Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  As for the wall in Detroit, the law suit between the gallery and the owners of the site was finally settled in the autumn of 2011, with the gallery paying $2500 for a clear title to their wall. The plan was that by spring 2012 the wall would re-emerge from the well-protected studio where it had been locked away to go on public display in an old police station they were turning into a new gallery. ‘It’s been a lively debate, a great experience and absolutely worth it in the end,’ said Goines.

  The Detroit wall weighed in at almost one ton, but that was a lightweight compared to the one cut out near Croydon, which was made of reinforced concrete and came in at about four tons. Again this was a Banksy that really worked. It showed a punk examining the put-it-together-yourself instructions that came from a box marked ‘LARGE GRAFFITI SLOGAN’ and branded IEAK. He was obviously having trouble – like we all do – with these instructions, for on the wall behind him were written the words SYSTEM, POLICE, NO, MORE, SMASH and other components of a typical revolutionary placard, but he hadn’t got the instructions right – the words were all jumbled up and made no sense. But unless Banksy was campaigning to get IKEA to write their instructions more clearly or asking slogan writers to show more originality, or perhaps giving a gentle rebuke to consumerism, there was no obvious message – just an enjoyable painting.

  Tucked away on an industrial estate, the wall was not easy to find, and it was almost a month before two south London friends in their early thirties – Bradley Ridge, who owns a restaurant in Streatham Hill, and Nick Loizou, a builder – heard that Banksy had strayed into the deepest south of the capital. They had actually been on their way to east London on a shopping expedition for Banksy prints when they got a phone call from a friend: ‘You know this Banksy, he’s done one in Croydon.’ They forgot the prints and a few beers later they decided that the next morning they would take a look. What they found was a wall which Bradley says ‘looked a bit knackered. It was an amazing piece but it looked ruined. Nick lost a bit of interest and I got more interested and told him, “Maybe we can get it cleaned up.”’

  At first they were described as two scallies with no interest in art, just an eye for a quick buck, but this was unfair. While they might have a south London edge to them, Bradley had been following and collecting Banksy ever since his college days in Bristol. He even kept – and still keeps – what he calls his ‘Banksy bag’, stuffed full with sleeping bag, woolly boots and a few other essentials, permanently in the corner of the hall in his flat, in case he suddenly gets word that another Banksy print is up for sale. He bought his first two Banksy canvases back in 2002 and he’s been buying prints ever since, including Bombing Middle England for just £20. But he has never yet sold a Banksy canvas or print. So yes, they both thought the wall would be profitable, but there was also the sheer thrill of doing it – of cutting out and owning, for however short a time, a Banksy wall.

  It was a far more difficult undertaking than they had ever imagined. First they had to make a few phone calls to find out if there was someone who restored walls – someone who could take off all the additional graffiti that had appeared after Banksy had painted it. Having satisfied themselves that such a man existed – thirteenth-century churches, twenty-first-century walls, they can all be restored – they then bought the wall. But the owners played by the rules: the pair had to come up with a structural engineer to do a risk assessment, a scheme of work, a schedule of work, high-vis jackets – a proper operation. And they had to provide a bricklayer to build another wall to fill the gap.

  When they started work they discovered that Banksy had, by chance, chosen the only part of the wall that was made of poured concrete with steel rods through it rather than the breezeblock they expected. Unhappily this made it a massively different job than the one they thought they had embarked on and it took them nine days to complete it. Four men, including Nick, worked on the wall during the day. At night, Bradley says, ‘My job was to sleep with it. I was there in the van sleeping next to it, we never left it. We had to make sure nobody came along and whitewashed it. We didn’t have any taggers but we had people round who I think were trying to steal the van. I don’t think they even realised what was on the wall.’

  Once the wall was down and safely tucked away into its steel cage, it could be taken to a restorer to be cleaned up. Unlike the Detroit wall, which was taken down so soon after Banksy had painted it that no one had time to add their own tag, the Croydon wall was covered with a mass of additional tags that had to be dealt with. To the inexperienced eye all this additional graffiti looked as though it would make the Banksy impossible to clean up, but Ridge and Loizou had found a restorer who had tackled much harder jobs than this one. Having been stored in Lincolnshire and New Covent Garden – Bradley’s father runs a greengrocery business – now it was on its way to Faversham in Kent for restoration.

