Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  He went on:

  This is all to say that while I’ve never met Thierry in-person I’ve spent days and days going through his footage . . . when you spend that much time with someone’s footage it feels like you’re spending time with them. You see the world the way they saw it and you hear their questions, frustrations and observations. As bad as the footage was Thierry’s personality came through in the tapes – he speaks in non-sequiturs, doesn’t respect people’s personal space and is distracted by all things equally. All of this is to say that in the time I spent with Thierry’s footage I found that he is without a doubt absolutely fundamentally lacking any self-awareness . . . I know that Thierry Guetta is real because I spent weeks and weeks wishing he weren’t.

  So Thierry Guetta certainly exists and, give or take a little, very much in the form that Banksy portrayed him. But at this point things start getting more complicated. Yes, it’s for real, Thierry is a very persistent but not very good cameraman, but is he anything more than that? Exit was short-listed for an Oscar in the Documentary category, but rather than a simple story about Thierry’s rise to fame as Mr Brainwash, it seems much more a documentary about how Banksy constructed Mr Brainwash from the eager model that was Thierry. As Thierry told the Los Angeles Times, ‘Banksy captured me becoming an artist, in the end, I became his biggest work of art.’

  It was immediately after the point when Banksy had sat through the ninety minutes of Thierry’s film and pronounced it ‘unwatchable’ that the whole Mr Brainwash phenomenon became very much a stage-managed documentary. When Banksy sent him back to Los Angeles to ‘make some art, you know, have a little show’, you might expect Thierry to be toiling away on the city’s streets for years before anyone would notice him, let alone put on a show. But as soon as he was out on the streets Banksy’s crew was filming him, providing the essential early scenes to go with the narrative of Thierry’s metamorphosis into Mr Brainwash. Even in these very early shots Thierry needed assistants and rather than painting on walls, he was, like a considerable number of street artists, pasting up posters that had been created in a studio. From this earliest point there was no opportunity to see whether he had any practical ability to draw or spray.

  What Banksy had spotted was that Thierry had enough quirkiness and endearing naïvete to be his lead actor. In his revealing email interview with A.J. Schnack, Banksy said: ‘I needed the film to be fronted by a personality the audience could engage with. The producer Robert Evans said that “vulnerability” is the most important quality in a movie star and that’s a hard thing to portray if all your interviewees have masks over their faces . . . Thierry’s entertainment potential wasn’t difficult to spot – he actually walks into doors and falls down stairs. It was like hanging out with Groucho Marx but with funnier facial hair.’

  Banksy has found the perfect character to lead a general audience into the unknown world of street art. As the producer of Exit, Jamie D’Cruz, says: ‘To make a film about something as obscure as street art you need the guy. You need the character. Thierry was a brilliant cipher through which you can get into a world which is actually quite dull in many ways.’

  There was not too much painting on the streets for Thierry to do, for the film needed a climax. It came through Mr Brainwash’s massive Banksy-style exhibition in the 15,000 square foot former CBS studio building in LA where many years earlier the TV show I Love Lucy used to be shot. In short, Banksy asks us to believe that he suggested to Thierry that perhaps he might graduate to a genteel little gallery opening and Thierry came up with this massive event all on his own.

  Banksy tells the camera that when preparations for the show begin to go a little haywire, ‘I rang a few people who I thought might be able to help him out.’ But he did much more than that. For instance the exhibition was produced by Daniel Salin, a ‘get it done guy’ who had produced Banksy’s Barely Legal show in the city two years earlier. One of the artists working with Thierry says, ‘Without the help of Daniel that show wouldn’t have happened the way it did. He really solidified the direction as best he could under the circumstances.’ Close to the deadline Banksy brought in Roger Gastman, a key fixer in the world where graffiti meets gallery, to make sure it all happened. Thierry’s claims to have financed the show himself appear justified: he took out a $320,000 revolving line of credit to do so a year before it opened. But John Sloss, a key figure in independent film circles and the film’s distributor, said that he believed Thierry had ‘a piece of the upside from the film’ – which meant that if Exit ever made a profit, Thierry would have a share in it and thus a return on his investment in the show, quite apart from whether any of the pictures sold.

