Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  Waldemar Januszczak, the Sunday Times art critic, once wrote that Banksy’s ‘chief achievement, and I believe it to be a mammoth one, was finding a way to operate so successfully outside the art world.’ It seems in a way a rather back-handed compliment – better perhaps at getting noticed than at his actual art – but is it true anyway? Acoris Andipa sees much more in his art than the way he has managed to get it displayed. ‘I don’t understand what’s new about the way he operated. Basquiat and Keith Haring were painting just as actively in the subway in New York while at the same time they were showing at the Castelli Gallery. Banksy did the usual thing that most artists do, going from one small gallery to another, hosting your own exhibition, finding the right space, buying into a champion who happens to have influence over that space whether it’s a restaurant or an empty venue, inviting all your mates and their mates along and hoping that somewhere along the line someone has some cash in their pocket.’ But it is not as simple as that. Leake Street is one of five exhibitions that marked Banksy out as an artist with a very different and very successful way of marketing himself.

  Oddly, having arrived in London, his first show opened in February 2000 back in Bristol, at the Severnshed restaurant beside the docks. At this point he was following the traditional path, doing just what other young artists do, finding the right free space. The restaurant was adorned with Banksys; there was even cheeky monkey, using a bomb as a surfboard, high up in the roof space.

  This was Banksy’s first real move from the streets to an exhibition space. He had to overcome his dislike of galleries – although this wasn’t quite a gallery – and canvases. Even though he had told one interviewer, ‘Canvases are for losers really,’ he explained to the BBC: ‘I am trying to make canvases work better than graffiti can work because obviously you can take time on it. Graffiti doesn’t always come out the way you like it because you’re rushing, you’re panicking, whatever. The question is to try to get the adrenalin rush that you get when you are doing graffiti into a canvas, that’s the problem that I am having.’ He seemed to have solved the problem, for it was a very strong exhibition, and if it was a stepping stone for Banksy it was a Lottery win for anyone lucky enough to be there.

  Everything was priced at under £1,000 and one of the paintings he sold was his Self Portrait, a painting full of mixed metaphors in which Banksy, whose head has been replaced with a chimp’s head, is depicted firing both spray cans like a cowboy. Seven years later it fetched £198,000 after a short bidding war at Bonhams. Another piece in the exhibition, Riot Green, one of the most famous Banksy images – the masked flower thrower – was bought by a student who splashed out £300 from his student loan even though he had originally mistaken the Banksy signature as Banoy. He hung it over his bed – uninsured – until he couldn’t resist the lure of the art market any longer, when he sold it at Sotheby’s for £78,000.

  What followed next in London, Los Angeles and Bristol was far from the traditional way of selling things. His first exhibition in London, if exhibition is the right word, took place in Rivington Street in 2001. In Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall he explains the show better than anyone else could: ‘We came out of a pub one night arguing about how easy it would be to hold an exhibition in London without asking anyone’s permission. As we walked through a tunnel in Shoreditch someone said: “You’re wasting your time, why would you want to paint pictures in a dump like this?”

  ‘A week later we came back to the same tunnel with two buckets of paint and a letter. The letter was a forged invoice from a Mickey Mouse arts organisation wishing us luck with the “Tunnel Vision mural project”. We hung up some decorators’ signs nicked off a building site and painted the walls white wearing overalls. We got the artwork up in twenty-five minutes and held an opening party later that week with beers and some hip hop pumping out of the back of a Transit van.’ About 500 people turned up to an opening which had cost almost nothing to set up – ‘We nicked all the materials except for about four pounds worth of black paint,’ Banksy told a fellow graffiti writer who interviewed him soon afterwards.