  There Tom Organ runs the Wall Paintings Workshop. A craftsman more accustomed to restoring twelfth-century Romanesque paintings on church walls or uncovering a fourteenth-century scene depicting the martyrdom of Thomas Becket than he is to conserving graffiti, for nine years now he has been travelling to Istanbul for a month or two at a time to work on the sixth-, ninth- and fourteenth-century mosaics in the dome of Hagia Sophia. So Banksy is not in his usual line of work, although the artist has provided the workshop with quite a few one-offs over the last few years.

  He and his small team took about forty days to clean the Croydon Banksy and he says, ‘It took a lot of testing and then a great deal of patience.’ He explains that from the practical point of view, there is often very little between cleaning one painting and another. But the paints that are used to create graffiti (nitrocellulose and alkyd resin binders over emulsion paint, for those who need details) have specific properties and his job was to determine which solvents could be safely used, where and when. There was one large, particularly noticeable silver tag which fortunately had enough metallic material in its structure that it could actually be taken off with a hand tool, using binocular magnifiers to do the job.

  The whole operation – buying the wall, taking the wall away, constructing a cage for it, transporting it, cleaning it up and storing it – has cost in the region of £30,000. Bradley says, ‘I would love to keep it but I live in a first floor flat, so that’s not going to happen.’ Inevitably the wall eventually appeared on the market – but, like most things to do with Banksy, it was not the usual kind of market.

  Four Rooms, a new series on Channel 4 – described by the Independent reviewer as a ‘kind of Dragons’ Den for overpriced brica-brac’ – invited viewers to bring in the treasures they would like to sell. It is not exactly Sotheby’s. The idea is that the seller goes in turn to four dealers in four different rooms, hence the title, has a haggle and hears each dealer’s best offer. If the seller turns down one offer in the hope of getting a better offer in the next room, then that’s it: if no better offer materialises, the seller can’t go back a room or two and accept the original offer. The show feels a bit like a game show, and all the drum rolls and camera cuts to the nervous sellers’ twitching fingers make it much more comic than the ‘real edge of your seat viewing’ that Channel 4 had promised. Yet it was in this bizarre bazaar that Banksy’s wall came to the market. Other items on the same programme included a pimped-up ‘entertainment chair’, a Victorian hangman’s rope ‘with full letters of provenance’, a collection of Superman memorabilia and the nose off a scrapped Concorde.

  The two lads said they were looking for a price in the region of £300,000. Only one dealer was prepared to go anywhere near that amount, offering what seemed an amazing £240,000. But that was not enough. The lads were not going a penny lower than £250,000. The dealer – looking rather relieved that his offer had not been accepted – would not come up. So the wall was still theirs – and by the end of December 2011 remained theirs.

  If Banksy had been unfortunate enough to have tuned in to Channel 4 that night, the programme would probably have given him nig
htmares. Outwitting the police might be cool, but having to endure being the centrepiece of a game show along with a hangman’s rope is just embarrassing.

  If it was any consolation for him, the following week Tracey Emin’s twin brother Paul was on the programme trying to flog a print his sister had given him entitled Mrs Edwards We Wish You Were Dead, a reference to a dinner lady at their old school that neither Tracey nor her brother took to. (He got £2300 for it.) Banksy probably feels the same way about the sellers every time he sees one of his walls go on the market.

  Thirteen

  How Pest Control Routed Vermin

  Any reader may well ask, how on earth can a book about an artist have such a strange chapter heading? But this is Banksy and none of the usual rules apply. What follows is a story about a serious battle for control of every aspect of his art. It is a battle that Banksy – in the form of Pest Control, the organisation he established to verify his art – won decisively, driving from the field the rival organisation, Vermin, set up by dealers to authenticate Banksy’s works themselves. It was a short battle and Banksy took no prisoners.

