Banksy (8 page)

There was one canvas that hit you as you walked in. It was heavy with colour and right at the point to which your eye is drawn, Robbo had written in easy to read lettering: ‘R.I.P. Street
Art.’ But the fact both that Robbo had agreed to show in a gallery and that there was hardly a piece of ‘pure graffiti’ to be seen only underlined the reality that street art of
the Banksy kind, which has nothing to do with the rules of pure graffiti, was not about to Rest In Peace. His second exhibition, entitled Team Robbo: The Sell Out Tour, showed that he had at least
picked up one useful tip from Banksy: irony. His art still seemed happier on the street than it did on a gallery wall; nevertheless one piece,
The King
, was priced at an astonishing
£12,000.

As for the beef with Banksy, at the time of writing Robbo had been in a coma for months after a fall outside his home. Graffiti writers were wishing him ‘Get Well Soon’, not with a
card but on a wall. In September 2011 I went to an art auction like no other at Cargo in Shoreditch to raise funds for Robbo’s family. You had to queue for forty-five minutes to get in and
signs warned us: ‘Please respect the Robbo event. No Bombing.’ Inside it was like a football
stadium in the days when fans stood on the terraces. For the most part
this was a tight little circle of outlaws and their friends who made Banksy seem like part of some far-off establishment. The room was overflowing with macho, beer and a sort of fan worship for
Robbo and what he stood for. On occasions there would be chants of ‘Robbo, Robbo’ pushing the bids higher. It was as far away from a Sotheby’s auction as it was possible to
imagine. The auctioneer, despite breaking his hammer early on, somehow managed to keep control above all this – just – and the auction raised about £30,000 from 150 donated works
(there was nothing from Banksy). In addition, in the way these things inevitably work, Robbo’s accident and the television programme about the feud had suddenly transformed him from an artist
having difficulty selling anything into a hot number, and another £28,000 was later raised by selling his own works.

Robbo’s accident, plus the fact that there were hardly any more Banksy pieces left in London to write over, may well have put an end to the feud. But graffiti writers will never see Banksy
as one of them. At this point in his career you may imagine he no longer cares very much about what they think, but he very obviously does. At the end of December 2011 he put up on his website a
slideshow of the whole Robbo affair, starting with the original piece, next showing how it had been partially defaced by others and then illustrating the tit for tat between the pair of them. The
final picture was a black and white replica done by Banksy of the original piece, with the addition of a candle in the shape of a spray can spreading light amidst the dark; it seems to be some sort
of homage to Robbo, lying in hospital in a coma. To emphasise the point he added elsewhere on his site: ‘I would never deliberately cuss Robbo – he’s a graffiti legend.’

Four

Finding His Own Style

T
here are a range of explanations that Banksy has given of his reasons for switching to stencils. The most romantic story comes in his book
Wall
and Piece
, where he tells of the time when, aged eighteen, he was in the middle of painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up. Everyone ran, but Banksy
got ‘ripped to shreds’ by thorny bushes as he tried to make his escape. ‘The rest of my mates made it to the car and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper
truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks I realised I had to cut my painting time in half or give up altogether. I was staring straight up at
the stencilled plate on the bottom of a fuel tank when I realised I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.’

It certainly makes a good story, but in 2002 he told the
Observer
he abandoned graffiti because ‘I was 21 and crap.’ Stencils, on the other hand, were ‘quick, clean,
crisp and efficient. And that’s quite sexy.’ A couple of years later he told
Wired
magazine, ‘I wasn’t good at freehand graffiti, I was too slow,’ and a year
after that he told Simon Hattenstone of the
Guardian
, in the only face-to-face
interview with a newspaper he has ever given, ‘Because I was quite crap with a
spray can, I started cutting out stencils instead.’

But perhaps it is all rather simpler than that, for he was most convincing when talking to author and friend Tristan Manco: ‘I started off painting graffiti in the classic New York style
you use when you listen to too much hip hop as a kid, but I was never very good at it. As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. The ruthlessness and the efficiency of it is
perfect.

