Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  It is difficult now to find many mainstream reviews of the book, although the Guardian called it ‘a grossly self-indulgent look at his work’. But it did not matter, for Banksy speaks and paints to a world beyond reviewers. Century’s clout meant that Wall and Piece was placed at the front of bookshops, and from there browsers could pick it up, have a good laugh, buy it and tell their friends to buy it. Figures from Booktrack in the spring of 2012 show the hardback had sold over 135,000 copies, meaning a turnover of over £2 million for the publishers, and the paperback had reached 300,000 copies with a turnover of £3.5 million. But these figures probably represent no more than 70 per cent of sales, for while they include results from the bookstores and Amazon, they do not include places like HMV, Virgin and Urban Outfitters where Banksy was to be found, nor do they include foreign sales. Whatever percentage of all this Banksy was on, it was certainly worth him asserting his copyright.

  If Wall and Piece spoke to fans way beyond the traditional art world, so too did his next two shows. The first, in September 2006, entitled Barely Legal to give it a little edge, was held in Los Angeles slightly less than a year after Westbourne Grove. The show seemed to be both a triumph and something of a disaster for Banksy. A triumph because the opening night was all valet parking and limos and Hollywood royalty, and so he made a lot of money – a reputed £3 million, although this figure has never been confirmed – while also making a name for himself in America, which was vital when his film came out just over three years later. A disaster because every story thereafter tended to have a clause in it that went something like this: ‘Banksy, whose work is collected by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt among others . . .’ For many artists the fact that Jolie and Pitt eventually spent over £1 million on their work or that Christina Aguilera spent £25,000 would seem like good news. Indeed Brad Pitt himself seemed envious; he told The Times, ‘He does all this and he stays anonymous. I think that’s great. These days everyone is trying to be famous. But he has anonymity.’ But for Banksy it appears that the fame, the movie stars and the money caused him considerable confusion for some time afterwards.

  The show was classic Banksy. A few months earlier Joel Unangst, who owns a 12,000 square foot former warehouse in down town Los Angeles named The Poodle Parlor, got a call from a location service telling him, ‘Hey, this guy wants to come by and look at your place for a potential art show.’ He had never heard of Banksy but told them to send him on over. The warehouse, built in 1937, originally stored salt, then fruit and vegetables, but from 1996 it had operated as a location for music videos, commercials, still shoots; people bored with the idea of a hotel ballroom even staged their weddings there. But never an art show. The warehouse is in a slightly dodgy part of town, dodgy enough anyway for one Sotheby’s executive visiting for Banksy’s opening night to say she ‘really worried about getting out of my car’.

  Unangst describes what happened next: ‘The first walk through it was Banksy and Thierry Guetta [of whom more later]. They showed up in Guetta’s Bronco SUV – the thing was a piece of shit. Thierry was there with his camera filming and Banksy is wearing black shorts with some paint smudges on them, sneakers and a T-shirt with more paint on it. He seemed a nice enough guy.

  ‘They did a quick walk through and then a group came back three weeks later and said they wanted to use my space.’ When they arrived at the end of August to set up the exhibition, Unangst was impressed by Team Banksy. ‘They brought with them a core group of about twelve from England and hired others from LA. These guys got down and got to it. They weren’t a bunch of fuck-offs, they were serious.’ So who was running the operation? ‘There were some other people who were more in charge of running the crew and stuff. They were trying to free him up a little bit so he could concentrate on the work. Thinking in film terms it’s like the director having an assistant director and production manager and that kind of thing, so that Banksy was a little bit insulated from the day-to-day stuff. He was there all the time.’ Banksy, he said, ‘has a fantastic mind even though he’s quiet and little bit unassuming.

  ‘They liked to relax and have fun, but it was a brutal schedule and it was pizza, beer and ska music that kept them going. They’d come in at ten or eleven in the morning then work until midnight, go out until three or four putting stuff up all over Los Angeles and then come back and do it all over again the next day.’

