Banksy Read online

  He told one interviewer he did art at school but never made it any further. He never went to art college and he says ‘I’m not from a family of artistic people.’ But a fellow pupil recalls now: ‘There were several good artists at school back then, but one really stood out and that was him.’ However, the art department at school and Banksy did not appear to get on, for he says he got no more than an E in GCSE art. Asked if this was due to a lack of inspiration, he replied: ‘That, plus I had also discovered cannabis.’ (The school says it cannot discuss any individual pupil’s achievements there.) From all that he says it appears as though he was miserable at school – it never made any sense to him – and it was only when he had an aerosol spray can in his hand that he discovered his voice. What happened to him between leaving school at sixteen and surfacing again as an up-and-coming artist remains unclear, although he claims to have spent much of the time apprenticed to a pork butcher. He says he was politicised during ‘the poll tax, the Criminal Justice Act and the Hartcliffe Riots’ (which developed after two men who had stolen a police motorbike were killed in a collision with an unmarked police car). ‘I can also remember my old man taking me down to see the Lloyds Bank – what was left of it – after the 1980 St Pauls riots. It’s mad to see how the whole thing of having to do what you’re told can be turned on its head, and how few people it takes to grab it back.’

  When Banksy did eventually make it up to Barton Hill he arrived at a good moment. He had started painting at the age of fourteen and he was only fifteen at the time of all the arrests, so he was not in any way involved and in many ways this was fortunate. Operation Anderson had not wiped graffiti off the streets but there was certainly a gap; it had made people pause and weigh up the risks and Barton Hill now had the reputation of being hot. Surveillance cameras were being introduced in force and there were fears that these cameras might have been installed in the area. Banksy and others were the second wave, the next generation, with new enthusiasm, new ideas, new ways of approaching things and no criminal record.

  John Nation remembers him coming up towards the end of his time there. He finds it hard to believe that Banksy was as nervous as he claims to be, but for ‘someone who wasn’t from Barton Hill he probably was scared a bit . . . there were a lot of the lads who were there every day of the week, hanging out. He wasn’t one of those, he wasn’t one of the local lads. But there were a lot who came up at the weekends, you could have up to 100 people here . . . I can remember him coming up. He was a lot younger than some of the other lads that were painting and he would sort of tag along. There were always lads on the fringes who weren’t so pronounced . . .’

  Tucked away in the corner of the youth club’s five-a-side football pitch there is a faded piece of graffiti that appears to be a Banksy. The wall has been sprayed silver and a poodle with what I took to be a goat’s head has been stencilled across it (I read later that it was actually the head of a bulldog, not a goat). Bulldog, goat . . . it was not one of his best efforts and it was so faded I was not even sure to begin with if the body was a poodle, yet it was certainly his stencilled tag at the bottom. Over the next few years he began to make his presence felt all over Bristol and not just at the Barton Hill ‘Hall of Fame’ (the name given by graffiti writers to a large wall where anyone can paint legally).

  He was experimenting with names – in these early days he sometimes signed himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy, which had less of the gangster ‘robbing banks’ ring to it but was much more memorable – and easier to write. He was experimenting too with styles. Was he going to be a graffiti writer, writing his name according to the strict set of graffiti rules? Was he going to be a freehand artist, using an aerosol nozzle against the wall in much the same way as a painter uses a brush against a canvas? Or was he going to be a stencil artist, cutting out the shapes he wanted on stiff card, placing the card against the wall and then using an aerosol can to spray over it so that when he took the card away only the shapes that had been cut out were left?

  Graffiti artist. Stencil artist. Aerosol artist. To most people outside this closed world, the terms don’t mean very much: graffiti is graffiti. But within this community they matter enormously. Thus a friend of Banksy’s from way back says, ‘He was never a graffiti artist who sold out, because he was never a graffiti artist to start with.’ So what, or who, is a true graffiti artist?

  Three

  Graffiti Decoded

  I was fortunate to find a friendly guide who would lead me through the world of graffiti, a world which he described very accurately as ‘a lawless activity with a million and one laws’. David Samuel grew up on a council estate in Kilburn, London. His own estate was tolerable but there were three others around it, one of which was ‘horrifying’. He got into graffiti at fourteen, at about the same age as Banksy, and he says simply, ‘It sounds very corny, but graffiti saved my life.’ And this is one of the weird things about graffiti: to the outsider it is vandalism; to quite a few of the graffiti artists I have met it is a way out of vandalism – or, in the words of one academic, a ‘tactic of the dispossessed in achieving a sense of identity’.

  Now thirty-one, the child of a volatile mix: mother Irish, father – who he never knew – Egyptian, he calls his story ‘the usual standard sob story . . . one parent family . . . didn’t have any money . . . I was stealing from a young age. As a teenager you want to do something that makes you look good, to stop yourself getting bullied or beaten up. I was running around with a gang from south Kilburn, doing a lot of bad things with them. When I stopped running with them things got really bad, they all turned on me because I knew certain things that could get them in trouble. There was a load of madness, once they tried to stab me on the high road and there was a knife fight in the bakery . . .’

  Instead of gangs he turned to graffiti, going straight into it from school rather like an Etonian might go into stockbroking. ‘I thought, this will show I’ve got balls. This will show I can do things myself and I don’t have to hurt anyone. That’s what mentally saved my life. And many of those people who I was doing those mad things with are either dead or in prison.’ He has stopped painting illegally and, having been helped initially by a £4500 loan from the Prince’s Trust to establish a gallery in Brighton, he now runs his own illustration agency, Rarekind. But if you know where to look on the web you can still find a short video of him painting trains.

  Graffiti on trains has always seemed to me to be annoying, exasperating, dispiriting – in short, hugely anti-social. But watching David paint part of a carriage on this video I can see the attraction: the combination of fear, adrenalin and satisfaction at having outwitted the rest of the world. ‘That’s the top, top thing,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing when you see your train in the morning. You get there early enough and you see it pull out. Oh, I can’t explain, but it’s the best, best feeling.’

  So why do they write only their ‘tag’ – in effect their signature? ‘’Cos that’s all we care about,’ says David. ‘We don’t go out there for no monetary gain. We go out there for passion and for fame.’ There seems, I suggest, a fair amount of macho swilling around here. ‘Oh God, man, it’s all about it – how big are your balls. It’s fame, ego, that’s what I did it for.’ But excuse me, he’s not famous and Banksy is. No, but graffiti writers are not doing it to impress the outside world, they are doing it to impress each other: ‘We’re not talking to anyone out there apart from ourselves.’ Getting your piece up, whether it be on a train or on a wall where no one else can reach, the adrenalin of painting when any moment you might be caught, beating the security system, chatting about it afterwards to fellow members of the club, like footballers dissecting their victory. This is what it’s all about.

  He loves Banksy’s work: ‘He’s very clever. I think he’s a genius man.’ But Banksy, he says, is not a graffiti artist. Graffiti artists ‘only write their name and do characters and it’s a whole ego trip and it’s all about us and our peers. It’s not abou
t the public.’

  In contrast, for Banksy and other street artists like him, it is all about the public. Maybe they care about their peers, but what they are really concerned about is a much wider audience. They are painting the same walls as a graffiti artist but they are producing images which are instantly understandable – a gallery on the street that is inclusive rather than exclusive. The image can be pure humour or social commentary or both, but every passer-by gets the joke.

  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 her
e 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.