Banksy Read online

  An even more complicated case of the Banksy effect is illustrated by a pub called the Foundry, near the Happy Chopper. In a previous life it was a Barclays Bank but when the banks started closing branches it had been turned into a pub/art gallery. It would be hard to imagine anything less like a bank than this. Inside it was undoubtedly the grungiest pub I have ever been in and, somehow, all the better for it; outside the wide pavement was a favourite spot for dispatch riders who could sit with a drink and watch the traffic go by instead of fighting it. Inside I discovered that there were two Banksys still in existence, but in a rather relaxed setting. The downstairs of the pub had graffiti on every spare space, even on the ceilings – the ladies’ loo was just as overwhelmed as the gents’. ‘It’s an artistic dialogue going on here,’ said one of the barmen. ‘We don’t judge, we leave it to the artists to make their own decisions.’ Banksy’s Grin Reaper, equipped with traditional scythe, black cloak and hood, but with a smiley face underneath instead of the usual skeletal one, was here, and a much smaller version of the Happy Chopper too, although it was more difficult to spot under rival graffiti. They were both still very much alive and visible amidst a lot of dross, so it was encouraging to see that in this ‘artistic dialogue’ in the pits of Old Street good art had triumphed over bad.

  Again, the outside of the pub showed just how the relationship between graffiti artists and property owners has changed. There was a big piece of striking graffiti by Krah wrapped around part of the front, and a notice alongside announced: ‘This painting is commissioned for The Foundry. Do Not Remove.’ At the back a huge chunk of wall was boarded up by hoardings three storeys high to protect two big Banksys, one a rat and the other a television being hurled out of a window. This hoarding, which in turn had become an inviting canvas for other graffiti artists, rose from a car park which had all the hints of a property development coming soon in up-and-coming Shoreditch. Again it was the internet that told me what was going on.

  On the Guardian website, under the headline ‘Not all art is meant to last for ever’, the journalist Nosheen Iqbal had written:

  A pub bearing his work is earmarked for demolition but Banksy has rightly rejected suggestions that his art should be saved. Having built a career on re-appropriating public spaces, it’s a relief to see that Banksy has intervened in the bizarre fuss surrounding the Foundry. To recap, the east London venue which is most part pub to some part art space, bears a Banksy original on its walls. Last week, Hackney Council approved plans to pull the building down to make way for a luxury hotel and spa. Predictably, the decision was met with some protest: the local authority’s response was to promise that at the very least, Banksy’s mural would be salvaged and protected. It’s a curious consolation and proof, if it were still needed, that street art has imploded on itself.

  To his credit, Banksy has appealed to the developers, asking that his work – a 6ft high painting of a rat, currently protected by hoardings – not be saved if the Foundry is to go. ‘It’s a bit like demolishing the Tate and preserving the ice-cream van out the front,’ he told the Hackney Gazette.

  The Foundry’s keenest customers organised a squat to try to prevent the pub from coming down, but they were evicted without much trouble. When I last looked, the pub was boarded up waiting demolition before being turned into an eighteen-storey ‘Art’otel’ – the name alone makes you want to vomit – with a publicly accessible arts centre and a design which, the developers promise, will ‘fit perfectly against this fashionable backdrop’.

  So, with Banksys disappearing all over the place, what hope was there for the Moorfields rat, neither dead nor alive, entombed behind his wooden screen? It was at about this time that I was slightly surprised and very delighted to receive an email back from the Eye Hospital’s chief executive:

  Dear Mr Ellsworth-Jones

  Many thanks for your email, which arrived just before a three week absence overseas on my part and which I have only now had a chance to look at. I was made aware of the Banksy graffiti (graffitus?) soon after joining Moorfields two years ago. At that time we had had an ‘offer’ to buy it from one of our doctors and I asked for it to be valued. This achieved nothing, mainly because, as you say, Banksy appears not to want to see his art traded and there seemed to be no obvious means of getting an independent valuation of it. Thereafter it has, I’m afraid, remained very low on the list of things I need to think about!

