Banksy (2 page)

An online petition gained more than 2000 signatures in a week – ‘The rabbit must live’, ‘Fur Pete’s sake’, ‘Just because it’s
not a Banksy doesn’t make it worthless’, ‘Don’t scrub the bunny’ were a few of the comments that came with the signatures. In general the belief was that the rabbit
was probably the best thing that could happen to a fairly dismal road in the middle of Hackney that needed all the lightening up it could get. Eventually the local authority relented and the rabbit
was saved, as they woke up to the fact that cleaning up graffiti or street art had become a much more confusing task than it used to be.

An artwork a little further down the same road in Hackney better illustrates the way graffiti jousts with the mainstream. It was a huge piece of typography, made out of smiley faces, which
spelled out very simply THE STRANGEST WEEK. Apart from its size, it was not exactly an arresting slogan unless you knew the story behind it. For the piece was painted by Ben Eine, Banksy’s
one-time printer, a graffiti artist in his own right with about twenty arrests and seven convictions for graffiti vandalism to prove it. Shortly before this work went up Eine had received a
telephone call from the Prime Minister’s office asking if he would provide a painting to give to ‘the most powerful man in the world’. (‘I didn’t think it was going to
go to Ronald McDonald,’ Eine said, ‘so it had to be Obama.’) It had indeed been a very strange week; David Cameron on his first visit to the White House as Prime Minister had
given President Obama a painting by a convicted graffiti artist. It was this that Eine was commemorating on Hackney Road and indeed Obama proved useful, for Eine was painting alongside another
graffiti artist, Pure Evil, on a site where they only ‘sort of’ had the permission of the owner. When the police duly turned up it was the link with Obama that helped convince them not
to make any arrests.

Eine was now famous, his prices went up and at a show he held in San Francisco every piece was sold. And while the rise of street art is confusing to city councils, it is
also sometimes confusing to the artists themselves. ‘I’m going to travel as much as I can, paint as much as I can and sell as few paintings as possible. I’d rather not earn
money,’ said Eine shortly after his show had done exactly that.

Graffiti can still anger me intensely, in the same way as it does councils trying to clean up depressing neighbourhoods, especially when I see it on the outside of the flats where I live; I
think, ‘Who’s done that and what’s the point?’ But what surprised me in talking to graffiti writers – not the Banksys of this world, but others who have made it a
little lower down the ladder – is the redemptive power that graffiti sometimes carries. The fact that on occasions it can bring hope and even a life to kids – nearly always male –
who were going nowhere until they found the excitement and the skill in painting graffiti on the street.

A minuscule number of these taggers, if any, will get anywhere near what Banksy has achieved. But without Banksy it is impossible to imagine that graffiti art, or as it is now more often called
‘urban art’, ‘street art’ or, more ridiculously, ‘outsider art’, would occupy the place it does today. In 2001 Banksy self-published his very slim, first book
– and how many artists, graffiti or otherwise, have ever done that? In it he wrote: ‘The quickest way to the top of your business is to turn it upside down.’ What this book
attempts to do is to travel with him as he does just that.

One

The Art of Infiltration

O
ne Wednesday in mid-October 2003 a tall, bearded man, looking slightly scruffy in a dark overcoat, scarf and the sort of floppy hat that cricketers
used to wear, walked into Tate Britain clutching quite a large paper carrier bag.

Banksy, for it was he, walked straight past the security guards, who were probably more worried about what visitors might be taking out than what they were bringing in, and made his way
unchecked up to Room 7 on the second level. It was a well-chosen spot that he must have researched beforehand. For it is not a gallery you simply stumble into: there is no direct entry from a main
corridor, you have to go through another gallery to reach it. It is usually quite quiet there, which allows the museum attendant to move in and out between galleries rather than having to sit
covering just the one room.

Having chosen his gallery, next he had to choose his spot on the wall. He found enough room between a bucolic eighteenth-century landscape and the doorway leading to Room 8 and claimed it for
his own. He placed his paper carrier bag on the floor, dug out his own picture from the bag and then simply stuck it up.
It was a pretty ballsy thing to do; the Tate would not
have been too happy to find a man stealing not their pictures but their space. But perhaps his earlier years spray-painting the streets of Bristol helped steady his nerve, for he showed no signs of
panic as he reached down into his bag for a second time and pulled out an impressive white stiff board on which was mounted the picture’s caption. This he stuck neatly beside his picture. And
then he was off.

Banksy was once asked by an American radio interviewer if he carried out this sort of incursion alone. He answered, ‘I do, yeah, you don’t want to bring other people into
that.’ And strictly speaking he was right – he was the only man sticking the painting to the wall. But others were involved in the planning. One of them remembers sitting with Banksy in
a café going through the options: ‘We said to each other, “It’s like planning a bank robbery.”’ He had at least one accomplice and possibly more in the gallery,
for we only know precisely how he achieved this coup because someone was filming him do it. Once the film had been mildly doctored so as to obscure his face, it went out on the web. Eventually a
set of stills were to find their way into his best-selling book
Wall and Piece
.

