART: DOES IT MATTER?
As a painter and polemicist Banksy’s work appears to matter to a
wide range of constituencies. It matters to those who seek access to
an art form that is relevant and risky; it matters to those who
regard the very idea of cultural regeneration through popular
street art as threadbare. In another dimension, it matters to those
who want to take a commission from the sales of original works or
multiple impressions that are occasionally released into the
market. It also matters to the underworld of street artists, ‘writers’,
and grafittists who recoil against the middle-class appropriation of
one of their kind but also enjoy his frequent patronage, and it
matters to those who have strived to revive and promote the
iconography of the stencil. Above all, and perhaps most
unquantifiably, Banksy’s work matters to Banksy as a creative
individual, an urban interventionist who is constantly pushing at
the limitations of his, her or their own capability to be disruptive
and meaningful.
‘WALL AND PIECE’: THE IMPACT ON THE STREET SCENE
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‘Street art’ connects with contemporary and urgent themes
through activism, reclamation, and edgy subversion. Pitted against
the combined weight of civic authority, communities and public
property, its multiple formats have allowed artists and street
writers a transgressive platform to reach a broader and more
diverse audience than many traditional art forms. As a vernacular
cultural form, street art has branched out from the clandestine selfnaming celebration of ‘I am here’ and ‘here I draw’ to a didactic
and highly polemicized display achieved largely through pasting
and stencils. Banksy has largely achieved this with little more than
the innovative use of a stencil, a simple graphic design format
once intended entirely for utilitarian and military use.
Contemporary graffiti artists, or ‘writers’ as they are known, work
within a strict hierarchy that self-ranks ambition, daring and
calligraphic innovation. At the apex are those writers who create
the imposing wildstyle exhibition pieces, large-scale vivid
inscriptions that call for a high degree of graphic invention and
daring. At the other extreme are the wheatpasters (bill stickers)
and stencil-cutters, who are regarded within the subculture’s peer
community as lesser writers, an underclass who rely on craft skills
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that are held to be quaint, even fraudulent. Their work is often
dismissed as being mass-produced and reprographic rather than
singular and autographic.
Inevitably, the arena of graffiti is a highly contested and
fragmented one. Like many other street ‘writers’ who have gained
commercial and reputational standing, Banksy’s position is
regarded by current practitioners as heavily, and irreversibly,
compromised. Not only because he earns considerable sums from
the sale of his work but that he has built a reputation around a
very limited creative format - the stencil – and relies increasingly
on the contribution of a more talented and creatively gifted group
of collaborators. In Banksy we can see evidence of the continuing
post-industrial feud between the authorial voice and the machinerun, mass-produced, standardized art run.
A common refrain amongst his peer group is that ‘Banksy is
ruining graffiti’. His work in stencil has given rise to a flood of
uninitiated neophytes saturating the public realm with weak
imitations. As Luke Muyskens argues:
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Not only is their work generally shoddy and uninspired, but
their etiquette is practically blasphemous in most graffiti
circles. These Banksy emulators are doing nothing more than
mimicking the work and stylings of another artist – which, in
a culture built on originality, is missing the point entirely.
Bemoaning the ‘Banksy cult’, Muyskens vents his frustration with
the ‘wannabes’ who lack respect for the ‘established’ graffiti scene.
Fellow writer Eros AKB endorsed this irritation stating, ‘[s]ome
seem to not have any respect for those that obtained the space
prior to them. I think that in the future there will be a fight for the
space between the wheatpaste/stencil artists and the graffiti
artists’. There is of course a profound irony about all this: the
stencil is essentially an egalitarian format, an artistic practice that
is firmly rooted in the notion of community. Furthermore, it is a
practice that can be readily, if not expertly, ‘mastered’ by all,
constituting what commentators such as Emily Truman have
described as an ‘informal document of citizenship’ which links the
originator with the wider community through the act of
‘think[ing] up an idea, put[ting] it on a piece of paper or plastic,
cut[ting] it out and paint[ing] it somewhere’.