  There were twelve stencilled images painted on this clean white background, edged in black, and below them a message that read ‘Speak softly. But carry a big can of paint.’ The whole thing was so informal that it was virtually painting to order: you could actually see a stencil on the wall, put down a deposit and a week later go round and pick up your painting in a version stencilled on to canvas. It sounds incredible now, but this was in the days before the name Banksy meant anything to anybody beyond his own world. No one was making big money and no one was asking for provenance. Soon after the exhibition finished, the wall which he had used to display his wares was knocked through to provide one of the entrances to Cargo, one of the new restaurant-bars springing up across Shoreditch. They did have the decency to give him an exhibition, and a couple of well-protected Banksys can still be seen on the wall of Cargo’s yard.

  In the same year there was another Banksy exhibition that is hardly ever mentioned now. In March Banksy and a small gang of helpers hired a van and slogged up to Glasgow for an exhibition called Peace is Tough, which was to be held at the Arches, another café-bar/restaurant. To be fair to Banksy, he was not headlining the exhibition; Jamie Reid, the man who in putting a safety pin through the Queen’s lips defined the visual style of the Sex Pistols, was supposed to be the crowd drawer. But punk was a little too old and Banksy a little too new, and the crowds never came. ‘No more than five people turned up,’ is how one person who was there remembers it. It can’t have been as bad as that, but measured by the exhibitions that followed it was the only real failure Banksy has ever had.

  Next came a very small and slightly chaotic show in a right-on Los Angeles gallery and bookshop called 33 1/3. It was advertised as an ‘exhibition of graffiti, lies and deviousness’ and although it is hardly remembered now it almost sold out. Banksy in those early days could afford to be rather more casual about his identity than he is now. One collector who bought a canvas there remembers him hanging around the show ‘eavesdropping on people’s comments without identifying himself. The idea seems to be that if he can earn his daily bread by selling paintings rather than by clerking or delivering pizzas, why the hell not.’

  At the end of 2002 he launched the first of what has become something of a Banksy institution – if there can be such a thing: Santa’s Ghetto. This first one was upstairs in a small room at the Dragon Bar in Leonard Street, Shoreditch, which at that time was one of the favoured hangouts for graffiti writers. A collector who visited it said, ‘There were canvases all over the place. It was pretty chaotic and a one-off became almost an edition.’ The poster for the ghetto advertised ‘gift wrapped trinkets of vandalism for the whole family’ and anyone lucky enough to be shopping for Christmas presents could buy some very valuable trinkets. An artist who was there said, ‘A friend of mine and his girlfriend bought one for about £300 and ended up selling it for about £70,000.’ It was here too that his canvas of Queen Victoria enjoying oral sex from one of her female subjects was given its first showing; it was to be sold at Sotheby’s in 2008 for £277,000.

  But although Santa’s Ghetto continues, selling the work of Banksy and other artists (for Christmas 2011 it was replaced by an exhibition of prints at Banksy’s gallery), the days of the small exhibition were over. With one exception Banksy was now going for size and surprise. Turf War, his breakthrough exhibition in July 2003, was staged in a former warehouse in Hackney, a true ‘pop-up’ show in the days before ‘pop-up’ had come to mean semi-permanent. It lasted for only three days but it established Banksy as the leader of the new movement in British art, the street artists who were prepared to come in from the cold – artists who painted walls and sold canvases.

  When Andy Warhol first exhibited at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1962, a rival gallery manager noticed that ‘There were lots of young people there and I didn’t know where they came from; they weren’t from the art world.’
The art critic William Wilson called it ‘the first circus opening, the first gallery-event . . . the first party opening’. Banksy was not only using some of Warhol’s images, he was using some of his party tricks too. You could call the show a bit of a circus but that was what it was supposed to be. There were no performing dogs, no circus lions, no elephants (those were to come next). But there was an attention-grabbing cow sprayed with rather macabre images of Warhol, pigs sprayed in blue and white police colours, sheep painted in concentration camp stripes, the Queen portrayed as a chimp, Churchill with a green Mohican – very much an exhibition that shouted ‘Look at me.’ A fan who was there on the first night says, ‘It really took off. The private view was so dangerous. It was really crowded. Everyone was smoking. People were graffitiing the walls, writing things like “you fucking sell-out” on the stencils that he had done on the walls, and amazingly Banksy didn’t seem to mind at all. There was a random mix of celebrities. There were queues outside and girls from Vogue in high heels and high fashion demanding that they didn’t have to queue in front of some really skanky warehouse in Dalston – this was in the days before Dalston got cool.’