  But if he needed massive aid from Banksy to put on the show, he also needed artists who could do the work for him, because there is no evidence in Exit that Thierry can paint. The only extended period where he is shown painting is in an extra that comes with the DVD of Exit, shot when he came to London to participate in the Cans Festival a month before his show opened in Los Angeles.

  One of the artists who was painting in Leake Street with him says: ‘He can be a little bit lazy. He can get other people to do the artwork for him. He did a big stencil and he didn’t cut it. He just got someone else to do it for him. The general consensus was, “Who the hell is this guy coming up and just sort of doing stuff?”’

  What you see on the DVD proves his point. First Thierry is shown choosing an image from a book of possibles – in the same way you might go into a carpet store and choose a carpet. He goes for a version of the Madonna/Britney Spears kiss at the MTV Awards, done in the form of a barcode. This image is then projected on to a huge expanse of paper which has been stuck to the wall of the tunnel so that someone – not Thierry, he is off talking to others – can trace the projected image. Once the lines have been traced they then have to be cut into a detailed stencil. Thierry does at least start on this painstaking work, but very soon gives up. He blames this on ‘HDD’, by which he probably means attention deficit disorder: ‘I am a person who cannot stay so long in a space, I become crazy. Usually I have some people to cut the stencil for me. I am bored. Like I told you, I am HDD, I am going to get some help.’ So others are summoned and, muttering mildly about Thierry being ‘management’, they do the job, but it takes them five hours. The stencil is then put up on the wall and you see Thierry up a ladder with a spray can. But the way the film is cut it is impossible to tell whether he does all the spraying. On the evidence we have seen beforehand, probably not – too boring. The end result looks good but tells you nothing about him as an artist.

  Before the film was released, Shepard Fairey told an audience at a Q and A session organised by the West Coast auctioneers Bonhams & Butterfields, ‘The thing about him [Thierry] is that he is motivated but he also has a lot of money and a lot of assistants. A lot of that work doesn’t even have his own hand in it and you know I have mixed feelings about all of that. His show was a very manufactured thing . . .’

  But if Thierry was not creating the art, who was? In many ways the film is quite open about his skills, or lack of them. When 200 of his paintings arrived at the very final minute, just in time for the show, Roger Gastman exclaimed, ‘Whatever elves Thierry had making that stuff did a good job.’ But it was rather more complicated than that. There is a revealing credit for David Healy, Thierry’s young ‘graphic designer’, who is shown going through a book full of other people’s art which Thierry has overwhelmed with Post-it notes. ‘Thierry goes through the books, he finds the paintings that he likes and he comes up with the ideas of how to change them and we scan the image and then we Photoshop.’

  The elves have been made redundant, Photoshop has taken over – although this later started creating unexpected problems for Thierry. For at the end of 2010 he was sued by Glen Friedman, a New York photographer whose iconic image of the rap group Run-DMC was used by Thierry, changing the tone in one version and giving it a graffiti background in another, in a relatively simple piece of Phot
oshopping. A Federal court was asked to decide whether this was ‘blatant plagiarism’, as Friedman’s lawyer suggested, or ‘fair use’, as Thierry argued. The judge eventually ruled in favour of Friedman. (In the middle of all this Thierry had to give a sworn statement to say that the piece was his work rather than anyone else’s – which did at least put paid to the theory that Banksy might have done it all for him.)

