Banksy
Authors: Will Ellsworth-Jones
For Lara and Daniel and in memory of Barbara
Contents
5 All Aboard for the Banksy Tour
12 Psst . . . Anyone Want to Buy a Wall?
13 How Pest Control Routed Vermin
F
irst to my wife Barbara who died in February 2012. Despite extended stays in hospital and all kinds of pain when out of hospital she was determined
that none of her trials and tribulations were going to stop this book being written. Sometimes in hospital she worried much more about whether I had done enough writing that day before coming to
see her than she did about her own far more pressing problems. In times of despair, particularly early on when it seemed it was going to be impossible to get through the wall of silence that
surrounds Banksy, and I doubted if I would ever finish the book, I told myself that I could not conceive of letting her down.
Next my thanks to Graham Coster, Publisher at Aurum Press, who had the original idea for this book, helped me develop it and was a very understanding shoulder to lean on during all the usual
– and unusual – ups and downs.
There are a few people who were of considerable help to me but who would not thank me at all if I named them here because they would then be cast out from the Banksy magic circle. But they know
who they are – many thanks and thanks too to all those who did help and are named in the book.
My thanks to three people who showed great patience in initiating me into the world of graffiti. First Nico Yates, a young graffiti artist who writes under the name of Spico who, over breakfast
one morning in a café in Deptford, gave me my first long lesson in graffiti. Thanks too to David Samuel and John Nation who, with similar patience, expanded this lesson on the streets of
London and Bristol.
My thanks as always to Don Berry who gave me key advice at awkward moments along the road and then made the first edit of the manuscript – as always suggesting many changes for the better.
My thanks too to Bernie Angopa, Drusilla Beyfus, Mick Brown, Jessamy Calkin, Gary Cochran, Jon Connell, Carolynne Ellis-Jones, David Galloway, Gail Gregg, Cathy Giles, Jonathan Giles, Henry
Greaves, Nick Greaves, Rory and Michael McHugh, Vicki Reid, Mern Palmer-Smith, Francesca Ryan, Claire Scobie, Robin Smith, Emma Soames and Angela Swan who all helped in various ways. The mistakes,
however, are all mine.
H
e is the outlaw who has been dragged reluctantly, but relentlessly, ever closer to the art establishment.
He is the artist who mocked museums and art galleries alike. Yet he chose to mount his first major exhibition in one of the crustiest museums imaginable – amidst the stuffed animals and
the antique pianos of Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery – and made a huge success of it.
When, in 2010,
Time
magazine selected him for its list of 100 most influential people in the world, along with the likes of Barack Obama, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga, he
supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable of course) over his head. For he is an artist unique in the twenty-first century: famous but unknown.
He claims he needs this anonymity to protect himself from the forces of law and order. This was true in the past, but at this stage in his career most cities would welcome a new Banksy on the
wall. The argument would be how best to preserve it, not how to lock up its creator.
This book does not attempt to unmask him. Tales of scuttling
around his home town of Bristol trying to convince childhood friends to reveal his identity would not make for
very interesting reading. More important is the fact that fans, followers and even those who are just vaguely aware he exists, don’t want to know who he is. The
New Statesman
critic
who derides it all as ‘ostentatious anonymity’ is very much in the minority. We all enjoy the mystery of the man who has somehow managed to get himself described as ‘Robin
Hood’ even though he is hardly robbing the rich to feed the poor.
What this book does do, however, is to follow his upward spiral from the outlaw – just one of many – spraying the walls of Bristol in the 1990s to the artist whose work commands
hundreds of thousands of pounds in the auction houses of Britain and America. The outsider who has become an insider.
It has not been an easy voyage. Pest Control, the appropriately named organisation set up to authenticate the real Banksy artwork from the fake, is also involved in protecting him from
outsiders. Pest Control uses everything from a tightly drawn up legal contract to a carefully timed phone call from the man himself where necessary to maintain its control.
Hiding behind a paper bag or, more commonly, email, Banksy wants to protect and preserve his own narrative and he does this very well. Pest Control has asked that this book be marked
‘unofficial’ to ‘avoid any doubt with the public that the book might be sanctioned by the artist’ and, yes, it is completely ‘unofficial’ – utterly
unauthorised. It is perhaps ironic that a graffiti artist appears to be trying to authorise the way people both think and write about him. Which is sad, for his work speaks for itself. His unique
talent puts him at the head of a whole new movement in the world of art: street art. A technically skilled artist who has – literally – taken art into
places it has
never been before, he marries this skill with an acute eye for the world around us. He is both artist and social commentator with the humour of a great cartoonist.
