Art Attack
First he turned back alleys into galleries. Then he hacked the MoMA and the Met. Meet Banksy, the most wanted man in the art world.
By Jeff Howe
source:
http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/bansky.html
It's noon in London, and self-described "art terrorist" Banksy is preparing for his next installation. "I've created a cave painting," he says. "It's a bit of rock with a stick man chasing a wildebeest and pushing a shopping cart." The next day, Banksy carefully hangs his work - called Early Man Goes to Market and credited to "Banksymus Maximus" - in Gallery 49 of the venerable British Museum, accompanied by a few sentences of explanatory text. He does this without the knowledge or consent of museum officials; they learn about the latest addition to the collection only after Banksy announces it on his Web site.
Over the past few years, Banksy has emerged as an ingenious and dexterous culture jammer, adept at hacking the art world and rewriting its rules to suit his own purposes. He once closed a tunnel in London while he and his friends, disguised as overall-clad painters, whitewashed the walls. Then Banksy applied his own distinctive black stencils on the newly cleaned surface. "We called our friends, bought some beer, and staged a 'gallery show,'" he says with a chuckle. Last March, Banksy achieved a sort of art world quadruple crown when he snuck his works into four New York City museums - the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Museum - in a single day. Such feats have earned him worldwide media attention and the kind of rewards traditional artists would kill for, including an offer from Nike to work on an ad campaign (he declined) and an invitation to do a public painting for the 2004 Liverpool biennial (he accepted). The British Museum even added Early Man Goes to Market to its permanent collection.
Brits have come to expect daring stunts from Banksy, who uses a pseudonym to avoid arrest for past escapades. But critics see him as nothing more than an overhyped vandal. Peter Gibson, a spokesperson for the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, says graffiti has become an epidemic: "How would he feel if someone sprayed graffiti all over his house?" Banksy says his work is merely "cheeky." And it's true, the pieces are long on humor: The one Banksy smuggled into the MoMA was a painting of a cheap brand of British tomato soup, a send-up of Andy Warhol's iconic can of Campbell's. But his arsenic-tinged wit has a purpose: By hijacking the established system of art exhibition, Banksy is drawing attention to its shortcomings. "Art's the last of the great cartels," he contends. "A handful of people make it, a handful buy it, and a handful show it. But the millions of people who go look at it don't have a say." Most of Banksy's work isn't found inside any building at all. "I don't do proper gallery shows," he says. "I have a much more direct communication with the public."
Born in Bristol in 1974, Banksy started his career at 14 as a standard-issue spray-paint vandal before switching to stencils. "I wasn't good at freehand graffiti," he says. "I was too slow." Soon Banksy had made a (fake) name for himself with wry images like schoolgirls cradling atom bombs, British bobbies caught snogging, and Mona Lisa shouldering a rocket launcher. These paintings contrast sharply with the usual all-but-unreadable scrawls. "Most graffiti is like modern art, isn't it?" he says. "People are like, What does it mean?"
Banksy's messages are far more accessible. He once painted a thought bubble on the wall of the elephant pen at the London Zoo: "I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring." The difficulty of that job gained the respect of the graffiti community but, more than that, it caught the imagination of the public, which was happy to empathize with the elephants.
Banksy has a thing for animals. In much of his graffiti they serve as thinly veiled stand-ins for humans. Rats, that other species struggling to subsist in our dirty, dangerous cities, show up a lot. Armed with radio transmitters, personal flying devices, and, natch, paintbrushes, many seem to be waging a covert war against some unidentified authority. One image depicts a rat swept up in the melody of its own violin-playing, trying, it seems, to carve a bit of art out of a sterile environment.
Which is pretty much Banksy's mission, too. Noting that he's not without altruistic impulses - "I always wanted to be a fireman, do something good for the world" - Banksy says he wants to "show that money hasn't crushed the humanity out of everything."
Contributing editor Jeff Howe (
[email protected]) wrote about innovative pension funds for artists in issue 13.04.
