Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  The idea of converting the old into the new is not an original one, although Banksy said that when he first thought of it, ‘I was completely convinced it was a genius idea nobody had had before, and I thought, how do I stop people from stealing this idea? And I thought the best thing to do was to get it hanging up in the Tate with my name next to it.’ In the 1960s, Asger Jorn, a Danish artist who was a key member of the Situationists, a small group with their base in Paris who argued that advanced capitalism had reduced us all to passive spectators in life, détourned paintings he bought in the Paris flea markets with his own swirls and splatters. In the catalogue to his exhibition in Paris he gave collectors and museums advice they were very unlikely to take: ‘Be modern. If you have old paintings, do not despair. Retain your memories but detourn them so that they correspond with your era. Why reject the old if one can modernise it with a few strokes of the brush?’

  In a more recent example, in 1980 Peter Kennard, an anti-war artist who was to become a friend of Banksy’s, painted Haywain with Cruise Missiles. This is John Constable’s famous painting detourned by Kennard, in a rather more startling manner than Banksy achieved, by the addition of three Cruise missiles on the back of Constable’s hay cart. The Tate bought this work from Kennard in 2007. But it did not matter that the idea of adding something to an old painting was not an original one, nor did it matter that Banksy’s picture only lasted on the wall for three hours before the glue failed. (An art student who was there at the time said: ‘When it fell to the floor a security guard went over to it in a bit of a panic. He then realised something was up and other security guards were called.’) What mattered was that Banksy had stuck it up in the Tate and he had been filmed doing it.

  Although remaining incognito, Banksy was happy to declare to newspapers reporting the story: ‘People often ask whether graffiti is art. Well it must be, now it’s hanging in the fucking Tate.’ He suggested: ‘To actually go through the process of having a painting selected must be quite boring. It’s a lot more fun to go and put your own one up. It’s all about cutting out the middle man, or the curator in the case of the Tate.’ But it was actually about much, much more than that – it was a publicity stunt that had gone wonderfully right. And if it worked at the Tate, why not try it elsewhere?

  Over the course of the next seventeen months he played the same sort of trick in seven more galleries in Paris, New York and London. It was fun; it was done with style and considerable cool; it hurt nobody; on the whole the museums took it in good heart; and it helped transform Banksy into an international name. The recognition that other artists spend years trying to achieve, he achieved in months.

  He did not just stroll into these galleries and put up a painting on the first wall he could find. He did the reconnaissance first: ‘It was funny. I was going to all these galleries and I wasn’t looking at the art, I was looking at the blank spaces between the art,’ he said. In 2004 he hit two targets. In April he installed in the Natural History Museum in London a rather complicated piece, a stuffed rat enclosed in a glass case along with a spray can, microphone, torch, backpack, sunglasses and a sign scrawled on the background in graffiti style announcing ‘Our time will come.’ Banksy’s then manager, Steve Lazarides, claimed at the time, ‘I saw a member of staff walk up to it, check it was attached properly, read the text and walk away.’

  Recently the Natural History Museum were kind enough to try to discover what happened to the rat. A spokeswoman said, ‘It wasn’t long before museum staff noticed it and removed it and as far as we’re aware it was returned to Banksy.’ In fact it was Steve Lazarides who very swiftly asked for it back, in the hope that a photograph of the rat that had been in and out of the museum would generate even more publicity. But he was told he would have to wait, since the boxed rat was being kept in the museum’s ice room to ensure that there was no contamination of any of the museum’s permanent exhibits. When the rat was finally released and Lazarides was interviewed by the museum’s security staff, he pointed out that there must be something wrong with security if a man could walk in with a rat enclosed in a substantial box and screw the box on to the wall of the museum without anyone raising an alarm.