  The scale of the whole operation, creating all the artwork, shipping it over, hiring the warehouse – $25,000 for about three weeks – flying over the whole team, seemed beyond Banksy. The story in Los Angeles was that it had all been funded by Damien Hirst, but although it made a good rumour it was completely untrue. It is a measure of how far they had come in such a short time that with the proceeds of their two main British exhibitions, Turf Wars and Crude Oils, Banksy and Steve Lazarides took a big gamble and financed the Los Angeles exhibition themselves. At one moment it looked as though their gamble might fail: a semi-trailer full of Banksy’s work had reached the West Coast but had then been held by US customs. When it was eventually released, what should have been a leisurely final ten days was forced into a frenetic three.

  Unangst remembers that when Team Banksy had been negotiating to use his warehouse they had said ‘Is it OK if we bring in an elephant?’ ‘And I said “Sure, OK, if we get all the permits.” For filming we’ve had horses, camels, grizzly bears, all different kinds of animals. it’s not really a problem. Although they didn’t really mention that they were going to paint it.’

  It was quite a major point to ‘forget’. For the rats, cows, pigs and sheep had all been replaced this time by just one rather big animal: 38-year-old Tai the elephant, or the ‘painted pachyderm’ as some journalists liked to call her. Like Banksy’s previous animal props, other than the rats, she was painted – this time all over – although visitors were assured that ‘non-toxic’ paint had been used. She was placed in the cosy sitting room, complete with Banksys hanging on the wall, which he had constructed at the heart of the exhibition. The colours and patterns on Tai’s back matched the room’s wonderfully awful wallpaper. (Eventually she had to be moved to one side since she was not really suited for such cosiness.) She was supplied by a company called Have Trunk Will Travel and her handlers said she was ‘regularly fed and given water, taken on bathroom breaks and driven back to her ranch every night’; but all this did little to reassure animal lovers.

  The elephant was there for Banksy to make a serious point – a card handed out to visitors read: ‘There’s an elephant in the room. There’s a problem that we never talk about. 1.7 billion people have no access to clean water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line . . .’ But who cares about global poverty when there really is an actual elephant in the room? The elephant became the story – a curiosity, cruel or otherwise – and global poverty soon disappeared far into the background.

  As usual the show was announced only at the last minute, unless you were a celebrity invited to the first-night preview. Banksy did his usual jokey-serious anonymous interview: ‘This show has been quite a big undertaking for me; it represents nearly a month of getting up early in the morning. Some of the paintings have taken literally days to make. Essentially, it’s about what a horrible place the world is, how unjust and cruel and pointless life is, and ways to avoid thinking about all that.’

  There was of course no press conference but Banksy had already made his own pre-opening headlines. At the beginning of the month Team Banksy had visited forty-two record stores across Britain and replaced Paris Hilton’s debut CD – ‘she sounds both distracted and bored stiff’, said the Guardian reviewer – with 500 of his own remixed Paris CDs. They came with a forty-minute rhythm track, but more important, he had brilliantly doctored the booklet that accompanied all Paris’s emptiness. His trick was to keep the CDs’ original barcode intact so that punters thought they were still buying the real thing. Only when they got it home would they discover that Paris was exposing a pair of enormous bare breasts; that the
original song titles had been replaced and instead they were faced with a list of questions: ‘Why am I famous?’, ‘What have I done?’ and ‘What am I for?’; and that there were telling thoughts from the new Paris like ‘Every CD you buy puts you even further out of my league.’ (No one who bought the album complained – they paid £9.99 for it and a copy of the CD complete with sleeve and case sold for £1500 at Christie’s in November 2011.)

  On the other side of the Atlantic a week later he visited Disneyland, with a blow-up doll stuffed into his backpack. He managed to get through the Disney security search, then sat down on a bench and calmly blew up the doll so that it turned into an orange-suited, black-hooded, manacled Guantanamo Bay detainee. He dodged the first security fence, stepped gingerly through various cacti – and stood the doll just inside, beside the railings protecting the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride. It was not a particularly impressive doll, but it took considerable nerve to put it there in broad daylight. And it was certainly big enough that when it was noticed after about ninety minutes, it brought the railroad to a halt while Disney disposed of the doll and checked the area. The key thing, as usual with Banksy’s escapades, was that he had himself filmed as he was doing it. More headlines followed both for the detainees at Guantanamo and for his show.