  Just before the exhibition opened, Banksy told Simon Hattenstone in the Guardian how excited he was. ‘A part of me wishes I could go because I’ve put together a really nice setup.’ He decided it was too risky to be inside on opening night but some years later he revealed he was on the pavement outside. ‘I saw a load of local yoots, some famous people in a Mercedes, two pimps shouting, four broadcast units from TV stations, and two Koreans selling food from the back of their car to the people waiting in line to get in. I guess it was what you’d call cosmopolitan.’ The day after the exhibition opened Banksy went inside. Unfortunately his timing was not very good, for the police had got there just before him and were asking one of the exhibition staff if Banksy was there or not. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help, I don’t know who Banksy is,’ the staff member lied to them. ‘But just as I was saying this I saw Banksy stroll into the exhibition. He must have seen the police at that moment, because he moved along quite quickly as though he was looking at the paintings and then he very calmly walked straight out again.’

  For all Banksy’s genuine dislike of brands, the exhibition itself did receive some small financial backing from Puma, a company that had been involved in the exhibition in Los Angeles and which obviously thought being associated with Banksy would do its street cred good. Visitors were given three postcards and a single black latex glove with the Puma logo on it, as a slightly unusual way of reminding them that Puma was providing some sponsorship. In addition you could buy a sort of official Banksy T-shirt with the Puma logo on the sleeve.

  As for the painted animals, Banksy offered two explanations for them. One went: ‘If you come from outside London they give you a lot of shite about being a country bumpkin. So I thought, right, I’ll give ’em country bumpkin – I’ll just get all these animals together and paint them.’ The second was rather more serious: ‘Our culture is obsessed with brands and branding. I’m taking the idea of branding back to its original roots, which is cattle branding. I call it Brandalism.’ In truth the animals needed no explanation. They did the trick; they were a very good publicity stunt. When one of Banksy’s camp called animal welfare campaigners and gave them a tip-off – anonymously of course – that the animals were being mistreated, there was another round of publicity. An animal rights protestor chained herself with a bike lock to the railings which penned in Andy Warhol’s cow. Steve Lazarides’ response was simple enough: ‘The animals are well cared for and I’m just going to leave the protester to it. Visitors will just think she is part of the exhibition.’ The show had to close a day early but it didn’t matter: Banksy was not yet a household name but he had gone way beyond the boundaries of the street.

  After the first Santa’s Ghetto in Shoreditch, Banksy continued to create a pop-up Ghetto almost every Christmas, starting in Carnaby Street in 2003 and then sticking closely to the Soho area except for a rather distant diversion he took one year to Bethlehem. They were always slightly haphazard, fun and very different from most art galleries. One year, for instance, there was a wall downstairs called the Chancer’s Wall: if you were a chancer, you could take your canvas or whatever you wanted, put it up on the wall and hope a buyer would chance upon it. Pure Evil put up a Panda print there; Banksy’s girlfriend bought it and eventually it was released by Banksy’s gallery as an edition of 700. The next year Pure Evil was back at the Ghetto manning a ‘remixed’ fairground stall where you could throw hoops over the Virgin Mary and other religious icons. As we talk a few years later in his own gallery, he says simply: ‘I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for Banksy.’

  In those days the Ghettos were still relatively casual. In 2006, for example, a blackboard announced: ‘Events for December’ and the events chalked in casually below included ‘Mon 18th New Banksy print. Edition 1000. Unsigned. £100. One per person.’ In contrast, the next day there was going to be a performance by ‘Dynamo The UK’s finest street magician’.