  Banksy also visited the Louvre in Paris. It is difficult to say just how successful he was here. Documented in his book there is a rather blurry picture of his own version of the Mona Lisa, transformed by a smiley face, hanging on a wall in the gallery. All does not look well in this photograph. We can see the back of a man, probably Banksy since his head has been deliberately blurred. He looks in a hurry, pressing a caption on to the wall below his Mona Lisa with one hand while he continues to keep moving past. That’s it. The video shows very little more than the photograph. As for how long it lasted, Banksy’s book only says ‘Duration Unknown.’ But it was the Louvre, it was there for however short a time – it counts.

  But he wasn’t quite there yet; the Tate had won enough headlines but the Natural History Museum and the Louvre had not really taken him much further. It was next year that he really upped his game in both New York and London. Being a Sunday, 13 March 2005 was a busy day for galleries; nevertheless he managed to infiltrate four museums in New York without being stopped once. At the Brooklyn Museum he put up another doctored painting, this time of a bewigged and rather ridiculous-looking aristocrat, all ruffles, frills and sword. One hand is resting limply on the back of a chair, the other is holding a can of spray paint just as limply. All this is in bright colours, while the dark background behind him is covered in graffiti including a CND sign and a simple demand for ‘No War’. At 61 cm × 46 cm it is the largest of Banksy’s incursion paintings, and the video of him doing it is the clearest of them all.

  The coat he used at the Tate had been replaced by an equally inconspicuous raincoat and the hat by a rather sturdier model, but the false beard looks as though it was still there and the carrier bag with his painting inside was almost laughably noticeable. Again he had chosen a gallery, the American Identities Gallery on the fifth floor, where there were not many visitors. We see him saunter into the gallery with a nerveless deliberation, put his bag down against one wall, extract the painting, turn and press it up against the opposite wall, pushing down on it with a manic intensity – determined that it was going to last longer than the three hours Crimewatch UK had survived at the Tate. Then he is off. The whole operation takes exactly thirty-three seconds. According to Banksy’s book, the painting stayed there for eight days before being discovered. Reports at the time say it was three days. But even if it was only three days, it is still a slightly depressing comment on how much interest we take in some of the paintings on display as we trail around galleries. Explaining how he got away with it, Banksy said that the galleries ‘do get pretty full but not if you put the pictures in the boring bits’.

  In Brooklyn he had chosen a boring bit, but in Manhattan itself he risked the crowds and still got away with it. How? He explained that the accomplices who were filming him also provided distractions where necessary: ‘They staged a gay tiff, shouting very loudly and obnoxiously.’ But, more thoughtfully, he told another interviewer: ‘I think it is a testament to the frame of mind most people are in when they are in a museum really. Most people let the world go past them and don’t pay a lot of attention to most things. Not even apparently to people with big beards wielding around pieces of art and glueing them up.’

  (All this talk of interviews makes it sound as though he was chatting to all and sundry, but of course he wasn’t. He chose the people he would talk to as carefully as he chose the galleries: the New York Times, National Public Radio – the nearest thing America has to Radio Four – and Reuters. The interviews were conducted by phone or email and since no one got to meet him they had to take on trust the fact that they were talking to or reading an email from the real Banksy.)

  He claimed that he had set a target of hanging his piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for at least forty-seven days. Why such a specific number? Because it was the time a
work by Matisse, Le Bateau, hung upside down before it was spotted by a visitor who informed a guard of the mistake. (He had actually got his museums muddled – an easy thing to do. The mistake was made in the Museum of Modern Art, not the Met.) But Banksy’s piece only lasted two hours and it is easy enough to see why. In the Great American Painting wing his modified portrait of a very proper society lady stared out at you; the gold frame fitted in well enough with the paintings around her, but she was wearing an antique gas mask. She was impossible not to spot. A spokeswoman for the gallery said that no damage had been done to the wall or to other artworks. She added, a little sniffily, ‘I think it’s fair to say that it would take more than a piece of Scotch tape to get a work of art into the Met.’

