Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  Sure enough, within the space of a year Team Robbo – that’s Robbo and his mates – had had not one but two exhibitions in galleries in Shoreditch. On the opening night of his first exhibition, with television cameras there at the ready, the canvases seemed to attract less attention than the feud, despite the fact that neither of the principals were there: Banksy didn’t show and Robbo preferred to spend the time in a nearby pub waiting to see how the show was received.

  There was one canvas that hit you as you walked in. It was heavy with colour and right at the point to which your eye is drawn, Robbo had written in easy to read lettering: ‘R.I.P. Street Art.’ But the fact both that Robbo had agreed to show in a gallery and that there was hardly a piece of ‘pure graffiti’ to be seen only underlined the reality that street art of the Banksy kind, which has nothing to do with the rules of pure graffiti, was not about to Rest In Peace. His second exhibition, entitled Team Robbo: The Sell Out Tour, showed that he had at least picked up one useful tip from Banksy: irony. His art still seemed happier on the street than it did on a gallery wall; nevertheless one piece, The King, was priced at an astonishing £12,000.

  As for the beef with Banksy, at the time of writing Robbo had been in a coma for months after a fall outside his home. Graffiti writers were wishing him ‘Get Well Soon’, not with a card but on a wall. In September 2011 I went to an art auction like no other at Cargo in Shoreditch to raise funds for Robbo’s family. You had to queue for forty-five minutes to get in and signs warned us: ‘Please respect the Robbo event. No Bombing.’ Inside it was like a football stadium in the days when fans stood on the terraces. For the most part this was a tight little circle of outlaws and their friends who made Banksy seem like part of some far-off establishment. The room was overflowing with macho, beer and a sort of fan worship for Robbo and what he stood for. On occasions there would be chants of ‘Robbo, Robbo’ pushing the bids higher. It was as far away from a Sotheby’s auction as it was possible to imagine. The auctioneer, despite breaking his hammer early on, somehow managed to keep control above all this – just – and the auction raised about £30,000 from 150 donated works (there was nothing from Banksy). In addition, in the way these things inevitably work, Robbo’s accident and the television programme about the feud had suddenly transformed him from an artist having difficulty selling anything into a hot number, and another £28,000 was later raised by selling his own works.

  Robbo’s accident, plus the fact that there were hardly any more Banksy pieces left in London to write over, may well have put an end to the feud. But graffiti writers will never see Banksy as one of them. At this point in his career you may imagine he no longer cares very much about what they think, but he very obviously does. At the end of December 2011 he put up on his website a slideshow of the whole Robbo affair, starting with the original piece, next showing how it had been partially defaced by others and then illustrating the tit for tat between the pair of them. The final picture was a black and white replica done by Banksy of the original piece, with the addition of a candle in the shape of a spray can spreading light amidst the dark; it seems to be some sort of homage to Robbo, lying in hospital in a coma. To emphasise the point he added elsewhere on his site: ‘I would never deliberately cuss Robbo – he’s a graffiti legend.’

  Four

  Finding His Own Style

  There are a range of explanations that Banksy has given of his reasons for switching to stencils. The most romantic story comes in his book Wall and Piece, where he tells of the time when, aged eighteen, he was in the middle of painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up. Everyone ran, but Banksy got ‘ripped to shreds’ by thorny bushes as he tried to make his escape. ‘The rest of my mates made it to the car and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks I realised I had to cut my painting time in half or give up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stencilled plate on the bottom of a fuel tank when I realised I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.’

  It certainly makes a good story, but in 2002 he told the Observer he abandoned graffiti because ‘I was 21 and crap.’ Stencils, on the other hand, were ‘quick, clean, crisp and efficient. And that’s quite sexy.’ A couple of years later he told Wired magazine, ‘I wasn’t good at freehand graffiti, I was too slow,’ and a year after that he told Simon Hattenstone of the Guardian, in the only face-to-face interview with a newspaper he has ever given, ‘Because I was quite crap with a spray can, I started cutting out stencils instead.’