‘I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars. Even a picture of a
rabbit playing a piano looks hard as a stencil.’ A fellow writer from Bristol days confirms that it was more than just sitting under a dumper truck that persuaded him to abandon his attempts
at ‘traditional’ graffiti: ‘Stencils are no coincidence. He knows his history. He looked at Paris in the sixties and how quickly they got their message up.’

Almost from the start Banksy showed an unusual single-mindedness, which he very much needed. For Bristol was a hardcore graffiti town, heavily influenced by the styles that for a few years had
overwhelmed the New York subway trains. Various artists from America – particularly Rock Steady Crew, who straddled both the music and the graffiti scene – brought their graffiti skills
with them when they were touring here; but more than anything else it was one book that was the key reference point.

Martha Cooper was a photographer who had moved from Rhode Island to New York City, where she worked on Rupert Murdoch’s
New York Post
. Henry Chalfant had arrived in New York as a
sculptor, but with rather less success. Both had become disillusioned with what they were doing and had started
photographing graffiti, first as sort of rivals and then as
collaborators, producing
the
key book on American graffiti:
Subway Art.
It still remains an extraordinary record of the days when the New York subway system became one huge graffiti
canvas. Over and over again graffiti artists say that this was the book that inspired them. Inkie, for instance, says, ‘It was instant. Lots of us were punks at the time and as soon as I saw
Subway Art
I thought it was the perfect synergy between graffiti and my anarchist tendencies.’ Jason Kelly, a friend who went on from graffiti to become a designer at the
Daily
Telegraph
magazine and then start his own design business, even copied his tag, ‘kid-ink’, from the book. ‘It’s a great book, it was like gold dust in those days,’
he says. ‘It was like a bible,’ says another graffiti artist.

The police, when discussing the case against John Nation, showed him a copy of the book they had taken from his office at Barton Hill as evidence that he was inciting young people to go out and
paint illegally. He pointed out to them that he had bought the book at Waterstones and if they were going to prosecute him they should be prosecuting Waterstones and the publishers as well.

It was a huge book not only in its impact but also in its size, although sales were slow to start with – partly because the graffiti fraternity were stealing the book, despite its size,
from bookshops in much the same way they stole their paint from paint shops. In the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, which came out in 2009, Martha Cooper remembers going on a promotional tour
across Europe, visiting eighteen cities in twenty-one days, and ‘in every city kids came up to me to tell me what
Subway Art
meant to them. More than one said “You saved my
life.” My favourite was the English writer who playfully shook his finger at me and said “You
have a lot to account for.”’ The whole graffiti removal
industry – for it is now an industry – would certainly agree.

A Banksy freehand ‘tag’ exists now only in old photographs and there were never too many of them in the first place, although there was for a short time a joyful ‘Banksy’
in big lettering on the side of a nightclub boat in Bristol harbour – ‘That was so toy,’ says one graffiti writer. His tag was the first thing that he put into stencils. It
started off with simple lower-case lettering but soon evolved into the very distinctive signature – with the upright back of the capital B missing, the k relying on the n for support, the s
with the top shaved off slightly and the final y that looks almost like a hieroglyphic – that he has continued to use ever since.

Although he had switched to a stencil for his signature he persevered with ‘freehand’ graffiti for some time. Inkie remembers this freehand stage well. ‘He’s a very
talented artist quite apart from the stencils. If you look at his sketch book he’s got fantastic concepts, an amazing sense of perspective and depth and vision. Personally I prefer some of
his early stuff, the canvases or the sketches, over the stencil stuff. However I do feel that he gives depth to his stencils in a way that others can’t do. It’s a bit more
organic.’ But however talented Banksy was as a freehand artist, it is still fair to say that if he had stuck to his freehand style he would probably still be doing it in Bristol today, and
probably no one other than the tight circle of the city’s graffiti artists and ex-artists would have ever heard of him.