  Despite the last-minute panic Banksy managed to pull it off again; the show was free, and even though it was only open for three days 30,000 people managed to visit it. Unangst says, ‘My first reaction was, oh my god I’ve got to get more toilet paper. It became a cool scene with the line outside turning it into something of a street festival.’ Making the front page of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times on the same day meant Banksy established for himself a new recognition across America, and for the West Coast fans who already knew him and followed him on the web, here was a chance to visit a gallery where they could actually see his work emerge from behind the computer screen.

  (As for Unangst, he received not only his fee but also a painting traded for all the lighting he did for the exhibition. ‘About a year went by and I was thinking, “These guys are going to fuck me up, I am never going to get a painting, he’s too big now.” But they came through, the painting suddenly arrived.’)

  These were all exhibitions – though perhaps the Westbourne Grove rats were, as one art critic put it, more of a happening than an exhibition – where Banksy was operating, and operating very successfully, outside the mainstream art world. But one exhibition yet to come was by far the most surprising and probably the most satisfying of all: Bristol.

  Eight

  The Outlaw Returns Home

  In the autumn of 2008 officials at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery received a phone call from someone claiming to represent Banksy. The caller asked to be put through to the museum’s director, Kate Brindley. Naturally enough it was assumed this was a bad joke and the call was not transferred. The real Banksy might have been born in Bristol, but what interest could he possibly have in the city’s imposing but rather dusty museum?

  But this was no joke call. The Banksy camp had made several attempts to find a personal contact who could give them an in to the museum, but without success, and eventually they had to resort to cold calling. The caller didn’t make it as far as the director but did finally succeed in getting through to the museum’s exhibition manager, Phil Walker. It became very clear that this was for real – not a practical joke – when the caller said Banksy would fly a representative from the museum to New York to see a small animatronic show that he had mounted there, titled The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill.

  This show, open for three weeks, was startlingly different from anything he had done before. It was held in a tiny gallery on Seventh Avenue, instead of 12,000 square feet in Los Angeles it occupied no more than 300 square feet, and it could hold no more than twenty people at a time. It had taken Banksy and friends a month to transform a trinket store into a ‘pet’ store, complete with some straw outside but with a rather confusing window display. Instead of the usual unhappy-looking hamsters and budgerigars, the shop window featured a rabbit quietly filing its nails in front of a mirror, two-legged chicken nuggets dipping themselves in sauce, and a leopard – or rather not a leopard but a leopard skin – lounging on a tree. Inside, there were swimming fish fingers in a large goldfish bowl, hot dogs squirming in their rolls, a chimp watching chimp porn on TV, a CCTV camera keeping a close eye on her young CCTV chicks in their nest, and much else. Again it came with the usual Banksy ‘is he joking, is he serious?’ statement; referring back to Tai the Los Angeles elephant, he said: ‘I took all the money I made exploiting an animal in my last show and used it to fund a new show about the exploitation of animals. If it’s art and you can see it from the street, I guess it could still be considered street art.’

  Once Phil Walker had been to New York and seen the show he met up with the Banksy team, who said they wanted to bring the exhibition to Bristol and wanted to know how the museum felt about it. ‘That was their first ask,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘It was completely their idea. We had talked in the past about working with Banksy but you could never imagine he would do it because we were a provincial museum with no money and no pulling power. It basically grew from there. Because what became quite clear quite quickly was that he knew the building very well. He had a lot of ideas about how he wanted to display the work. And we started a dialogue with him. Obviously it was not a dialogue with him but a dialogue through the mechanisms that he used, through his agents but also through a series of drawings that he produced on how he could see his ideas working within our spaces.’