  But perhaps it is all rather simpler than that, for he was most convincing when talking to author and friend Tristan Manco: ‘I started off painting graffiti in the classic New York style you use when you listen to too much hip hop as a kid, but I was never very good at it. As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. The ruthlessness and the efficiency of it is perfect.

  ‘I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars. Even a picture of a rabbit playing a piano looks hard as a stencil.’ A fellow writer from Bristol days confirms that it was more than just sitting under a dumper truck that persuaded him to abandon his attempts at ‘traditional’ graffiti: ‘Stencils are no coincidence. He knows his history. He looked at Paris in the sixties and how quickly they got their message up.’

  Almost from the start Banksy showed an unusual single-mindedness, which he very much needed. For Bristol was a hardcore graffiti town, heavily influenced by the styles that for a few years had overwhelmed the New York subway trains. Various artists from America – particularly Rock Steady Crew, who straddled both the music and the graffiti scene – brought their graffiti skills with them when they were touring here; but more than anything else it was one book that was the key reference point.

  Martha Cooper was a photographer who had moved from Rhode Island to New York City, where she worked on Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. Henry Chalfant had arrived in New York as a sculptor, but with rather less success. Both had become disillusioned with what they were doing and had started photographing graffiti, first as sort of rivals and then as collaborators, producing the key book on American graffiti: Subway Art. It still remains an extraordinary record of the days when the New York subway system became one huge graffiti canvas. Over and over again graffiti artists say that this was the book that inspired them. Inkie, for instance, says, ‘It was instant. Lots of us were punks at the time and as soon as I saw Subway Art I thought it was the perfect synergy between graffiti and my anarchist tendencies.’ Jason Kelly, a friend who went on from graffiti to become a designer at the Daily Telegraph magazine and then start his own design business, even copied his tag, ‘kid-ink’, from the book. ‘It’s a great book, it was like gold dust in those days,’ he says. ‘It was like a bible,’ says another graffiti artist.

  The police, when discussing the case against John Nation, showed him a copy of the book they had taken from his office at Barton Hill as evidence that he was inciting young people to go out and paint illegally. He pointed out to them that he had bought the book at Waterstones and if they were going to prosecute him they should be prosecuting Waterstones and the publishers as well.

  It was a huge book not only in its impact but also in its size, although sales were slow to start with – partly because the graffiti fraternity were stealing the book, despite its size, from bookshops in much the same way they stole their paint from paint shops. In the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, which came out in 2009, Martha Cooper remembers going on a promotional tour across Europe, visiting eighteen cities in twenty-one days, and ‘in every city kids came up to me to tell me what Subway Art meant to them. More than one said “You saved my life.” My favourite was the English writer who playfully shook his finger at me and said “You have a lot to account for.”’ The whole graffiti removal indus
try – for it is now an industry – would certainly agree.

  A Banksy freehand ‘tag’ exists now only in old photographs and there were never too many of them in the first place, although there was for a short time a joyful ‘Banksy’ in big lettering on the side of a nightclub boat in Bristol harbour – ‘That was so toy,’ says one graffiti writer. His tag was the first thing that he put into stencils. It started off with simple lower-case lettering but soon evolved into the very distinctive signature – with the upright back of the capital B missing, the k relying on the n for support, the s with the top shaved off slightly and the final y that looks almost like a hieroglyphic – that he has continued to use ever since.

  Although he had switched to a stencil for his signature he persevered with ‘freehand’ graffiti for some time. Inkie remembers this freehand stage well. ‘He’s a very talented artist quite apart from the stencils. If you look at his sketch book he’s got fantastic concepts, an amazing sense of perspective and depth and vision. Personally I prefer some of his early stuff, the canvases or the sketches, over the stencil stuff. However I do feel that he gives depth to his stencils in a way that others can’t do. It’s a bit more organic.’ But however talented Banksy was as a freehand artist, it is still fair to say that if he had stuck to his freehand style he would probably still be doing it in Bristol today, and probably no one other than the tight circle of the city’s graffiti artists and ex-artists would have ever heard of him.