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Street art thrives on rivalry and competition; it also embraces the
ephemeral. Writers outcompete each other to create their works in
the most outlandish locations and in the most inaccessible sites in
the urban environment. Writers also compete to create the most
elaborate and baroque iconography. Wildstyle is perhaps the most
extreme form of highly-stylized competitive calligraphy: a matrix
of interwoven and overlapping forms (intricately drawn as arrows,
curves, flares, or letters) with a volumetric appearance, as opposed
to the lineal signature of the plainer ‘tag’. So radically transformed
is the visual language that – to the eye of non-graffiti practitioners
– the ‘piece’ is rendered quite arcane, indecipherable as language,
and impenetrable. Larger set-piece wall drawings and paintings
are known as a production and are invariably drawn by a ‘crew’ (a
gang of accomplices). Yet even these extraordinarily ornate wall
works have a short lifespan. Many are painted out by rivals or
fellow ‘writers’ within days, sometimes hours, despite the efforts
that have gone into their creation:
On the other side of [Leake] street is a lone artist with about
a dozen cans of paint at his feet. He is wearing goggles and
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full breathing apparatus to protect himself from the paint
fumes, so he looks more like a welder than an artist […] he
has been here since ten this morning, painting a piece which
suits his name, planes exploding like darts out of
everywhere. He is not using stencils, but it is not traditional
graffiti, rather it is freehand graffiti without a letter in sight;
he is using the spray can to paint what he wants without
following any of the rules.
To watch a group of practiced street artists at work on a large
exhibition piece, is to witness draughtsmen (the scene is highly
gendered) their notebooks and preparatory sketches in hand, the
vast ‘canvas’ of by a large wall, prepared for a lengthy (invariably
illegal) engagement, armed with little more than plastic carrier
bags crammed with aerosol paint-cans. What matters most to such
artists is the very act of marking the wall, and of passing on the
innate knowledge accrued through the very illicit act of doing.
‘Kids’, concludes one artist, ‘will only aspire to what they can see.
And that’s why you do your best work, so that kids can look and
aspire to master the craft’.
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The challenge – of the wall, of the law, of each other’s talent - is
what also really matters. Either through envy, turf war, or base
rivalry Banksy has had a running battle, now nearly a decade long,
with a fellow crew. The bitter competitiveness with ‘Team Robbo’
has been wilfully lost in the mythologies of the graffiti fraternity,
but it inevitably results in any new piece of public artwork by
Banksy being damaged, overpainted or defaced by his rivals.
Quite how this merits press coverage as ‘vandalism’ is to stretch
the tautologies of illegal wall painting too far, but it has added
immeasurably to the mystique that surrounds both sets of
perpetrators.
‘BEYOND THE WALL”: THE IMPACT ON THE MARKET
How does Banksy make a living? Indeed, how does any artist
whose canvas is the urban realm make his or her money? In 2004
Banksy established his first company in the form of his own
gallery in London. ‘Pictures on Walls’, or POW as it is known, is a
‘front of house’ salesroom for his own work and a highly select
cadre of fellow-artists. It was an attempt to bring some order to the
haphazard selling, circulation and recirculation of editions of
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prints with unknown print runs, numerous signed and unsigned
proofs and uncatalogued extras. Indeed, Banksy’s first ever print
run, Rude Copper – a stencil of a British police constable ‘giving the
finger’ in an offensive gesture – had a print run of 250, of which
fifty were ‘signed’. Sold then, in 2002, at £40 a piece, today they
each may fetch £8,000, possibly even £13,000 for the select few that
have a hand-sprayed background. POW corralled Banksy’s
creative works within a recognisable commercial organisation,
tapping into his innate business acumen, but by 2008 his value
(and standing) as a serious artist was being compromised by theft,
fraud and plain incompetence. His stencilled work, after all, was
easy to forge and fake; a sequence of unauthorised exhibitions of
one-off paintings, multiple copies of the same image, and
unnumbered editions of prints was causing mayhem in the art and
auction market. Forgers were facing prison sentences for selling
fakes through elaborate on-line scams. In January 2008 a new
Banksy company was formed, fully owned and commanded by
POW. Pest Control Office Limited took over control of Banksy’s
work and tried to bring order to the flood of fakes, forgeries, and
unauthorized fine art prints and ‘original’ artworks that had been
circulating from London to New York, but mostly via eBay where
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fake receipts, trumped-up email exchanges and other ruses had
been contrived to prove a trail of false provenance.