  At the Museum of Natural History he hung an intriguing glass-encased beetle to which he had attached Airfix fighter plane wings with missiles slung beneath them. The caption declared it was a ‘Withus Oragainstus’ beetle (you may have to read the caption for a second time to get the joke). On the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), home of Andy Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, he placed his own painting Discount Soup Can – depicting a tin of Tesco Value cream of tomato soup. He says in Wall and Piece that having placed the picture on the wall he took five minutes to see what happened next. ‘A sea of people walked up, stared and left looking confused and slightly cheated. I felt like a true modern artist.’

  Most of these successful incursions came with slightly irritating faux-naïf thoughts from Banksy. After his success in New York he emailed the New York Times to say he had thought about trying the Guggenheim as well but he was too intimidated: ‘I would have had to appear between two Picassos and I’m not good enough to get away with that.’ He said he preferred to be known as a ‘quality vandal’ rather than an artist and he went on: ‘I’ve wandered around a lot of art galleries thinking “I could have done that”, so it seemed only right that I should try. These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they see.’

  Having finished with New York, Banksy was back in London. In May he hit Gallery 49 of the British Museum, a busy gallery full of artefacts from Roman Britain. Below a statue of Atys (youthful lover of the mother goddess Cybele, in case you were wondering) and partially hidden by a first-century tombstone, he managed to stick up a convincingly rough piece of rock. Drawn across it, in the style of early caveman art, was a picture of ‘early man’ pushing a shopping trolley. The caption, which was almost identical in design to the British Museum’s captions, read:

  The artist responsible is known to have created a substantial body of work across the South East of England under the moniker Banksymus Maximus but little else is known about him. Most art of this type has unfortunately not survived. The majority is destroyed by zealous municipal officials who fail to recognise the artistic merit and historical value of daubing on walls.

  On his website Banksy announced a treasure hunt with a prize for the first person who could find the caveman’s art and send him a photograph of themselves standing beside it; but the British Museum got there first, taking the caveman down before anyone could claim the prize. A spokeswoman for the British Museum said they were ‘seeing the lighter side of it’ and were ‘still in the process of deciding what to do with it’. Since then it has become part of internet folklore, reinforced by a statement in Banksy’s book, that the caveman was taken into the museum’s permanent collection. However, a search of the permanent collection using key words such as ‘Banksy Maximus’, ‘Early Man goes to Market’, ‘Post Catatonic’ and, of course, ‘Banksy’, yielded no results. It seems a pity to spoil the fun but the museum responded to my request for information by saying, ‘It wasn’t acquired by the museum and isn’t in the collection.’ (In contrast, Riikka Kuittinen, then a curator in the print department at the Victoria & Albert Museum, says she was really hoping that the V&A would get one. She says she would have marked it ‘accession into the collection’, stuck a number on it and put it into store. But the artist never obliged and later the V&A had to buy its Banksy prints.)

  These incursions were not only profitable in terms of publicity, they were – eventually – profitable financially. Banksy’s Crimewatch UK was placed in the Tate’s lost property office after it fell down. Quite what happened to it after that is unclear. The Tate says that at this point it has no information about where it ended up. But only days after the Tate incursion, another version of Crimewatch UK, complete with the video of it being hung, was being offered for sale by a gallery for £15,000. And six years later, yet another version turned up on the walls of the Black Rat Gallery in Shoreditch; this version was owned by a private collector who had presumably bought it from Banksy. The gallery had received an offer of £150,000 which the collector turned down. (There is a puzzle here. Banksy found the original painting in a street market and painted the police tapes over it; but he can’t have found three identical paintings in the market. Somehow he must have transferred the image. Similarly, a picture identical to that of the unfortunate society lady he used for the New York Metropolitan Museum turned up four years later in his exhibition in Bristol, but her gas mask had been replaced by a child’s disguise: a big false nose, complete with a silly moustache and funny glasses. She looked better in the gas mask.)