  Even when he was painting with a ‘crew’, if there was intricate lettering to be done someone, often Inkie, or sometimes another friend, Kato, would do it, while Banksy stuck to illustration. The people, and indeed the apes, he drew in these early days all have a slightly strange, primitive feel to them. My personal favourite – perhaps because it is still there to see – is a piece which greets you when you enter the Pierced Up tattoo parlour in Bristol. It is a painting of giant wasps (with television sets strapped to them as additional weapons) dive-bombing a tempting bunch of flowers in a vase with their long red tongues curling towards the nectar. What somehow makes this aerosol painting work is the fact that the flowers and their vase are encased in a wooden frame screwed to the wall, so the angry wasps are buzzing towards a traditional still life. The manager, Maryanne Kempf, says, ‘It was an all-nighter and the next day when he came back he still wasn’t sure how to finish it off. He saw an empty frame in a skip, screwed it to the wall and it was done.’ It is a typical Banksy touch which lifts the painting out of the ordinary. (Like many early Banksy paintings, this one ended up on eBay, but the tricky problem of how to remove it from the wall was never solved because the bidding stopped at £6889 – below the reserve price.)

  Perhaps the best judge of this early work is Banksy himself. In his three small self-published books there is not one example of this freehand work from his Bristol days. In Wall and Piece, which followed later, there are 316 photographs – give or take a picture or two – but amidst so many photographs only six of these early pieces are included. There is never going to be an exhibition of Banksy’s ‘Early Work’ because most of it was soon painted over. But it was nearly always photographed before it was obliterated and these photographs do not appear to be memories he treasures.

  Banksy was not the first to switch to stencils. 3D, Robert Del Naja, tried it in 1986 for the face of Mona Lisa – the body he did freehand – and, he says, ‘the graffiti boys hated it.’ But 3D had been one of the earliest graffiti artists in Bristol and no one was seriously going to give him much trouble.

  Jody was another early stencil artist in the city but, without quite the same pedigree as 3D, he found life rather more difficult. In an interview with Felix Braun for Weapon of Choice magazine he says he ran into a ‘notoriously intimidating’ member of the United Bombers crew (famous in their day for tagging virtually everything that moved) just after he had finished stencilling his version of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe on the wall at Barton Hill. ‘He stood right in my face and said: “You can fuck off with your fucking stencilled faces, you cheating ****! Nothing you’ve done will ever test my pieces.”’ It did, he admits, put him off stencils for a bit. Banksy has never even hinted that he got the same sort of treatment. Perhaps it was because he was not the first, but more likely it was because of the sort of character he was. ‘To us stencils were taboo,’ says Inkie. ‘I would have just been laughed at, it was all about face. Even if you used a bit of paper or some sellotape or masking tape to do the sharp edges it was frowned on . . . But Banksy had a punk attitude. He didn’t care what people thought, he had a strong personality.’

  So it was not as though Banksy was the only person in Bristol to have thought about stencils; but he was one of the very few who dared to make the big leap. It was much more than just a change of style; he risked banishment from the strong subculture that was part of the lure of graffiti. This is perhaps why he did not convert to stencils overnight. It was almost as if he was testing the water, for although some of his early pieces look like stencils they are actually painted freehand to give the stencil effect. Thus in one early work on an Esso garage in Bristol, painted with other members of the Dry Breadz Crew, most of the length of the piece is pure graffiti, but at one end the two children who we are used to seeing on the lollipop lady’s sign warning of children crossing, have been gently transformed by Banksy into robbers so the girl is carrying a gun and the boy is carrying a briefcase leaking money gained in their successful raid. It looks like a pure stencil, but it is actually freehand with Banksy trying things out. On other occasions he would stencil the face while painting the body freehand.