  Your email does, though, prompt me to need to think again about this, and I wondered whether you might be able to advise me on the valuation question and/or how to get it cut out. Neither is an area of expertise for me or any of my colleagues, so any advice you can offer would be most appreciated.

  Kind regards

  John Pelly

  Chief Executive

  Since I was hardly the expert he supposed me to be, I would have to do some research before replying. In the meantime it was back on the trail, although at this point I was spotting more toasters than Banksys and it was usually a case of spotting Banksy remnants rather than Banksy originals. Graffiti removal squads are obviously more interested in walls than pavements; thus a copper, snorting coke, had been washed away although there were still painted traces of the wonderfully long line of coke he had been snorting as I walked down the alley. A rat with an overturned barrel of poison had gone but the green slime that was spilling out of the barrel was still painted on the pavement. Two rats in dinner jackets going to a red carpet occasion had gone too, but parts of the ‘red carpet’ remained on the pavement. There was however no trace of a parachute rat – scrubbed off by the council years ago. In its place was a jumble of miserable scrawl. The building remained derelict and there was no evidence at all that by cleaning up the parachutist the council had cleaned up the site or the area.

  There were many more occasions when I found the site of a Banksy but the painting had gone. At the old Truman Brewery site, off Brick Lane, I even came across an old Triumph GT6, painted pink, which had somehow been hauled up on top of a container, probably by Banksy, and then later encased in a Perspex box, almost certainly not by Banksy. He had painted the Grim Reaper – no smiley face here – looking scarily out of the driver’s window, but some modern-day Houdini had come along and nicked the window from underneath the Perspex. The Triumph just looked a mess to be photographed by puzzled tourists. The whole thing looked bedraggled and it was the only time on the treasure hunt that I felt really let down.

  Before the end of the tour there were still a couple of pieces of unfinished business I had to deal with. First I found Pure Evil, the man who had painted Murder Mile, a very jolly forty-something artist despite his name. Certainly, talking to him, street art seemed a little less edgy than I imagined. For one thing his real name, Charley Edwards, sounded rather less threatening than his pseudonym. For another it turned out that he had not climbed his way over the barricades to paint his Murder Mile; he had entered the site with a key to the big gates having first negotiated with the owners, Londonewcastle, developers of ‘boutique flats’. While waiting for the market to improve they had turned this space into something of an open-air gallery – they required a sketch before they allowed him in – and Pure Evil would be followed by Mode 2, a graffiti artist represented by the dealer who used to represent Banksy. Furthermore it turned out that it was not just Pure Evil who was painting, but he had an ‘intern’ helping him; I thought ‘interns’ were the property of big corporations pleading tight budgets. But here were Pure Evil and his intern, who had come over from Paris for a month, painting a wall in Islington in a blizzard. (The intern went back to Paris and was soon being called by galleries wanting to use the graffiti skills he had learned.)

  I bought my print from Pure Evil and I got some advice from him too, so I felt that I could now reply to Moorfields. It felt slightly scary to be treated as some sort of fine art adviser. Nevertheless I had a go:

  Dear Mr Pelly,

  Thank you for your email. I now see the problems you face. I would sugge
st that perhaps the best thing to do would be to write to Banksy’s PR Jo Brooks explaining the problem and asking if she can help. [I gave her address.] Banksy has offered works up for charity in the past so maybe one way or another he would be prepared to help the NHS. Even if he, or rather Pest Control who act for him, would authenticate the piece then at least you would be half way there.

  I did discuss the problem with Pure Evil, a graffiti artist who also runs a gallery by the same name. He said it was perfectly possible for a restorer to sit down for a couple of days and using polymer and a releasing agent and other tools of the trade take the graffiti off the tile and put it on to a canvas. It sounded interesting until I asked what kind of money would be involved and he suggested about £30,000 for the right specialist. I can’t imagine that Moorfields would want to gamble that amount.

  The only other suggestion I can make is to contact one of the main auction houses. In case you want to follow this up these are the names I have found on the web . . .