Pest Control put a stop to this illicit trade. For £65 anyone could
have their Banksy print authenticated. If it was a genuine artwork
the office would issue a certificate of authenticity which had
stapled to it one half of the ‘Di face Tenner’, a £10 note faked by
Banksy with Lady Diana Windsor’s face on it. The ‘banknote’ had
a handwritten ID number which could be matched to the number
on the other half which was held by Pest Control. It is, as journalist
Will Ellsworth-Jones cheekily notes, ‘A fake to prove that you do
indeed have the genuine article – what could be more Banksy than
that?’
Pest Control’s rigorous process of verification cleaned up the
market and regained some control over Banksy’s intellectual
property and commercial rights, but there were unforeseen
consequences. There are many buyers who possess what are
without doubt genuine prints or canvases by Banksy but which his
office refuses to authenticate as genuine.
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There are those, on the other hand, who queue for many hours for
limited edition prints or unique artworks and then advertise them
often within minutes for higher prices on eBay or other internet
sites. Indeed there are many who believe that the Banksy sales
phenomenon would not have happened had it not been for eBay.
Commentating on how the painter’s notoriety seemed to coincide
with the advent of online shopping, one dealer said:
No one flipped art before then. It just hadn’t happened. But
with Banksy people queued for four or five hours for a print
and by the time they were out of the queue it would be on
eBay.
It was, said Banksy’s first manager Steve Lazarides ‘a new gold
rush’:
You could go out and buy a Banksy print at 250 quid. The
next day you could sell it for two and half grand. What other
investment is going to make ten times your money
overnight? And the next owner, if they were lucky, could sell
16
it on again for five grand… so it was a no-brainer in those
days of easy credit.
Fascinated by the dark humour and edgy irreverence of Banksy’s
art the public have become equally obsessed by the sale prices of
his work. Single items bought in minor group exhibitions in the
late 1990s for a few hundred pounds have since fetched tens of
thousands of pounds, but only where they have been vouched for
by the Lady Di Tenner. In 2002 it is estimated that he needed to
sell fifteen different prints to make just under £500,000; four years
later in 2006 a run of six prints first shown in Los Angeles raised
over £1 million. In 2009 he could make the same sum by selling
just a few of the same print. During his ‘artist’s residency’ in New
York City in 2013 a pop-up market stall was stacked high with
images stencilled on canvas each selling for sixty dollars a piece.
Few sold on the day. Those that did can now command a price of
up to 200,000 US dollars. It is not only auction rooms that have
done extraordinarily well out of Banksy, canny buyers who are
willing to face daunting queues and laborious gallery hunts can
track down original artwork or multiples with guaranteed
provenance as ‘originals’.
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Although it is not easy to access exact figures, Banksy has been
estimated (in a Forbes Lifestyle article) to have a net worth
upwards of US$20 million. True or not, that figure (and the
interest shown in it) clearly irks the artist. In the hardcore street art
fraternity commercial success has long been regarded a mark of
failure for a graffiti artist. To many of his former allies his
subversiveness does rather diminish as his prices rise. But that is
changing as the art market adjusts to the street art phenomenon.
‘I’m kind of old fashioned’ Banksy has put on record, ‘in that I like
to eat so it’s always good to earn money’. There is little doubt that
he does make significant sums from his work, but it is also clear
that he could make more than he does. In an authorized
‘interview’ he told The New Yorker magazine:
I have been called a sell-out but I give away thousands of
paintings for free, how many more do you want? I think it
was easier when I was the underdog, and I had a lot of
practice in it. The money that my work fetches these days
makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that’s an easy problem to
solve – you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don’t
think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then
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trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for me…. I
love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies.
