Banksy (17 page)

Whether it was the pony-tailed girl hanging on to eight balloons as she gets lifted to the top of the wall, the two stencilled children
with bucket and spade dreaming of
their own bright and colourful Caribbean beach (the effect achieved by a coloured poster pasted on to the wall), or the boy with a simple escape route: a crude ladder painted all the way to the
top, all the images talked of escape from this depressing, dispiriting environment. None of this lasted very long but it did not matter, they were photographed and soon up on the web for all the
world to see.

So, by the time of Banksy’s next show, Crude Oils, two months after his trip to Israel, his name was much better known and he did not need all the razzmatazz of Turf War. This time his
exhibition might have had the feel of a slightly more traditional gallery show, but there was one important difference: 164 rats – real rats – running around the gallery. For twelve
days he took over a shop located between a hairdresser and a smart restaurant on Westbourne Grove, west London. A man wearing a fez and handing out free postcards of Kate Moss remixed by Banksy in
the style of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe (yours now for £4.99 plus postage on Amazon) was at the door holding back the first-night crowds. Banksy later claimed proudly: ‘On the
opening night, the neighbours showed up with some cops and six different health-and-safety inspectors, but they never managed to shut us down.’

To begin with, at least if you did not have the right pass, you were allowed in for only three minutes, which did not give too much time to dodge the rats and see the paintings. There was a lot
of very clever reworking of masters old and new: Hopper, Monet, Van Gogh, Warhol all had the Banksy treatment, and even
Modified Oil Painting No 6
, the painting he had slipped into the Tate
two years earlier, made another appearance. While no longer in the Tate, it was at least hanging close to a museum attendant, or rather the skeleton of a museum attendant, slumped against a
wall with the rats finding a home amongst all his crevices. Despite the rats, or maybe because of them, the exhibition did not create quite the stir of his first big show,
although the Kate Moss canvas and print first shown here was eventually to prove one of Banksy’s biggest money-spinners.

But there was another money-spinner still to come the same year, this time from an unexpected source. In November Century launched
Wall and Piece
, essentially a glossily repackaged
version of his three self-published books with some additions – and a few deletions, usually for taste reasons. Thus in his self-published
Cut
It Out
he describes precisely the
ingredients and the fire extinguisher involved in spraying ‘BORING’ in huge ten-foot letters on the National Theatre and ends by saying: ‘the perfect accompaniment to a night out
drinking heavily with friends.’ Whereas in
Wall and Piece
all this comes down to a much safer caption: ‘Fire extinguisher with pink paint. Southbank, London 2004.’
Similarly his detourned painting of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus with a suicide bomb attached to him had the caption beside it: ‘Suicide bombers need a hug’ in the original;
perhaps understandably, this has disappeared in
Wall and Piece
. Again, his caption for Queen Victoria having oral sex reads much more rudely in the original than it does in
Wall and
Piece
.

It is a book with instant appeal, enjoyable even for people who hate graffiti; it catalogues a great deal of his early work but nevertheless remains as far away from a catalogue raisonné
as it is possible to imagine. At the front of the book he attempts to preserve his outsider status with a rather lame compromise: ‘Against his better judgement Banksy has asserted his right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.’ It is fortunate he could overcome his
scruples, for the book has become
something of a publishing phenomenon.

It is difficult now to find many mainstream reviews of the book, although the
Guardian
called it ‘a grossly self-indulgent look at his work’. But it did not matter, for Banksy
speaks and paints to a world beyond reviewers. Century’s clout meant that
Wall and Piece
was placed at the front of bookshops, and from there browsers could pick it up, have a good
laugh, buy it and tell their friends to buy it. Figures from Booktrack in the spring of 2012 show the hardback had sold over 135,000 copies, meaning a turnover of over £2 million for the
publishers, and the paperback had reached 300,000 copies with a turnover of £3.5 million. But these figures probably represent no more than 70 per cent of sales, for while they include
results from the bookstores and Amazon, they do not include places like HMV, Virgin and Urban Outfitters where Banksy was to be found, nor do they include foreign sales. Whatever percentage of all
this Banksy was on, it was certainly worth him asserting his copyright.