  As for the sculptures and installations that were very much part of the show, Thierry hired a team to do the work. Derek Walborn, a 25-year-old artist who had arrived in Los Angeles only three months earlier, got a job with Thierry when he answered an ad on Craigslist for a sculptor who could work with assorted materials. He made at least twenty-five of the exhibits in the show, so he was at the heart of the Brainwash team, and in an email kindly answering my questions he gives the clearest picture yet of what Thierry did and didn’t do. ‘Most of everything we did was his idea. He didn’t tell us HOW to do anything (he, at least at the time, didn’t really know how to do anything or know anything about tools or materials) or, for the most part, how exactly he wanted it to look and in some cases he wouldn’t tell us WHAT to make it out of either. He would just kind of throw an idea at us and then we would formulate the materials and best way to make it happen. For example, he said that the air ducts in the building reminded him of a spider. He asked me if I could make it look like a giant spider was on the ceiling. I said yes. The end.

  ‘That particular project got no more input from him aside from his excitement about how it was coming along. A common thing would be him bringing in things he had “collected” one way or another (e.g. old film reels) and saying “Make me a (something) out of this (material).” The film canister creatures, for example, were the result of him saying “Make me a person out of them”. The instructions were very minimal and the freedom to create was pretty vast. He never looked at anything I did and said “No, this is not what I wanted.” He seemed continually impressed and happy with us. Towards the end of the preparation some ideas were put together to fill space that Thierry was not directly involved in, but these were very few and, at this point, I can only remember one idea that was more between Daniel [Salin] and I than Thierry.

  ‘He is not a technician. He cannot draw or paint, by his own admission and by my own observation. I have not seen him cut a stencil. Granted, I wasn’t with him 24/7, but the only thing I have ever seen him do was sprinkle spray paint on some prints in order to make them each “unique.” We were all very dubious about his ability to do the things he said he could do. His lack of knowledge on a lot of processes, materials, and costs of said materials would have been humorous were we not employed by him, but at the same time it allowed us a lot of breathing room when it came to the processes we used to build things.’

  I had read that Walborn had put pictures of some of the work that he had done for Thierry on his own website, but I could not find them and I wondered what had happened to them. ‘He didn’t want images from the show anywhere that would give the impression that his work was not “his.” He did not want mystery surrounding the alleged source of the art or anyone to think that “Mr. Brainwash” was some kind of collective as opposed to just one guy. At his request I took it down. Since it’s not really my style anyway, I’m not too worried about it.

  ‘Personally, I don’t hold anything against Thierry. I think he is generally a nice guy. However, I struggled through the show’s creation with my ability to respect him as an artist. When I think of artists I look up to I think of honesty, integrity and, of course, talent. I found it more and more difficult to find any of these attributes as time went on. If you don’t physically make your own art then be clear about it. You can still enjoy the spotlight as the ideas-man, if that’s in fact what you are. But as a struggling artist myself who wouldn’t dream of putting my name on something that someone else created or even touched, I couldn’t help but to be a little annoyed when Thierry would show people things I put together and say “see what I did?” It made me feel like I was selling my soul, to some extent. To be fair, he was pretty generous to us as far as giving us credit in some cases. I think it just depended on what kind of impression he wanted to make on who he was talking to.

  ‘That being said, I don’t have any regrets at all about my participation in the show. I made some great friends, made enough money to pay rent, and got to make sculptures all day. I got a quick ten seconds in an Oscar-nominated documentary. Not bad, right? I also think that I learned a little from Thierry. He didn’t let anything stop him. In spite of my disdain for his way of presenting himself as the creator of the art, I admire that kind of thinking and I find myself applying it to my own life as a result. Maybe, in the end, that’s Thierry’s real true talent: the inability to allow reality to ever take the wheel.’

  And what about Banksy’s role in constructing Mr Brainwash? ‘Banksy helped to create a monster and then set it loose. He’s here to stay now. Enjoy.’

  Justin Murphy was billed in the film as ‘props builder’, but he was rather more of an artist than that description allows. At the time when Thierry was being attacked on the web he was solid in his defence. ‘I can assure all of you people, he IS an artist, just like the rest of the team that set out to produce this show. The amazing part is, none of this would have happened without this man’s vision, and it’s very true, that it wouldn’t have been such a huge success without the team of artists that he recruited . . . MBW is a machine, and our team is the oil that keeps it going.’