To compensate for his nervousness at becoming too estranged
from his street roots Banksy frequently donates work to political
causes. In 2011 he gave £200,000 from the multiple sales of a single
print to the Russian art collective Voina, a group that performs
public protest happenings in the face of oppressive Soviet
authorities. The funds helped secure the release of two its
members from Russian prison in 2011. The same year he created a
limited edition souvenir print of a Tesco Value petrol bomb only
days after the high street convenience chainstore had been torched
in a Bristol street riot. Proceeds were given to local charities to pay
legal fees for local squatters and those arrested during the
disturbances. Long regarded a tolerated, if sometimes favoured,
son of the city, the Leader of the Council warned the artist that this
act of defiance was provocative and unhelpful. Her admonishment
that ‘Banksy will lose a lot of friends’ will have lost the artist little
sleep.
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What does cause Banksy and his office, managed by the estimable
Holly Cushing, more concern, however, is the trade in his work
over which they have no control. Banksy’s extraordinary street
value has not only led to a glut of copying but also a cult of
robbery, most notably of the wall paintings. Two of the wall
stencils painted in Bethlehem, ‘Stop and Search’ (which depicted a
young girl frisking an armed soldier) and ‘Wet Dog’ (a white
silhouette of a dog shaking itself dry) were hacked from their
moorings on the wall and transported to the US as part of an illicit
show of seven stolen walls in 2011. Apparently ‘Wet Dog’ nearly
crumbed to dust at one checkpoint, but it was eventually
conserved and displayed in a sturdy metal frame at ART Miami.
Banksy’s office will not authenticate street works. They consider
their removal an outrage. ‘I think it's morally wrong to take these
pieces off the streets’, said his former dealer Steve Lazarides, ‘They
were put there for the general public, not for one person to take
away. I think London is the poorer for the loss of all these pieces.
As for the argument that they're being removed to protect them,
that's just bullshit.’ Banksy has been equally dismissive:
Graffiti art has a hard enough life as it is, before you add
hedge-fund managers wanting to chop it out and hang it
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over the fireplace. For the sake of keeping all street art where
it belongs, I’d encourage people not to buy anything by
anybody, unless it was created for sale in the first place.
Such imprecations have had little impact. In the UK, in the Middle
East, the USA and Europe his wall works have been relentlessly
destroyed, vandalized, ripped off, and removed only to re-appear
in auction rooms or in backstreet sales lots, invariably at
extravagant prices. Ironically and despite the hugely expensive
efforts required to retrieve such wall works from their original site,
sales are rarely guaranteed. Without the necessary authentication
by Pest Control, sellers are lambasted by the street press and
ridiculed by artists. However, this has not prevented the practice.
In October 2013 Banksy launched a self-proclaimed month-long
residency in New York City, posting one unique ‘exhibit’ a day in
an unannounced location, and sparking a thirty-one day
‘scavenger hunt’ both online and on the streets for his work. Chris
Moukarbel’s subsequent film of the extraordinary scenes that
unfolded during that month ‘Banksy Does New York’ tells us less
about the artist, the locations, or the artwork and much more
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about the local graffiti artists who tagged or defaced the works, or
the property owners who promptly removed or hid the piece in
the hope of a quick sale, or even the streetwise locals charging the
hordes of Banksy fans to simply photograph one of the pieces. The
closing scenes of the crowd-sourced, multi-platform film replays
the moment where a string of bubble-shaped balloon letters
(which spell out the word ‘Banksy’) are displayed near 5 Pointz,
the soon-to-be demolished graffiti landmark in Queens. The film
shows that as a crowd formed below the work a group of men
attempt to remove it, prompting an outcry and scuffles captured
by videos promptly posted to Facebook and YouTube. ‘It’s like the
Internet’s almost the graffiti wall,’ said one New Yorker. Others
have argued that the residency could only be seen in person, it
was a performative and a participatory activity, ‘You can’t re-blog
this. You have to experience it.’ The truth is that both positions are
valid: Banksy needed social media during the month in New York
City just as social media needed Banksy. The laconic audio guide
on Banksy’s website noted, rather grandly:
The outside is where art should live, amongst us, where it
can act as a public service, promote debate, voice concerns
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and forge identities. Don’t we want to live in a world made
of art, not just decorated by it?