  I am afraid I have no knowledge of how best to cut it out from your wall, although if it came to it I am sure one of these contemporary art directors would know a man who knew a man who had an angle grinder or whatever is required.

  Regards . . .

  And there the tour had ended. I had one rather gloomy-looking revolver hanging on the wall; to be honest I think it looks better in its original context than it does on the inside of our house, although perhaps that is because it is hanging amidst rather more traditional scenes: quite a few sailing yachts, some gentle landscapes, family photographs. It is not very fair on Evil’s artwork.

  Of the fifty-two Banksys I was hunting for, forty had gone entirely, although at least two had been taken away by speculators hoping to make a huge profit, so these pieces had not quite been lost altogether even though they were no longer on the street. Another four (two inside, two outside the Foundry pub) looked like they would disappear too. Eight had survived (seven now that the hoodie has gone) in some form or another. Banksy would undoubtedly argue that this transience is part of the very nature of street art. It had indeed been a treasure hunt, where the disappearance of so many Banksys made it even more satisfying to find one still alive. You made a little effort for Banksy and he repaid you.

  And there was an enjoyable footnote to this tale. For in October 2010 it was reported that the Moorfields rat was to go on sale at a charity auction. The rat had been successfully cut out of the wall and was to be sold for the benefit of Moorfields at a charity auction at the Saatchi Gallery, with Lord Archer wielding the auctioneer’s hammer. The Guardian reported Mr Pelly as saying: ‘As far as I can gather, it simply appeared on the wall outside our main entrance one morning. A member of staff subsequently offered us £5,000 for it, but we suspected it was probably worth a good deal more.’ It was. It went for £30,000.

  Six

  Anonymously Happy

  Anonymity can be a powerful weapon. Does the name Perry McCarthy ring a bell? And if you have no luck with him, what about an easier name: Ben Collins? It is hard to imagine that they are ever going to be much more than answers in a pub quiz or a round of Trivial Pursuit, but they were once famous in a very anonymous sort of way. Perry McCarthy was the original Stig when the BBC’s Top Gear began. Ben Collins, his replacement, took Stig and the question of his true identity to another level.

  For those who never watch the show, Stig set lap times for performance cars that Top Gear was testing as well as preparing celebrities for their drive on the show. His very anonymity – he never spoke, protected by his white full-face helmet and his white racing suit – turned him into a sort of human robot who couldn’t answer back, a convenient butt for Top Gear’s jokes: ‘His earwax tastes like Turkish delight . . . after making love he bites the head off his partner . . . the outline of his left nipple is exactly the same shape as the Nurburgring.’ And it was his anonymity which transformed just another very fast driver into something much more intriguing.

  The BBC knew just how valuable this anonymity was. When McCarthy confirmed that he was ‘Black’ Stig – so called because he was dressed and helmeted all in black – he discovered that his contract was not being renewed. It was all done in the best Top Gear fashion: he was last seen careening down the runway of the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible in a Jaguar XJS, ‘missing his braking point’ and disappearing over the side – a solitary racing glove found floating off the carrier was his farewell to the world. When it became clear that his successor, Ben Collins, was writing a book about his experiences as Top Gear’s Mystery Man he was not disappeared but taken to court to enforce the confidentiality clause in his contract. It was Collins however who won the right to go ahead with the book, for which he was said to have received an advance of £250,000. In the long run being Ben Collins might be more satisfying, but it is almost certainly rather less profitable than being Stig.

  Banksy has the same allure of the single name which transforms the ordinary into something special: who would remember Ben Collins if he wasn’t Stig, Paul Hewson if he wasn’t Bono, Gordon Sumner if he wasn’t Sting, Saul Hudson if he wasn’t Slash or Cherilyn Sarkisian if she wasn’t Cher? But in addition the way he guards his anonymity, although he is certainly not a recluse, gives him the added glamour of seclusion – the whiff of Syd Barrett or J.D. Salinger. Together it is a powerful mix.