If
Wall and Piece
spoke to fans way beyond the traditional art world, so too did his next two shows. The first, in September 2006, entitled Barely Legal to give it a little edge, was held
in Los Angeles slightly less than a year after Westbourne Grove. The show seemed to be both a triumph and something of a disaster for Banksy. A triumph because the opening night was all valet
parking and limos and Hollywood royalty, and so he made a lot of money – a reputed £3 million, although this figure has never been confirmed – while also making a name for himself
in America, which was vital when his film came out just over three years later. A disaster because every story thereafter tended to have a clause in it that went something like this: ‘Banksy,
whose work is collected by Angelina
Jolie and Brad Pitt among others . . .’ For many artists the fact that Jolie and Pitt eventually spent over £1 million on
their work or that Christina Aguilera spent £25,000 would seem like good news. Indeed Brad Pitt himself seemed envious; he told
The Times
, ‘He does all this and he stays
anonymous. I think that’s great. These days everyone is trying to be famous. But he has anonymity.’ But for Banksy it appears that the fame, the movie stars and the money caused him
considerable confusion for some time afterwards.

The show was classic Banksy. A few months earlier Joel Unangst, who owns a 12,000 square foot former warehouse in down town Los Angeles named The Poodle Parlor, got a call from a location
service telling him, ‘Hey, this guy wants to come by and look at your place for a potential art show.’ He had never heard of Banksy but told them to send him on over. The warehouse,
built in 1937, originally stored salt, then fruit and vegetables, but from 1996 it had operated as a location for music videos, commercials, still shoots; people bored with the idea of a hotel
ballroom even staged their weddings there. But never an art show. The warehouse is in a slightly dodgy part of town, dodgy enough anyway for one Sotheby’s executive visiting for
Banksy’s opening night to say she ‘really worried about getting out of my car’.

Unangst describes what happened next: ‘The first walk through it was Banksy and Thierry Guetta [of whom more later]. They showed up in Guetta’s Bronco SUV – the thing was a
piece of shit. Thierry was there with his camera filming and Banksy is wearing black shorts with some paint smudges on them, sneakers and a T-shirt with more paint on it. He seemed a nice enough
guy.

‘They did a quick walk through and then a group came back three weeks later and said they wanted to use my space.’ When they arrived at the end of August to set up the exhibition,
Unangst was
impressed by Team Banksy. ‘They brought with them a core group of about twelve from England and hired others from LA. These guys got down and got to it.
They weren’t a bunch of fuck-offs, they were serious.’ So who was running the operation? ‘There were some other people who were more in charge of running the crew and stuff. They
were trying to free him up a little bit so he could concentrate on the work. Thinking in film terms it’s like the director having an assistant director and production manager and that kind of
thing, so that Banksy was a little bit insulated from the day-to-day stuff. He was there all the time.’ Banksy, he said, ‘has a fantastic mind even though he’s quiet and little
bit unassuming.

‘They liked to relax and have fun, but it was a brutal schedule and it was pizza, beer and ska music that kept them going. They’d come in at ten or eleven in the morning then work
until midnight, go out until three or four putting stuff up all over Los Angeles and then come back and do it all over again the next day.’

The scale of the whole operation, creating all the artwork, shipping it over, hiring the warehouse – $25,000 for about three weeks – flying over the whole team, seemed beyond Banksy.
The story in Los Angeles was that it had all been funded by Damien Hirst, but although it made a good rumour it was completely untrue. It is a measure of how far they had come in such a short time
that with the proceeds of their two main British exhibitions, Turf Wars and Crude Oils, Banksy and Steve Lazarides took a big gamble and financed the Los Angeles exhibition themselves. At one
moment it looked as though their gamble might fail: a semi-trailer full of Banksy’s work had reached the West Coast but had then been held by US customs. When it was eventually released, what
should have been a leisurely final ten days was forced into a frenetic three.