As for the painting itself, Banksy said it was an unsigned oil painting he had found in a London street market. He claimed he found it ‘genuinely good’ but he was being kind; it was
an uninspiring countryside scene with sunlight just managing to filter through the trees on to a meadow and what looked vaguely like a chapel. Across the foreground of the picture he stencilled the
sort of blue and white police incident tapes that you usually see keeping gawpers away from an accident. The picture was titled
Crimewatch UK Has Ruined the Countryside for All of Us
and the
caption he stuck up alongside it was one of the first of Banksy’s many pronouncements:

(Originally the caption was rather more jokey, adding: ‘Little is known about Banksy whose work is inspired by cannabis resin and daytime television’, but interestingly, as Banksy
became more mainstream, this was edited out of the caption when it eventually appeared in
Wall and Piece.
)

The idea of converting the old into the new is not an original one, although Banksy said that when he first thought of it, ‘I was completely convinced it was a genius idea nobody had had
before, and I thought, how do I stop people from stealing this idea? And I thought the best thing to do was to get it hanging up in the Tate with my name next to it.’ In the 1960s, Asger
Jorn, a Danish artist who was a key member of the Situationists, a small group with their base in Paris who argued that advanced capitalism had reduced us all to passive spectators in life,
détourned
paintings he bought in the Paris flea markets with his own swirls and splatters. In the catalogue to his exhibition in Paris he gave collectors and museums advice they were
very unlikely to take: ‘Be modern. If you have old paintings, do not despair. Retain your memories but detourn them so that they correspond with your era. Why reject the old if one can
modernise it with a few strokes of the brush?’

In a more recent example, in 1980 Peter Kennard, an anti-war artist who was to become a friend of Banksy’s, painted
Haywain with Cruise Missiles
. This is John Constable’s
famous painting detourned by Kennard, in a rather more startling manner than
Banksy achieved, by the addition of three Cruise missiles on the back of Constable’s hay
cart. The Tate bought this work from Kennard in 2007. But it did not matter that the idea of adding something to an old painting was not an original one, nor did it matter that Banksy’s
picture only lasted on the wall for three hours before the glue failed. (An art student who was there at the time said: ‘When it fell to the floor a security guard went over to it in a bit of
a panic. He then realised something was up and other security guards were called.’) What mattered was that Banksy had stuck it up in the Tate and he had been
filmed doing it.

Although remaining incognito, Banksy was happy to declare to newspapers reporting the story: ‘People often ask whether graffiti is art. Well it must be, now it’s hanging in the
fucking Tate.’ He suggested: ‘To actually go through the process of having a painting selected must be quite boring. It’s a lot more fun to go and put your own one up. It’s
all about cutting out the middle man, or the curator in the case of the Tate.’ But it was actually about much, much more than that – it was a publicity stunt that had gone wonderfully
right. And if it worked at the Tate, why not try it elsewhere?

Over the course of the next seventeen months he played the same sort of trick in seven more galleries in Paris, New York and London. It was fun; it was done with style and considerable cool; it
hurt nobody; on the whole the museums took it in good heart; and it helped transform Banksy into an international name. The recognition that other artists spend years trying to achieve, he achieved
in months.

He did not just stroll into these galleries and put up a painting on the first wall he could find. He did the reconnaissance first: ‘It was funny. I was going to all these galleries and I
wasn’t looking at
the art, I was looking at the blank spaces between the art,’ he said. In 2004 he hit two targets. In April he installed in the Natural History
Museum in London a rather complicated piece, a stuffed rat enclosed in a glass case along with a spray can, microphone, torch, backpack, sunglasses and a sign scrawled on the background in graffiti
style announcing ‘Our time will come.’ Banksy’s then manager, Steve Lazarides, claimed at the time, ‘I saw a member of staff walk up to it, check it was attached properly,
read the text and walk away.’

Recently the Natural History Museum were kind enough to try to discover what happened to the rat. A spokeswoman said, ‘It wasn’t long before museum staff noticed it and removed it
and as far as we’re aware it was returned to Banksy.’ In fact it was Steve Lazarides who very swiftly asked for it back, in the hope that a photograph of the rat that had been in and
out of the museum would generate even more publicity. But he was told he would have to wait, since the boxed rat was being kept in the museum’s ice room to ensure that there was no
contamination of any of the museum’s permanent exhibits. When the rat was finally released and Lazarides was interviewed by the museum’s security staff, he pointed out that there must
be something wrong with security if a man could walk in with a rat enclosed in a substantial box and screw the box on to the wall of the museum without anyone raising an alarm.

Banksy also visited the Louvre in Paris. It is difficult to say just how successful he was here. Documented in his book there is a rather blurry picture of his own version of the
Mona
Lisa
, transformed by a smiley face, hanging on a wall in the gallery. All does not look well in this photograph. We can see the back of a man, probably Banksy since his head has been
deliberately blurred.
He looks in a hurry, pressing a caption on to the wall below his
Mona Lisa
with one hand while he continues to keep moving past. That’s it.
The video shows very little more than the photograph. As for how long it lasted, Banksy’s book only says ‘Duration Unknown.’ But it was the Louvre, it was there for however short
a time – it counts.

But he wasn’t quite there yet; the Tate had won enough headlines but the Natural History Museum and the Louvre had not really taken him much further. It was next year that he really upped
his game in both New York and London. Being a Sunday, 13 March 2005 was a busy day for galleries; nevertheless he managed to infiltrate four museums in New York without being stopped once. At the
Brooklyn Museum he put up another doctored painting, this time of a bewigged and rather ridiculous-looking aristocrat, all ruffles, frills and sword. One hand is resting limply on the back of a
chair, the other is holding a can of spray paint just as limply. All this is in bright colours, while the dark background behind him is covered in graffiti including a CND sign and a simple demand
for ‘No War’. At 61 cm × 46 cm it is the largest of Banksy’s incursion paintings, and the video of him doing it is the clearest of them all.