Banksy Read online

  For Lara and Daniel and in memory of Barbara

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 The Art of Infiltration

  2 Once Upon a Time

  3 Graffiti Decoded

  4 Finding His Own Style

  5 All Aboard for the Banksy Tour

  6 Anonymously Happy

  7 The Artist and Organiser

  8 The Outlaw Returns Home

  9 Welcome to Team Banksy

  10 The Business of Banksy

  11 Faking It

  12 Psst . . . Anyone Want to Buy a Wall?

  13 How Pest Control Routed Vermin

  14 Bonjour Monsieur Brainwash

  15 Art Without a Theory

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  First 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.

  Introduction

  He 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.

  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

  One 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:

  It can be argued that defacing such an idyllic scene reflects the way our nation has been vandalised by its obsession with crime and paedophilia, where any visit to a secluded beauty spot now feels like it may result in being molested or finding discarded body parts.

  (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.)