Even when he was painting with a ‘crew’, if there was intricate lettering to be done someone, often Inkie, or sometimes another friend, Kato, would do it, while Banksy stuck to
illustration. The people, and indeed the apes, he drew in these early days all have a slightly strange, primitive feel to them. My personal favourite –
perhaps because
it is still there to see – is a piece which greets you when you enter the Pierced Up tattoo parlour in Bristol. It is a painting of giant wasps (with television sets strapped to them as
additional weapons) dive-bombing a tempting bunch of flowers in a vase with their long red tongues curling towards the nectar. What somehow makes this aerosol painting work is the fact that the
flowers and their vase are encased in a wooden frame screwed to the wall, so the angry wasps are buzzing towards a traditional still life. The manager, Maryanne Kempf, says, ‘It was an
all-nighter and the next day when he came back he still wasn’t sure how to finish it off. He saw an empty frame in a skip, screwed it to the wall and it was done.’ It is a typical
Banksy touch which lifts the painting out of the ordinary. (Like many early Banksy paintings, this one ended up on eBay, but the tricky problem of how to remove it from the wall was never solved
because the bidding stopped at £6889 – below the reserve price.)

Perhaps the best judge of this early work is Banksy himself. In his three small self-published books there is not one example of this freehand work from his Bristol days. In
Wall and
Piece
, which followed later, there are 316 photographs – give or take a picture or two – but amidst so many photographs only six of these early pieces are included. There is never
going to be an exhibition of Banksy’s ‘Early Work’ because most of it was soon painted over. But it was nearly always photographed before it was obliterated and these photographs
do not appear to be memories he treasures.

Banksy was not the first to switch to stencils. 3D, Robert Del Naja, tried it in 1986 for the face of Mona Lisa – the body he did freehand – and, he says, ‘the graffiti boys
hated it.’ But 3D had been one of the earliest graffiti artists in Bristol and no one was seriously going to give him much trouble.

Jody was another early stencil artist in the city but, without quite the same pedigree as 3D, he found life rather more difficult. In an interview with Felix Braun for
Weapon of Choice
magazine he says he ran into a ‘notoriously intimidating’ member of the United Bombers crew (famous in their day for tagging virtually everything that moved)
just after he had finished stencilling his version of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe on the wall at Barton Hill. ‘He stood right in my face and said: “You can fuck off with your fucking
stencilled faces, you cheating ****! Nothing you’ve done will ever test my pieces.”’ It did, he admits, put him off stencils for a bit. Banksy has never even hinted that he got
the same sort of treatment. Perhaps it was because he was not the first, but more likely it was because of the sort of character he was. ‘To us stencils were taboo,’ says Inkie.
‘I would have just been laughed at, it was all about face. Even if you used a bit of paper or some sellotape or masking tape to do the sharp edges it was frowned on . . . But Banksy had a
punk attitude. He didn’t care what people thought, he had a strong personality.’

So it was not as though Banksy was the only person in Bristol to have thought about stencils; but he was one of the very few who dared to make the big leap. It was much more than just a change
of style; he risked banishment from the strong subculture that was part of the lure of graffiti. This is perhaps why he did not convert to stencils overnight. It was almost as if he was testing the
water, for although some of his early pieces look like stencils they are actually painted freehand to give the stencil effect. Thus in one early work on an Esso garage in Bristol, painted with
other members of the Dry Breadz Crew, most of the length of the piece is pure graffiti, but at one end the two children who we are used to seeing on the lollipop lady’s sign warning of
children crossing, have been gently
transformed by Banksy into robbers so the girl is carrying a gun and the boy is carrying a briefcase leaking money gained in their
successful raid. It looks like a pure stencil, but it is actually freehand with Banksy trying things out. On other occasions he would stencil the face while painting the body freehand.