Banksy (6 page)

In addition, while some graffiti artists sketch out their work before going out to paint, most just go out and bomb. But for a stencil artist, the art is much more in the conception of the piece
and then exactly where you place it than in how skilfully you can use a spray can. Stencils can take hours at home or in the studio to prepare, and if you venture beyond black and white each layer
of colour demands its own separate stencil. Bristol stencil artist Nick Walker says some of his own intricate stencils ‘take days to cut.’ It is painstaking work cutting out accurately
the shape on a piece of stiffish card. Banksy himself suggests card about 1.5 mm thick, ‘much fatter and it’s too difficult and boring to cut through. Any thinner and it gets sloppy too
quickly.’ Some artists now use Photoshop to create their image and computer-driven lasers to
cut out their shapes, but Banksy preaches the joys of a ‘very sharp
knife’ and pre-cut gaffa tape to stick the stencil on the wall in a hurry.

The stencil artist manages to marry the techniques of the studio with the thrill of danger that comes with graffiti art. There are other advantages. The risk of being caught painting on the
street is diminished, though not eliminated. For once the cut stencil has been stuck temporarily to the wall, it is much quicker to spray over it than to paint the intricate, involved flourishes of
the graffiti artist, although watching a stencil artist doing layer upon layer of colour I realise it can take huge patience and attention to detail. Also, if you feel like it, you can repeat the
image, or a very similar image, again and again – one done by Banksy himself, of placard-carrying rats, being a good example (in more recent years he appears to have stopped these
repeats).

So if Banksy and others out there painting the streets are not graffiti artists, what are they? Steve Lazarides, Banksy’s one-time gallerist and former manager, has tried to promote the
name ‘Outsiders’ and his book called, of course,
Outsiders
, declares it is ‘Art by people.’ But the fact that some of these ‘Outsiders’ sell in his
gallery for up to £40,000 makes them feel like outsiders who have very much come in from the cold. ‘Outsiders’ as a collective name probably has a shelf life only slightly longer
than ‘aerosol artists’, the term John Nation persevered with for so long. ‘Aerosol art’ has never made it and never will – even though, long before the days of Tracey
Emin and her bed or Damien Hirst and his sheep, we often classified painters by the material they used – as ‘oil painters’ or ‘watercolourists’ for example.

Street art is the name that fits best. It can cover Banksy and his stencils, it can cover stickers, posters, wooden boxes, cardboard,
woodcuts, pavement paintings, mosaics,
even knitting and crocheting. Yes, there are ‘yarn stormers’ who use knitting to decorate everything from lamp-posts to buses and there are crochet graffiti artists – particularly
Olek, a Pole living in New York, who managed to crochet a nice warm tightly fitting suit covering the whole of Wall Street’s charging bull, a bronze statue which stands eleven feet tall and
sixteen feet long. Sadly her work only lasted a couple of hours before it was cut off. And if the ‘pure’ graffiti merchants hate the title street artists – usually dismissing
anyone using stencils as a ‘toy’ or an ‘art fag’ – then they can still call themselves graffiti artists.

And pure graffiti can in itself be far more complicated than it might appear at first glance. To understand graffiti you need to decode it and without the code you are lost. Again, to put it in
academic terms, ‘graffiti artists are modern day calligraphers. It [graffiti] is characterised by the redefinition of the alphabet and its metamorphosis into one of indecipherable chaos. This
is to deliberately exclude those who are not part of the sub-culture by making the names and messages indecipherable.’

Anyone who lives in a city will have seen squiggles on a wall, some of them – the most irritating ones – nothing more than a squiggle, the ones that make you feel that all graffiti
should be banished. These are done by the lads who will ‘sacrifice mural quality for tag quantity’, putting their name up wherever they can find a space providing it will enhance their
exposure.