  Being Banksy’s idea, created by Banksy, financed by Banksy, publicised by Banksy, he could write the contract he wanted. And it was a very tight contract, particularly as far as letting anyone know about the project, or indeed about Banksy. ‘They were very explicit about it – if it was going to happen it had to be kept top secret,’ says Brindley. ‘Of course this is all very counter to how we usually work, because we spend a lot of time trying to get publicity and planning and organising involving loads of stakeholders and the team. Instantly we had to work completely differently. It was a fabulous opportunity and we needed to manage the risk because they were very categorical with us. They said, “If it gets out it’s over. Nothing happens.” So we had to start planning it that way.’ Even among the museum staff, the number of people who were allowed in on the secret was very limited.

  Even now the terms of the contract that the city had to sign are so tight that when, a year after the show was over, I approached Phil Walker to ask him more about the exhibition, he was yet another to ask me in turn if the publication ‘had been authorised by the artist’. He then consulted with Banksy’s PR and apologised but said he was ‘contractually bound not to disclose details of the production’. However, Kate Brindley was hired away from Bristol to become director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima), so she was able to be interviewed – the Banksy net did not quite stretch that far. While she says, ‘I don’t think I would have been doing my job properly if I had said no,’ she and the museum staff did much more than just say yes. Certainly it was all Banksy’s idea – and no one at the museum, and probably not even Banksy, knew that it would grow and grow until it took over the whole building. But the transformation of the museum, from slightly quaint treasure trove to a place so hot and on the mark that people were ready to queue for hours to get into it, could not have happened without the very few staff who were involved being just as determined as Banksy to make it work.

  The approach came in October 2008 and Banksy wanted the show to open the following June, which might seem a reasonable time gap but is a very short deadline by exhibition standards. ‘We worked on very small budgets so we realised we had hardly anything to bring to the table. But they didn’t worry about that, what they wanted from us was the buildings and the access to the collections and co-operation and flexibility. What they brought to the table was a huge amount of resources and c
ontacts and an ability to make it happen within eight months, which is phenomenal for the scale of the show.’

  For probably the first and last time in its history, there was no budget for the museum to stick to – an amazing luxury. In his usual jokey pre-show statements Banksy said this was the first show he had ever done where ‘taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off.’ But actually it was his money, not the taxpayer’s, that was used to hang the paintings and make the exhibition possible. Kate Brindley says: ‘One of the big things about putting on exhibitions is cost control, but the pleasure of working with Banksy was he was footing the bill so I didn’t have to worry in the same way. It was an odd position to be in actually, where they were saying “If there’s a problem we’re dealing with it.” It was quite bizarre.’ The deputy leader of the city council, Simon Cook, put the cost to the city at about £60,000 in extra security and the economic impact of the ten-week run at about £15 million. ‘In the case of some businesses I think it literally saved them from going to the wall. Some of the retailers said that without it they would have found it difficult to continue and then promptly asked us what we were going to do next year.’ Even though these figures are rough, there was certainly a Banksy bonanza. The Bristol Evening Post was so excited it called it ‘the greatest gift he could have presented to his home city’.

  To understand just how radical the exhibition was, you have to have some concept of what the museum was like before Banksy got working on it. Housed in an imposing Grade II listed building, it had been opened in 1905 as a gift to the people of Bristol ‘for their instruction and enjoyment’ from Sir Henry Wills, Baron Winterstoke, who had made his fortune through tobacco. ‘Encyclopaedic’ is a kind description, so too is ‘eclectic’; ‘dusty’ is less kind, but they all sort of fit. A brochure you can pick up inside describes how the museum ‘tells the story of our world from the beginning of time to the present day’. It is all Edwardian confidence on the outside and marble steps and brass banisters on the inside. You enter and on the left there is a gallery of British and South West wildlife, while on the right Sekhmet the lion goddess and Hapy, the god of inundation, guard the Egyptian galleries. There are dinosaurs, a world wildlife gallery full of very excited schoolchildren and an equal number of stuffed animals, there are twelve pianos and there are fossils, silver, minerals, Chinese glass and Chinese ceramics. A biplane hangs in the central hall while a gypsy caravan sits on the first floor. There is Eastern art and Bristol art, Turner and Titian, Botticelli and Bellini, Sisley and Seurat, Holbein and Harris (Rolf). There is the slightly faded swagger here of Bristol as a great trading port, stretching out its influence – collecting in its treasures – to and from all corners of the world.