  Collins says that, as the years went by, preserving his anonymity ‘became harder and harder because there would be these natural slips – there are all these little pitfalls you have to avoid and really I just had to keep myself to myself.’ Perhaps he should have taken lessons from Banksy – if only he knew who Banksy was. For Collins’ anonymity lasted – just about – for six years; Banksy’s secret is still relatively well preserved after a dozen or so years. In May 2008, for instance, at the festival of stencilled graffiti that Banksy organised in a tunnel under Waterloo station, a French artist was overheard having a conversation with a fellow artist, telling him: ‘I hope Banksy’s going to show up today, it would be really cool to meet up with him.’ Then they moved on. The Frenchman never knew that he had just had a conversation, however short, with Banksy.

  So why the anonymity? Banksy’s answer is usually twofold. One strand is the oft-repeated explanation with respect to the illegal nature of graffiti: he ‘has issues with the cops’; authenticating a piece he has done on the street would be like ‘a signed confession’. He has said in the past, ‘I consider it to be a victimless crime what I do generally, but the criminal side is important. Any piece of graffiti is saying you are not going to be told what to do and you’ll go out under your own steam and you’ll make the city look the way you want it to look.’ Certainly graffiti is more than a game – if you paint often enough, as often as Banksy has done, there is a real chance that you will get locked up. That’s the risk that gives it the essential adrenalin rush that most graffiti artists talk about, and that’s what they miss when they are painting on walls that have been provided as legal spaces. There is a story among graffiti writers in America – impossible to tell whether it is true or not – that the police in Los Angeles used to try their hand as agents provocateurs. They would put up their graffiti attempts on a wall then lie in wait for others to be tempted to put their tags up too. When graffiti writers duly arrived and contributed their own tags and vamps, the police would come out of their hidey-hole and arrest them. The police, or more often the British Transport Police, are not desperate enough to become involved in this novel form of entrapment but they are certainly after persistent offenders.

  Take Sam Moore, twenty-four, of Newport in the Isle of Wight, known rather more romantically as 10Foot when he is writing his name across London. He is the complete opposite of Banksy – for him the ‘getting up’ is everything – and he is widely admired in the graffiti community for what he has done. He hates Banksy and his stencils and shows it by writing across his work. But in June 2010, before another graffiti ‘war’ could get going, 10Foot was arrested. He was let ou
t on bail while the police used ‘handwriting analysis’ to link him with further tags, yet even in the months while they were carrying out this analysis he carried on painting with grim but foolhardy determination, only adding to his troubles. Eventually he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges of criminal damage carried out over three years and was jailed for just over two years, receiving in addition a five-year ASBO which prevents him from carrying an extraordinary range of implements starting with any form of ‘unset paint’ and expanding through ‘shoe dye, grinding stone and glass etching equipment’. So if you are caught bombing the town, the consequences are now much more severe than in the days of Operation Anderson twenty years ago.

  Banksy himself has largely managed to stay out of trouble. He has always remained vague about his record, but Shepard Fairey, who has somehow succeeded in remaining at the pinnacle of street art in America while at the same time carrying on a very successful design business, says that Banksy has ‘never been busted to the point of potentially not being able to do street art.’ Translated, this means that he has never been fined or imprisoned on the scale of 10Foot where a subsequent offence would mean a huge fine or an even longer sentence. Piecing together what Banksy has either written or told interviewers, it appears that he was arrested once, many years ago, in New York, for painting a picture about corruption on a billboard. ‘As a result I spent 40 hours in a cell with the cops taking the piss and telling me lies, followed by a spell of community service and hefty fine.’

  In the late 1990s he spent a couple of years on and off in New York, usually staying at the Carlton Arms Hotel on East 25th Street, just north of the East Village, which had once been a port in a storm for welfare families, drug dealers and hookers of various descriptions before it cleaned up its act. As the hotel grew smarter, different artists were invited to decorate its fifty-four rooms – in return they got to stay in the hotel for free during the time they were painting. The room that Banksy painted has since been painted over by other artists but his bright, cartoony work along part of the corridor still exists. The hotel’s general manager, John Ogren, says, ‘We knew him when he was just beginning and he is one of the kindest, funniest, genuine, and genuinely talented artists I know.’