But then there are the elaborate ones, where what is important is the way the piece flows, the rhythm, the balance, the lean of the intricate lettering, the space between each letter –
which can be just as important as the letter itself – the colours of the outline, the colours inside the outline, the colours for the background. And
this is just the
beginning of the list. The end result you might find just as irritating as the simple squiggle, but they are not mindless; they are very carefully thought out, they are painstaking, they are
expressive, they are, in one word,
art
. And what the outsider seldom realises is that buried deep down in this piece is a name. Essentially a nom de plume has been assumed, because there is
obviously not much point running from the police if you leave your real signature on the wall. For example, these are some of the names, each given a small chapter to themselves, in
Crack &
Shine
, a book on London graffiti artists: Teach, Elk, Diet, Grand, Fuel, Pic, Zomby, Drax, 10Foot, ATG, Dreph . . . The choice of name is often governed not just by the sound of the name but
the way the letters will look on a wall. Sometimes this intricate signature can be linked in with a cartoon character or two, either taken from a comic or a book or just made up. It shows you have
skills – and imagination – beyond the tag.

David takes me down to Leake Street, which goes under the railway tracks leading out from Waterloo station, once one of the darkest little roads imaginable, and even now, flaming with colour as
it is, still a tunnel you would not choose to walk through in the dead of night. It is a road which Banksy rented from the owners to allow artists to paint unhindered by the police. As we walk in a
sign announces ‘The Tunnel, authorised graffiti area’ and then warns ‘You don’t have to be a gangster to paint here, so please don’t behave like one.’ Here,
using as a teaching aid the graffiti that almost overwhelms us on these walls, David tries to guide me through this arcane world. It is a world so prickly that the purists would probably question
every word I write, but in one paragraph it goes something like this.

A
tag
is the name you have chosen, and although it’s the
lowest on the ability scale it is still very important. Next comes a
throw up
; this is two
letters of the name in two colours, one being the outline and the other being the fill-in. This is followed by a
dub
, the full name in two colours. Next comes a
piece
or
masterpiece
, where your elaborate name is painted on top of a background that is sometimes almost equally elaborate. Next
wildstyle
, a jigsaw puzzle of typography, a form of
competitive calligraphy where each artist is ‘attacking’ another’s style; it is very intricate, and often almost impossible to read. Finally comes a
production
–
usually on a bigger scale – and often done by a ‘crew’ or gang of friends.

All of this, however intricate, is done freehand, sometimes sketched out in detail beforehand and sometimes painted without any pre-planning. There is never a stencil in sight. Occasionally a
young graffiti writer might pull out a bit of masking tape to do a straight line and he would be dismissed as a ‘toy’. (A toy is, as Professor Gregory Snyder puts it in his scholarly
book on New York graffiti writers, ‘a neophyte writer with no skills and little clue of the history of the culture’.)

The pressure for legal space to paint is so intense that most pieces in Leake Street usually only stay for a week or two, often less, before another artist comes and paints over them. But now it
is mid-afternoon on a weekday so the place is almost empty of painters. At one end we come across a crew of three teenagers, all hoodies and hip hop, the kind of guys who might be a little
frightening to meet on a dark night but who are all down here painting with complete dedication if not complete skill. They each have a separate chunk of wall which in the end they will join up.
David sounds a bit like a school art master as we look at them. The letters don’t fit together quite right; the outlines are too simple;
there should be a stronger
border on the outline not a mid tone; they have left too much space in the middle of the whole painting so other kids will come and take it . . .

Then we examine their paint. He borrows a can on which the manufacturers have written ‘Use cans for art not vandalism’, as though this somehow absolves them of all further
responsibility. He steps up to the wall, shakes the can a couple of times and writes his tag and WILL in what I consider striking blue, as though we have been writing as a team for years.
It’s all done in a few seconds and I get a small whiff of the thrill of it all. Next he takes a look at a big can of household paint sitting open on the pavement which, slapped on the wall
with an ordinary brush, has given them their white background. They have made a comic mistake. The paint is gloss not emulsion, so already the paint they have sprayed on top of it has begun to run,
giving the whole piece a nasty cracking effect. ‘Next time use emulsion,’ he tells one of the lads who, drawing close in the hope that I can’t hear, explains to David with some
embarrassment that the paint was ‘racked’. In this world ‘racked’ means stolen and it used to be part of the tradition of graffiti art that all paint was
‘racked’, So in short they stole the wrong paint. They have a lot to learn.