The shambolic scenes at 5 Pointz mark a memorable end to a
curious movie, a documentary without an on-film lead character, a
collage of impressions gathered from multiple anonymous
sources, its key narrative made manifest by the hundreds, possibly
thousands, of aficionados, addicts and the merely curious scouring
the city for their daily helping of the artist’s work. Not far behind
the genuine fans are the robbers, the police, the city officials, and
on the odd occasion a sceptical art dealer sniffily casting doubt on
the long-term quality of the artist’s work.
‘RINGMASTER’: THE IMPACT ON OTHER ARTISTS
Banksy’s global reputation has become ever burnished by his
ability to create city-wide spectacle and engagement in places as
far flung as New York, Gaza or in the migrant camps near Calais.
These spectacular interventions require panache and participation.
His ability to muster the energies and creativity of a loyal band of
supporters to create his ‘own’ work has frequently been extended
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to the wider street art community. Ever keen to retain an edge of
credibility, to remain urban rather than merely urbane, Banksy has
been acting as champion of other street artists, acting as a canny
choreographer of global talent. Through adventurous collaborative
events he has gained a reputation as organiser and promoter of
artistic events often on an epic scale. In 2007 he organised ‘Santa’s
Ghetto Bethlehem’ which brought together the work of a number
of esteemed contemporary artists intent on revitalising tourism to
the beleaguered town on the West Bank. Offering ‘the ink-stained
hand of friendship to ordinary people in an extraordinary
situation’ the exhibition raised a significant sum for charitable
causes. A string of other group events followed. In late 2015
Banksy staged perhaps his largest-scale extravaganza Dismaland,
in the West Country seaside resort of Weston Super Mare, which
featured over 58 artists from 17 countries. A satire on theme parks,
Dismaland attracted some 150,000 paying customers, amongst them
many A-list celebrities, to wander the installations, effigies and
mock-spectacle of a ‘family theme park unsuitable for children’. In
addition to such renowned artists as Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer
and Jimmy Cauty, artists from Australia, North America and the
Middle East were invited to participate. Banksy’s reputation as a
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ring-master, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ was further
endorsed by the queuing public and the frenzied press attention,
though critical acclaim appeared to have dried up. A visit to
Dismaland, wrote one critic, offered a sustained opportunity to
assess Banksy as an artist. He concluded that ‘[h]is onedimensional jokes and polemics lack any poetic feeling. Devoid of
ambiguity or mystery, everything he has created here is inert and
unengaging.’ In the face of such withering criticism Banksy – and
his entourage – are regarded as little more than ‘media-savvy
cultural entrepreneurs.’
This may be a little harsh, even sour, but it has become a refrain in
critical quarters. Yet it is important to remember what Banksy (a
mere stenciller) has achieved; he has been lauded as the standard
bearer for a new movement in contemporary art; he has positioned
himself in the vanguard of a global population of practitioners
which now extends from street graffiti writers, stencil artists and
wheatpasters, to yarnbombers who crochet their own ‘knittiti’ and
adorn our cities’ street furniture and urban trees. From a
movement of disenfranchised hooded renegades spraying and
scrawling on downtown surfaces, the movement has crashed
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through the wall, off the streets and into a much wider (and
readily embracing) public consciousness. In academic circles his
work and that of his fraternity arouses the analytic interest of
many disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. No
longer ‘needling, discontented and detached’ street art dictates its
own terms and has created a near-mainstream following. It is easy
to see why Banksy cares little for sniffy critics.