  Once he had found the right medium he was on his way. Another of his Bristol friends says, ‘From the first he was very ambitious and centred,’ and another writer from those days told Steve Wright, author of Home Sweet Home, ‘When I first met him, which was probably in 1993, even then he was very driven. He wasn’t much concerned about what anyone else was doing, even though he was, back then, up for getting together and collaborating on projects and pieces, something he seems less likely to do these days. But he already had that “goal” then – wanting to get his message across, have that dig at the system, make that point. It seemed obvious that he was going to become big or well known, he just had that air about him.’

  He had some sort of agent from quite early on and while others just painted at Barton Hill, he managed to stage his first show, with a few other artists, in the laundromat in the block of council flats next to the youth centre. He said later with some pride: ‘All the people who lived there checked it out. It was really funny seeing trendy kids in Carhartt next to big fat ladies with Iceland shopping bags.’

  Who were his early influences? Apart from 3D there was no one in Bristol who he could turn to, but in Paris Blek le Rat – a very genial artist despite his name – had been stencilling life-size rats across the walls since 1981. Blek, who has an impeccably bourgeois background, tells a romantic story of how he was inspired to go into graffiti by a fortune teller who told him she saw him working with walls. He studied architecture before moving on to stencils, so she was certainly in the right zone. Perhaps more to the point, he remembers being on holiday in Italy after the war and spotting an old stencilled propaganda portrait of Mussolini. What impressed him was the power of the stencil – still there long after the dictator had been done away with. The first time he ever saw graffiti as art was on a trip to New York back in 1971. He told Swindle magazine: ‘I wanted to do American pieces like I had seen in New York. [But] I told myself, “No, I mustn’t do that.”’ Why? Because he was determined, in a very French way, that if he was going to do art on the streets of Paris it had, somehow, to be graffiti in a uniquely French style.

  In the early days, when he was besieging Paris with his rats, Blek needed to be as anonymous as any other street artist attempting to avoid the police, but now he is as open as Banksy is closed. Somehow an image of the street artist has evolved, all hoodies, jeans, sneakers and aggression, but Blek fails t
o meet the criteria. When I met the well-dressed, middle-aged Blek at a book launch party in London, he told me how excited he was to be flying to Brisbane in a day or two first class. He had never flown first class in his life and not only was his ticket being paid for, but he was being provided with a legal wall to paint on once he got there.

  Quite when Banksy first learned about Blek is unclear. Blek suggests it may have been through their mutual friend Tristan Manco, who showed his work to Banksy at ‘the end of the nineties’, but it may well have been earlier than that, for a slim book called Paris Graffiti was doing the rounds of the graffiti writers in Bristol at about the time Banksy was coming on to the scene. (None of the graffiti in the book is attributed, but there is what looks like an early Blek rat and possibly other pieces by him – certainly the book revealed what the blurb called ‘a new chic on the streets of Paris’.) Whatever the date, there is no doubting the influence Blek had on Banksy. Once you have seen Blek’s work it is impossible to see a Banksy piece, especially his early work, without thinking of Blek. Blek does not play with words in the way Banksy does and he is also much less political (a rare political piece of his with David holding a rifle, done in support of Israel, did not go down too well in the street art community). Nevertheless the line between the two of them is a very strong one, for like almost any artist Banksy has been influenced by those who have gone before him.

  The two artists are almost always impeccably polite about each other. ‘Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it, too,’ says Banksy, ‘only Blek did it twenty years earlier.’ And Blek replies with just a little more edge: ‘People say he copies me, but I don’t think so. I’m the old man, he’s the new kid, and if I’m an inspiration to an artist that good, I love it. People want to know me now . . . I have a major book deal with the biggest publishers in the world. I have waited thirty years for this. It’s only today that my street art has become big news, and that’s thanks to people saying Banksy is inspired by me.’ All of which is true, and only once has he been slightly less polite about him: ‘I can tell you now that I have a stock of good ideas for him. Really, I do! I have many good ideas but this time he will have to pay because we all know that he is fucking rich. (laughs) . . . He takes, but we all take from someplace.’