On the other side of the street is a lone artist with about a dozen cans of paint at his feet. He is wearing goggles and full breathing apparatus to protect himself from the paint fumes, so he
looks more like a welder than an artist. Pilot, as he calls himself, is originally from Poland and he speaks with such a slow, sincere English he makes the language sound almost sad. He has been
here since ten in the morning, painting a piece which suits his name, planes exploding like darts out of everywhere. He is not using stencils, but it is not traditional graffiti, rather it is
freehand
graffiti without a letter in sight; he is using the spray can to paint what he wants without following any of the rules.

‘There’s still a load of work to do. I will finish in two or three hours.’

‘Will it last?’

‘No, it won’t last. The second I finish it I take the picture and I go away and someone will destroy it.’

‘That doesn’t worry you?’

‘No, I do it for the pleasure of painting.’

And then he tries to explain the call of graffiti in an almost messianic way. ‘Kids will only aspire to what they can see. And that’s why you need to do your best work, so that kids
can look and aspire to master the craft. Because it is a craft. It’s almost illogical to do graffiti. You can spend most of your life and money on it and what you have is a picture on the
internet.

‘What I love about graffiti is there is a sense of belonging. Everyone seems to be coming from the same background. It feels like we are an entity. When I meet these amazing street artists
my hat goes off to their work. But with street artists there’s no sense of “getting up”, it’s just one stencil, one sticker and two thousand pictures all over the internet.
Graffiti artists would go in the dead of night and would do it for themselves and they would go to the most audacious spots for the love of painting. For the craft . . .’

I went back to Leake Street the next day and was happy to see that everything was still there just as they had painted it. When I went back again two weeks later there was almost nothing of the
original work to see and I remembered David, sounding this time a bit like a letter writer to the
Daily Telegraph
, as he told me, ‘We call them rats, they come out and they paint over
everything and they’ve got no respect. That’s kids in society nowadays. It’s not just
graffiti, it’s how kids are growing up.’ Pilot’s
elaborate work had been completely ruined by tags and throw ups. But I know he would say it was worth it. Of the lads’ work the middle part had survived, with the crackled effect caused by
the gloss still showing. The work they had done to the left and right had been completely obliterated. So too had our tag.

Banksy was once asked to define graffiti and he made his definition as wide as he possibly could. ‘I love graffiti. I love the word. Some people get hung up over it, but I think
they’re fighting a losing battle. Graffiti equals amazing to me . . . I make normal paintings if I have ideas that are too complex or offensive to go out on the street, but if I ever stopped
being a graffiti writer I would be gutted. It would feel like being a basket weaver rather than being a proper artist.’

But although he is known by the outside world for his ‘graffiti’, it was very early in his career that he decided there was more to life than tags and masterpieces. And many,
although certainly not all, hardcore graffiti artists are not happy with him for it – to put it mildly. His work, they say, is too easy, too glib. In
Crack and Shine
the graffiti
artist called 10Foot (later imprisoned for twenty-six months) says: ‘Banksy is a sell-out, a cross over and gets taken out because we hate street art and he’s got no integrity. Getting
properly up or having a wicked style is less pseudo-intellectual but takes more time, determination and talent.’

Banksy did attempt to reach this tough London crowd. Three years after he came to London he set up the Burner Prize – as opposed to the Turner Prize – for graffiti writers. He put up
£1000 and even had a bronze statue made, rented out the basement of a club in west London and threw a party for about 100 people, all graffiti writers. There was a shortlist which included
the ATG crew,
Cos, Kist, the NT crew, Odea, Oker, Take, Tox and Zomby. The front-runner was Tox but in the end the prize was won by Zomby. Unlike the Turner Prize there was
very little argument, for almost all the writers agreed that Zomby was the king of the London scene and anyway the press was not too interested in a row over who was the year’s greatest
graffiti writer. There were two things missing from the award ceremony: Banksy and Zomby; but, sweetly, Zomby’s mother was there to collect his award. David Samuel was impressed. ‘I
thought this Banksy dude, a stencil artist, bit of a writer from Bristol comes to London and does that with the money he’s earning, that’s amazing.’ But it did not do Banksy any
lasting good in this tight community.