  Banksy’s past is always catching up with him – not in disastrous ways, but in difficult, awkward ways that force him to make decisions he would rather not have to make. Back in November 2007 a note appeared on one of the Banksy forums: ‘Authentic Banksy for sale – Mystic Swing art.’ The details then followed: ‘It is the frontage to a fairground ride called the Mystic Swing which has attended festivals and green fairs for the past few years.’ Anyone interested was given a choice of web contacts including googling ‘Mystic Swing’ as a phrase, ‘ignoring the movie of the same name’.

  This was not exactly a high-pressure sell. At the end of the message the seller warned: ‘I’m not actually on the internet and use the local library for a connection so please don’t expect an immediate response. Be Lucky!’ It was signed ‘Flatcap’.

  A little later Flatcap posted more details. The ride was about thirty years old and the artwork, a collaboration between Banksy and one Dave Panit, ‘the celebrated fairground artist’, was completed in 2000. ‘I’m just thinking that, as the work got slightly damaged this year (sometime whilst I was asleep at a festival) I’m not willing to travel this anymore. Believe me, I think it’s a shame. But, I’m not rich and am looking for the cash to buy my “safe haven” as promised by thatcher (I’m not going to put a capital “t” on the start of that word) for my family.

  ‘Anyway, I’m not having some pissed up prat playing ping-pong with his head with the artwork (my friend witnessed this one and politely told him to “go away”), nor an imbecile with a Cosworth collide with it on a roundabout (close one, that) so it’s got to go.’ In response to further questions he added, ‘It does have a Banksy tag and I’m currently getting it authenticated to ease the cynics minds.’

  Flatcap said that he was in ‘no rush to sell’. Which was fortunate, for four years later the piece still sat in a shed, with nothing to fear from Cosworths but still no buyer. For Banksy, or rather Pest Control, will not authenticate it. And without their signed certificate, complete with half its Lady Di tenner, no one wants to know.

  It is a big (roughly 6m × 3.5m), really enjoyable, unusual piece, with all the brighter than bright colours of the fairground, but depicting a rabbit playing the piano, a trapeze artist monkey, a performing seal tossing a TV set instead of a ball, and a couple of rabbit ballerinas en pointe wearing tutus and gas masks. To me it looks like Banksy at his freehand best, but is it a Banksy?

  The journey to see Dave ‘W.E.T.’ Panit was a long one, deep into the heart of Somerset near Huish Episcopi. From a local pub I was guided down country roads which soon turned into country lanes, which eventually turned into a large field. And there sat the fairground artist and dyslexic sign writer who long ago had trouble with spelling the key words ‘Wet Paint’ – hence his adopted name of Panit. The long hair evident on his website had gone, and in his mid-fifties, with a beard, he looked almost like an academic, but we were definitely in the alternative world here. The field, where various neighbours seemed to pass by and where they would sometimes reside, houses his own touring van, as well as a huge ex-Teletubbies van which turns into a bar at festivals when it is needed, some mobile toilets, the caravan for his travelling freak show, and his own overstuffed studio.

  He has done everything he wanted to do as a fairground artist; he painted one helter-skelter not once but twice, when fifteen or twenty years later it came back for some rehab. A couple of years back he achieved the pinnacle for any fairground artist, a ‘set of gallopers’ – thirty-three horses, two cockerels and a chariot. ‘It took me a couple of months, it was a bloody nightmare at times but it was worth it.’ We talked in his studio, which was more treasure trove than anything else, containing everything from Lord Sutch’s bowler hat and a dead fairy (nothing serious, just a skeleton with fairy wings) to lots of teddy bear heads and hundreds of dolly parts, all of them waiting to be key players in his next freak show.