Unangst remembers that when Team Banksy had been negotiating to use his warehouse they had said ‘Is it OK if we bring in an elephant?’ ‘And I said
“Sure, OK, if we get all the permits.” For filming we’ve had horses, camels, grizzly bears, all different kinds of animals. it’s not really a problem. Although they
didn’t really mention that they were going to paint it.’

It was quite a major point to ‘forget’. For the rats, cows, pigs and sheep had all been replaced this time by just one rather big animal: 38-year-old Tai the elephant, or the
‘painted pachyderm’ as some journalists liked to call her. Like Banksy’s previous animal props, other than the rats, she was painted – this time all over – although
visitors were assured that ‘non-toxic’ paint had been used. She was placed in the cosy sitting room, complete with Banksys hanging on the wall, which he had constructed at the heart of
the exhibition. The colours and patterns on Tai’s back matched the room’s wonderfully awful wallpaper. (Eventually she had to be moved to one side since she was not really suited for
such cosiness.) She was supplied by a company called Have Trunk Will Travel and her handlers said she was ‘regularly fed and given water, taken on bathroom breaks and driven back to her ranch
every night’; but all this did little to reassure animal lovers.

The elephant was there for Banksy to make a serious point – a card handed out to visitors read: ‘There’s an elephant in the room. There’s a problem that we never talk
about. 1.7 billion people have no access to clean water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line . . .’ But who cares about global poverty when there really is an actual elephant in the
room? The elephant became the story – a curiosity, cruel or otherwise – and global poverty soon disappeared far into the background.

As usual the show was announced only at the last minute, unless you were a celebrity invited to the first-night preview. Banksy did his usual jokey-serious anonymous
interview: ‘This show has been quite a big undertaking for me; it represents nearly a month of getting up early in the morning. Some of the paintings have taken literally days to make.
Essentially, it’s about what a horrible place the world is, how unjust and cruel and pointless life is, and ways to avoid thinking about all that.’

There was of course no press conference but Banksy had already made his own pre-opening headlines. At the beginning of the month Team Banksy had visited forty-two record stores across Britain
and replaced Paris Hilton’s debut CD – ‘she sounds both distracted and bored stiff’, said the
Guardian
reviewer – with 500 of his own remixed Paris CDs. They
came with a forty-minute rhythm track, but more important, he had brilliantly doctored the booklet that accompanied all Paris’s emptiness. His trick was to keep the CDs’ original
barcode intact so that punters thought they were still buying the real thing. Only when they got it home would they discover that Paris was exposing a pair of enormous bare breasts; that the
original song titles had been replaced and instead they were faced with a list of questions: ‘Why am I famous?’, ‘What have I done?’ and ‘What am I for?’; and
that there were telling thoughts from the new Paris like ‘Every CD you buy puts you even further out of my league.’ (No one who bought the album complained – they paid £9.99
for it and a copy of the CD complete with sleeve and case sold for £1500 at Christie’s in November 2011.)

On the other side of the Atlantic a week later he visited Disneyland, with a blow-up doll stuffed into his backpack. He managed to get through the Disney security search, then sat down on a
bench and calmly blew up the doll so that it turned into an
orange-suited, black-hooded, manacled Guantanamo Bay detainee. He dodged the first security fence, stepped
gingerly through various cacti – and stood the doll just inside, beside the railings protecting the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride. It was not a particularly impressive doll, but it took
considerable nerve to put it there in broad daylight. And it was certainly big enough that when it was noticed after about ninety minutes, it brought the railroad to a halt while Disney disposed of
the doll and checked the area. The key thing, as usual with Banksy’s escapades, was that he had himself filmed as he was doing it. More headlines followed both for the detainees at Guantanamo
and for his show.

Despite the last-minute panic Banksy managed to pull it off again; the show was free, and even though it was only open for three days 30,000 people managed to visit it. Unangst says, ‘My
first reaction was, oh my god I’ve got to get more toilet paper. It became a cool scene with the line outside turning it into something of a street festival.’ Making the front page of
the
New
York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
on the same day meant Banksy established for himself a new recognition across America, and for the West Coast fans who already knew
him and followed him on the web, here was a chance to visit a gallery where they could actually see his work emerge from behind the computer screen.