  The rise of Banksy’s humble can of soup was just as swift as that of Crimewatch UK, Just three years after he had hung his first version in MOMA, a rather bigger version of the painting (measuring 48 in × 36 in, it would have been difficult to smuggle into MOMA) fetched £117,600 at Bonhams, after two rival bidders had driven it rapidly beyond the estimated price of £80,000. And this was at the height of the credit crunch. Certainly it was not the $15 million that wealthy friends of the Museum of Modern Art had paid for Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans back in 1977. But this was fifteen years after Warhol had painted them and the price reflected the fact that Warhol’s soup cans, glorifying such an everyday object, had come to be seen as changing the very nature of what was considered art. When Warhol had first painted his cans back in 1962, his new gallery in Los Angeles was trying to sell them at $100 each – and failing. (Eventually the gallery bought the whole set for $1000, an extraordinarily good investment but not much of a return for Warhol.)

  Although these gallery visits were to earn Banksy good money in the years to come, this was almost certainly the last thing he had in mind at the time. It seems strange to say this about an artist who wishes to remain anonymous, but his incursions were about fame and recognition, about people who never went near a gallery or a museum seeing his pictures for the first time in newspapers or on television, and especially on the web, enjoying them and looking out for them in the future. Very swiftly Banksy became the first international artist of the internet. His anonymity meant he could not hold big press conferences or give television interviews, so he announced his coup in New York on the internet by giving a set of pictures to www.woostercollective.com, a New York site dedicated to street art of one kind or another.

  He was not creating art on the internet, but he was building himself an immensely loyal following on the web, fans who were unlikely to visit a gallery but were more than happy to visit a website. He now shows his new works on his own site, www.banksy.co.uk. He can thus be spraying walls in Israel, Hollywood, Barcelona or London and everyone can see what he has done – it gives his art a lifespan that graffiti artists never had before. The wall might be painted over but the picture is still there. He can advertise his film, promote any new exhibition and through an associated site, www.picturesonwalls.com, sell his own signed prints and those of other artists. And apart from Banksy’s own site a whole nest of other sites have sprung up to follow his work, argue about who he is, put up photos of ‘a new Banksy’ they think they have spotted, discuss whether this piece is really a Banksy, track his prices, slam him and champion him. In short, to give everyone a chance to feel they share some part of Banksy, even if they are
not a millionaire with a Banksy on their sitting-room wall.

  And beyond these dedicated fans, through both the mainstream press and the internet, Banksy had won for himself international recognition. Before he hit London, Paris and New York he was known – he had for instance provided the cover illustration for Blur’s Think Tank album. But he was not well known; his first two small self-published books had been overlooked by all but his most committed fans. Now, by reinventing the rules, he had become a known name, and he had done it in such a clever way that he was not considered a publicity seeker, but more a battler for the little guy against the all-powerful galleries and art dealers. Instead of ‘vandal’, descriptions of him like ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ became common currency, culminating in the Sunday Times calling him ‘Our unlikeliest national treasure.’

  There is simply no other artist who could command the cover and the inside pages of the Sunday Times magazine, followed a few months later by an ‘exclusive’ interview heralded on the front page of the Sun. The fact that this Sun interview had simply been lifted word for word from the extras when his film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, was released on DVD did not matter – except perhaps to Banksy. What mattered was the fact that the Sun considered him interesting enough to their readers to devote two pages to him. He had come a long way in a short time from his early days in Bristol.

  Two

  Once Upon a Time

  The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town. Very white – probably no more than three black families had somehow ended up there – working class, run down and not happy with strangers of any colour. A series of high-rise council flats had been plonked there in the 1950s and it had a reputation for drugs and crime. The graffiti on the walls of Barton Hill shouted ‘Fuck the Pope’, but it was not a Protestant enclave, more an angry enclave. The National Front had got a foothold in the estate and, as one of its old-time residents says, ‘No one was coming up here taking the piss.’