  But these Ghettos housed other artists and other japes. Santa alone was not going to do it for Banksy, he had to go it alone. And 2005 was the year that helped turn him into a superstar. His punk incursions into galleries in London, New York and Paris were followed by a trip to Israel to paint the concrete wall on the West Bank, part of the barrier built to try to stop suicide bombers. Banksy was not the first to paint on the wall but he was certainly the best. Everything good about Banksy was on display in these paintings. They made his point about the awfulness of the wall, but they made it in a subtle way, far better than any slogan could. They were very specific to the site; they were poignant and there was no need to walk into a gallery to see them.

  Whether it was the pony-tailed girl hanging on to eight balloons as she gets lifted to the top of the wall, the two stencilled children with bucket and spade dreaming of their own bright and colourful Caribbean beach (the effect achieved by a coloured poster pasted on to the wall), or the boy with a simple escape route: a crude ladder painted all the way to the top, all the images talked of escape from this depressing, dispiriting environment. None of this lasted very long but it did not matter, they were photographed and soon up on the web for all the world to see.

  So, by the time of Banksy’s next show, Crude Oils, two months after his trip to Israel, his name was much better known and he did not need all the razzmatazz of Turf War. This time his exhibition might have had the feel of a slightly more traditional gallery show, but there was one important difference: 164 rats – real rats – running around the gallery. For twelve days he took over a shop located between a hairdresser and a smart restaurant on Westbourne Grove, west London. A man wearing a fez and handing out free postcards of Kate Moss remixed by Banksy in the style of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe (yours now for £4.99 plus postage on Amazon) was at the door holding back the first-night crowds. Banksy later claimed proudly: ‘On the opening night, the neighbours showed up with some cops and six different health-and-safety inspectors, but they never managed to shut us down.’

  To begin with, at least if you did not have the right pass, you were allowed in for only three minutes, which did not give too much time to dodge the rats and see the paintings. There was a lot of very clever reworking of masters old and new: Hopper, Monet, Van Gogh, Warhol all had the Banksy treatment, and even Modified Oil Painting No 6, the painting he had slipped into the Tate two years earlier, made another appearance. While no longer in the Tate, it was at least hanging close to a museum attendant, or rather the skeleton of a museum attendant, slumped against a wall with the rats finding a home amongst all his crevices. Despite the rats, or maybe because of them, the exhibition did not create quite the stir of his first big show, although the Kate Moss canvas and print first shown here was eventually to prove one of Banksy’s biggest money-spinners.

  But there was another money-spinner still to come the same year, this time from an unexpected source. In Nove
mber Century launched Wall and Piece, essentially a glossily repackaged version of his three self-published books with some additions – and a few deletions, usually for taste reasons. Thus in his self-published Cut It Out he describes precisely the ingredients and the fire extinguisher involved in spraying ‘BORING’ in huge ten-foot letters on the National Theatre and ends by saying: ‘the perfect accompaniment to a night out drinking heavily with friends.’ Whereas in Wall and Piece all this comes down to a much safer caption: ‘Fire extinguisher with pink paint. Southbank, London 2004.’ Similarly his detourned painting of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus with a suicide bomb attached to him had the caption beside it: ‘Suicide bombers need a hug’ in the original; perhaps understandably, this has disappeared in Wall and Piece. Again, his caption for Queen Victoria having oral sex reads much more rudely in the original than it does in Wall and Piece.

  It is a book with instant appeal, enjoyable even for people who hate graffiti; it catalogues a great deal of his early work but nevertheless remains as far away from a catalogue raisonné as it is possible to imagine. At the front of the book he attempts to preserve his outsider status with a rather lame compromise: ‘Against his better judgement Banksy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.’ It is fortunate he could overcome his scruples, for the book has become something of a publishing phenomenon.