  Flatcap had bought Mystic Swing in 2003 from Seb Bambini, a travelling showman who entertained children at festivals around Europe. Seb had discovered the ride unused and unloved and had done an enormous amount of work getting it back into its original shape. With the help of Mike Bodyart, a UV body and make-up artist on the rave scene, he completely covered the barrel of the ride with recycled CDs to create a giant spinning mirror ball within which sixteen visitors could sit down and enjoy the illusion of being lost in space. For the front of the ride, the part that encouraged people in, he commissioned Dave with his flamboyant, over-the-top circus style to do all the lettering – or ‘flashes’ as they are known in the trade – and Banksy, who he knew from the music scene in Bristol, to do the illustrating.

  Dave says, ‘Seb approached me and asked if I would decorate the ride with Banksy and I said “No problem.” I knew he was a graffiti artist but of course none of us realised what he was going to become at that time.’ It was a combination that worked perfectly.

  The work was done in the spring of 1999, in the back garden of a house Bambini was renting in the village of Hambridge in Somerset, and it was certainly rather more than one quick painting session. ‘Banksy was funny doing this,’ says Dave. ‘He was getting paid to do it for a start, and as a graffiti artist you don’t normally get paid, do you? And he’d been given permission to do what he liked. I was really amazed by what he could achieve with an aerosol can.’

  The Bambinis provided the meals and the drinks as well as paying both artists £200 and their travel costs. There were several people, including Banksy, staying at the house and a lot of cider was being consumed. Another artist who was said to have been present says, ‘Those days were a pretty hazy time. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you whether I was there or not.’ Banksy took time – days – to get started but when he did start, most of the work was done in one night. As recalled by Dave: ‘We worked together and I thought, this is going to be interesting, how are we going to do this? All day I would be doing my bit and would he come and join in? No. He wouldn’t do it during daylight hours. He waited until it got dark, put a headtorch on and got out there and did it then. That’s how it was painted, one half at night and one half in the day. It was just so funny, him in the head torch. We’d all have enough bevvies by the time he started, so we’d go to bed and he’d go painting and we’d go out there and check on him once in a while to see what he was up to.’

  The division of labour was quite easy. The words ‘Frills’, ‘Spills’, ‘Ribtickler Entertainment’, ‘Mystic Swing’ and the like were all Dave’s, as was the edging. Banksy did the rest, and since he was the last one to paint he could overlay his work on top of Dave’s, rather than the other way round. So it is an important early work, and although Dave did a skilful job on the lettering it is without any doubt at all a freehand Banksy. The only stencil is his signature, which comes just below the safety certificate the ride needed every year.

  But when Flatcap app
roached Pest Control for authentication, he never got an answer. Flatcap, aka Jez White, a rather laid back traveller who has plans to use the proceeds from the sale to provide a winter park-up for travellers to work on their summer festival projects, does not seem especially bothered by it all. He keeps the piece dry and well locked up and hopes that one day someone will come along and make him an offer – authenticated or not.

  Pest Control was set up by Banksy in January 2008. Its one shareholder is Pictures on Walls; its one director is Banksy’s accountant, Simon Durban; the company secretary is Holly Cushing, who runs it. As Simon Todd of artnet wrote at the time, ‘MI5 has more information about itself on its website than Pest Control does on its own’; nevertheless it took very little time for the company to change the rules of the game. The majority of its activities have been welcomed by every dealer in town. ‘We were crying out for somebody,’ says Acoris Andipa. ‘Holly has brought a very, very big degree of professionalism into the marketplace, in terms of what is and what isn’t a Banksy.’ He admits though, ‘There will be grey areas and I know plenty of people who have crossed swords with them because they have hit these grey areas.’

  The ‘grey areas’ usually come with what are known as the street pieces, whether they be Mystic Swing, walls, traffic bollards, gates or even the side of an articulated lorry. Banksy, in the form of Pest Control, will not authenticate art he has done in the street, even though a piece like Mystic Swing is undoubtedly painted by Banksy. In part this is because to authenticate a piece on the street is, as he says, ‘basically a signed confession on headed notepaper’. But in addition his argument is that he has created this art to be seen and indeed enjoyed in context, and he is not going to give any help to anyone who wants to make money out of it or, indeed, simply wants to preserve it.