  Warhol might have been proud of that defence, with all its ‘Factory’ implications; but it is no use, as Mr Brainwash’s defenders do, comparing Thierry with Warhol. Warhol had all the technical drawing skills that Mr Brainwash does not possess, but much more than that he had the original ideas: he changed the way we look at everyday objects, he changed the way art could be produced. And in doing all this he changed the nature of art.

  But, quite apart from Mr Brainwash’s skills or lack of them, the exhibition and its success provided the centre point for the film. Marc Schiller, who runs the influential street art website www.woostercollective.com and who helped promote the film, said that Banksy was ‘making a movie that’s 100 percent like a Banksy exhibition’, and he was right. What Banksy had done was make a very good film about the marketing of art. It was both fun and informative, in the sense that it showed how Mr Brainwash was a triumph of marketing over talent – how easily led we all are to the next big thing. In the early days of the film’s marketing both the distributor and Banksy were careful not to call it a documentary, worried that the D word itself was a box-office turnoff – ‘Our distributor told me that if I call it a documentary nobody will come,’ said Banksy. But as the Oscars approached, so the dreaded D word was allowed – encouraged even – to emerge again. What the film is not, however, despite Banksy’s protestations that ‘it’s all 100 per cent true’, is a documentary in the usual sense of the word.

  But, Oscar or not, Banksy appears to have had the last laugh. For in much the same way as his Morons print mocked the people buying ‘this shit’ while at the same time making good money for him, Exit did the same thing. After the film’s surprise appearance at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival there were ‘a bunch of offers’ from distributors, but John Sloss, the film’s American sales agent, launched his own DIY distributing company to bypass the traditional distributors. It was a gambit described by one writer as ‘one part innovation, one part desperation’, but in this case, with the help of Banksy, the gambit worked. It also went some way to resolving Banksy’s problem that with graffiti you have ‘complete control over the means of distribution, with a film you have none’.

  In the end just over $1 million was spent on distribution, a very sizeable sum for an independent film, but there was no movie star or famous director to do a media tour – and Banksy was both the problem and the solution. The problem according to Sloss was, ‘I saw how controlling he was over the promotion of his work. So I just thought, this is
a highly unlikely project for a traditional distributor because not only is Banksy very controlling, but you can’t talk to him.’ The solution was to transform Banksy into a vandal who was also a marketing device. Sloss saw the impact Banksy had when he hit Park City, Utah (where the Sundance Festival is held) just before the film did and realised he had the best travelling billboard he could ever have – and it was free. Banksy described how he rented a minivan so he could ‘drive around and make some paintings. Me and a friend slept in it for a week at a trailer park covered in snow and full of rottweilers. I was huddled over a tiny electric heater cutting stencils on a fold-down bed surrounded by dog shit.’ It was effective but it was hardly Hollywood.

  As Banksy’s art had brought in a new audience, so too did his film. The approach was twofold: Banksy would get to work in each major city before the film arrived and at much the same time the distributor would ‘screen the hell out of it’. These invitational screenings, designed to get the word out to a wider audience, were not for any Tom, Dick or Harry, they were ‘tastemaker’ screenings. ‘Musicians sat with film-makers, writers and graffiti vandals,’ said Marc Schiller, who helped with this campaign. ‘We announced the diversity at the screenings.’ Once the film’s ‘offline presence’ had been established the promoters could then go online and to Twitter. And the audience they drew in were not regular filmgoers. As Sloss said: ‘They don’t read the newspapers or traditional movie advertising – we were connecting with them online, from within their community.’

  And it worked. Banksy told the New York Times that he financed the film himself, and the abbreviated 2010 accounts for his film company Paranoid Pictures show an investment of almost £1.5 million, or roughly $2.4 million. Film finance is an obscure business, to put it mildly, but the headline figures are these. The American box office was almost $3.3 million, the foreign box office was just over $2 million, making a total of $5.3 million; add to that DVD sales and television rights. By the time everyone else had taken their share Banksy might not have made a huge profit, but he certainly would not have lost money.