It is tempting to mourn the passing of an era of innovative and
engaging graffiti or tough street art that has been so dominated by
a single artist. But perhaps we should more readily embrace the
21st century opportunities for counterculture commentary, to
applaud an art form that remains energetic and didactic but which
now adopts filmic or performative conventions to convey its
mixed ideologies. As Banksy’s team demonstrated in New York a
third of the ‘residency’ output took non-graphic forms –
advertising iconography was followed by dramatic performance,
an actor cleaned the shoes of a fibreglass po-faced Ronald
McDonald, installations travelled the city in trucks, cinderblock
debris was recycled in a poignant sphinx-head tribute to the
Middle East, and messages and images were conveyed by
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instragram, twitter, and a faux audio guide. Three year earlier, his
Oscar-nominated film Exit through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film
even coined a new subgenre, what the New York Times described as
a ‘prankumentary’.
This radical shift to film and installation, and the ready absorption
of his contemporaries into the gallery system, offer compelling
evidence of the counterculture becoming a further part of the
mainstream but also at times seeming capable (at times) of
remaining revolting as well as stylish. ‘Street art’ is now mutating
into (and shaping) the expanded field of contemporary fine art
practice. By moving into film Banksy’s work has shifted from the
temporary towards the temporal. This trend towards non-graphic
art forms is in one respect an attempt to create works that cannot
be easily ripped off, copied, or repeated ad nauseam. Furthermore,
it could be argued that Banksy, and his accomplices, are throwing
down a challenge to the mainstream in its new ‘public streets’ with
a generation of ‘weaponry’ – cheap video, demotic photography,
social media – that assures an instant global reach. Borne of dissent
and rage street art has clearly come of age. The jagged diction of
‘low’ art has been internationally embraced and extended by a
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diverse body of artists, blending the distinctions between street
and gallery, and creating a genuinely democratic form of urban
communication.
References and further reading
Portions of this chapter have been adapted from my study of the
artist in Paul Gough, (ed.) Banksy: the Bristol Legacy, Bristol:
Sansom and Company, 2012. The artist’s own words and images
are best located in Banksy, Banging your Head against a Brick Wall,
London: Weapons of Mass Distraction, 2001; and Banksy, Wall and
Piece London: Century, Random House Group, 2005. Important
insights into the street art milieu are to be found in Alison Young,
Street Art: Public City, Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination, Taylor
and Francis, London, 2014; and Will Ellsworth-Jones, Banksy: The
Man Behind the Wall, London: St. Martin's Press, 2013. Briefer
accounts of street activism can be found in Emily J. Truman, ‘The
(In)Visible Artist: Stencil Graffiti, Activist Art, and the Value of
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Visual Public Space’, Shift: Queen’s Journal of Visual and Material
Culture, 2010, and Luke Dickens, ‘Placing post-graffiti: the journey
of the Peckham Rock’, Cultural Geographies, 15:4, 2008. Extensive
coverage of Banksy’s work can be found on blogsites and in
popular journalism, often with such novel headlines as ‘Something
to Spray’, ‘Keeping it Real’ and ‘Breaking the Banksy’.
Professor Paul Gough RWA is Pro Vice-Chancellor and VicePresident of RMIT University, based in Melbourne, Australia. A
painter, broadcaster and writer, he has exhibited internationally
and is represented in the permanent collection of the Imperial War
Museum, London, the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, and the
National War Memorial, New Zealand. In addition to roles in
national and international higher education, his research into the
imagery of war and peace has been presented to audiences
throughout the world. In addition to an exhibiting record he has
published a monograph on Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere,
in 2006; A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War in
2010, and Your Loving Friend, the edited correspondence between
Stanley Spencer and Desmond Chute, in 2011. Books on the street
artist Banksy were published in 2012, and on painters John and
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Paul Nash, ‘Brothers in Arms’ in 2014.
Paul.gough@rmit.edu.au
http://www.paulgough.org
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