Inevitably what comes with all this is a certain amount of baggage. There is the paranoia, which if anything has grown over the years, and then of course there is the money. He says, ‘I
don’t make as much money as people think,’ and it is true, he is not – yet – in the Damien Hirst money-making bracket, but money he certainly makes. In his earlier days,
when his prices suddenly started to rocket upwards, often it was not Banksy who was making the huge amounts that captured the headlines but his fans. Usually they were from his home town of
Bristol, fans who had bought a painting for a couple of hundred quid not as an investment but simply because they liked it and were selling it a few years later for thousands. For a short time it
was that elusive commodity called people’s art. But when the art investors moved in the money started to flow to Banksy himself.
He accuses others of being capitalist but, despite giving away some pictures for charity, funding events for other graffiti artists, trying to sell prints at a reasonable price only to see them
more than double in value on eBay, he too is a capitalist – albeit a reluctant one. With all the compromises and fudges that this entails, this is the side of life that he is most uneasy in
dealing with.
With his success comes the inevitable envy and accusations of being a sell-out. Certainly there are many people in the street art world who criticise him, but almost universally, whether they be
gallery owners or street artists who have found a market for their work, they admit, if sometimes a little grudgingly, ‘Without Banksy I wouldn’t be here.’
For he is the standard bearer for a whole new movement in art, whether its practitioners be ‘pure’ graffiti writers, stencil artists like himself or even artists
who crochet their own graffiti. It is a movement which has sprung off the streets and into a much wider public consciousness. In an emailed interview to publicise his film
Exit Through the Gift
Shop
, Banksy suggested: ‘There’s a whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell it, particularly at the lower levels. You don’t have to go to
college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful. All you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first
time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.’
He is right, up to a point. There is undoubtedly a new army of Banksy fans thriving on the internet, who will queue for hours to see the very few exhibitions he has put on or queue all night to
buy a new print when it is released. When you meet a Banksy fan you can mention
Trolleys
or
Morons
or
Flying Copper
and many of his other works and both of you will know
instantly which of his many prints you are talking about. Club Banksy is a club which you don’t need a degree in art history to join.
In the long run Banksy will certainly, as he suggests, ‘make it count’, although, like the members of many other movements, it is difficult to imagine that many of his fellow artists
will be remembered. Nevertheless it is remarkable how far street art has travelled in the ten years since Banksy rose to the surface.
The strength of an art movement is all too often measured by the prices the movement’s leading figures command in the auction houses. But there are ways other than the price of a Banksy to
measure how street art has become an accepted, if slightly confusing, part of our lives.
At the end of 2010 I travelled to the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry for the opening of a travelling exhibition of street art prints from the collection of the
Victoria & Albert Museum. All the big names were represented in the exhibition, from Banksy to D*Face; Swoon to Shepard Fairey. But there was more than that; six ‘emerging’ artists
from the street had been invited to paint on the white walls of the gallery. A DJ had been imported to give the opening night a little edge, and there was even a wall provided for artists to spray
their stuff in some sort of competition with each other. The city council condemns graffiti as an ‘illegal, anti-social activity’ and spends thousands of pounds a year washing it off,
but here was the council’s chief executive welcoming – when he could be heard amidst the slightly raucous opening-night crowd – street art both figuratively and literally as it
came in from the cold.
Quite soon afterwards I was in the middle of Hackney, east London hunting around the frozen streets for a community centre where a meeting was being held to ‘Save the Rabbit’. There
was no DJ, no free booze here. The night before, the centre had hosted a bingo session for the local residents. But tonight a rather different, more earnest audience was gathered together to try to
save a huge – about twelve foot high – and very attractive rabbit. The rabbit had been painted by the Belgian street artist Roa on the side of a recording studio (with the owner’s
permission) on one of the main roads through the borough. The council had warned the studio’s owners that the unfortunate rabbit was ‘a blight on the local environment’ and would
have to go. What the council had failed to take into account was both the new popularity of street art and the new power of the internet. And what an animal to go into battle against! Not a rat,
nor a snake, but a nice cuddly rabbit.