Banksy (18 page)
Authors: Will Ellsworth-Jones
(As for Unangst, he received not only his fee but also a painting traded for all the lighting he did for the exhibition. ‘About a year went by and I was thinking, “These guys are
going to fuck me up, I am never going to get a painting, he’s too big now.” But they came through, the painting suddenly arrived.’)
These were all exhibitions – though perhaps the Westbourne Grove rats were, as one art critic put it, more of a happening than
an exhibition – where Banksy was
operating, and operating very successfully, outside the mainstream art world. But one exhibition yet to come was by far the most surprising and probably the most satisfying of all: Bristol.
Eight
I
n the autumn of 2008 officials at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery received a phone call from someone claiming to represent Banksy. The
caller asked to be put through to the museum’s director, Kate Brindley. Naturally enough it was assumed this was a bad joke and the call was not transferred. The real Banksy might have been
born in Bristol, but what interest could he possibly have in the city’s imposing but rather dusty museum?
But this was no joke call. The Banksy camp had made several attempts to find a personal contact who could give them an in to the museum, but without success, and eventually they had to resort to
cold calling. The caller didn’t make it as far as the director but did finally succeed in getting through to the museum’s exhibition manager, Phil Walker. It became very clear that this
was for real – not a practical joke – when the caller said Banksy would fly a representative from the museum to New York to see a small animatronic show that he had mounted there,
titled The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill.
This show, open for three weeks, was startlingly different from anything he had done before. It was held in a tiny gallery on
Seventh Avenue, instead of 12,000 square feet
in Los Angeles it occupied no more than 300 square feet, and it could hold no more than twenty people at a time. It had taken Banksy and friends a month to transform a trinket store into a
‘pet’ store, complete with some straw outside but with a rather confusing window display. Instead of the usual unhappy-looking hamsters and budgerigars, the shop window featured a
rabbit quietly filing its nails in front of a mirror, two-legged chicken nuggets dipping themselves in sauce, and a leopard – or rather not a leopard but a leopard skin – lounging on a
tree. Inside, there were swimming fish fingers in a large goldfish bowl, hot dogs squirming in their rolls, a chimp watching chimp porn on TV, a CCTV camera keeping a close eye on her young CCTV
chicks in their nest, and much else. Again it came with the usual Banksy ‘is he joking, is he serious?’ statement; referring back to Tai the Los Angeles elephant, he said: ‘I took
all the money I made exploiting an animal in my last show and used it to fund a new show about the exploitation of animals. If it’s art and you can see it from the street, I guess it could
still be considered street art.’
Once Phil Walker had been to New York and seen the show he met up with the Banksy team, who said they wanted to bring the exhibition to Bristol and wanted to know how the museum felt about it.
‘That was their first ask,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘It was completely their idea. We had talked in the past about working with Banksy but you could never imagine he would do it
because we were a provincial museum with no money and no pulling power. It basically grew from there. Because what became quite clear quite quickly was that he knew the building very well. He had a
lot of ideas about how he wanted to display the work. And we started a dialogue with him. Obviously it was not a dialogue with
him but a dialogue through the mechanisms that
he used, through his agents but also through a series of drawings that he produced on how he could see his ideas working within our spaces.’
Being Banksy’s idea, created by Banksy, financed by Banksy, publicised by Banksy, he could write the contract he wanted. And it was a very tight contract, particularly as far as letting
anyone know about the project, or indeed about Banksy. ‘They were very explicit about it – if it was going to happen it had to be kept top secret,’ says Brindley. ‘Of course
this is all very counter to how we usually work, because we spend a lot of time trying to get publicity and planning and organising involving loads of stakeholders and the team. Instantly we had to
work completely differently. It was a fabulous opportunity and we needed to manage the risk because they were very categorical with us. They said, “If it gets out it’s over. Nothing
happens.” So we had to start planning it that way.’ Even among the museum staff, the number of people who were allowed in on the secret was very limited.
Even now the terms of the contract that the city had to sign are so tight that when, a year after the show was over, I approached Phil Walker to ask him more about the exhibition, he was yet
another to ask me in turn if the publication ‘had been authorised by the artist’. He then consulted with Banksy’s PR and apologised but said he was ‘contractually bound not
to disclose details of the production’. However, Kate Brindley was hired away from Bristol to become director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima), so she was able to be
interviewed – the Banksy net did not quite stretch that far. While she says, ‘I don’t think I would have been doing my job properly if I had said no,’ she and the museum
staff did much more than just say yes. Certainly it was all Banksy’s idea – and no one at the museum, and probably not
even Banksy, knew that it would grow and
grow until it took over the whole building. But the transformation of the museum, from slightly quaint treasure trove to a place so hot and on the mark that people were ready to queue for hours to
get into it, could not have happened without the very few staff who were involved being just as determined as Banksy to make it work.
The approach came in October 2008 and Banksy wanted the show to open the following June, which might seem a reasonable time gap but is a very short deadline by exhibition standards. ‘We
worked on very small budgets so we realised we had hardly anything to bring to the table. But they didn’t worry about that, what they wanted from us was the buildings and the access to the
collections and co-operation and flexibility. What they brought to the table was a huge amount of resources and contacts and an ability to make it happen within eight months, which is phenomenal
for the scale of the show.’
For probably the first and last time in its history, there was no budget for the museum to stick to – an amazing luxury. In his usual jokey pre-show statements Banksy said this was the
first show he had ever done where ‘taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off.’ But actually it was his money, not the taxpayer’s,
that was used to hang the paintings and make the exhibition possible. Kate Brindley says: ‘One of the big things about putting on exhibitions is cost control, but the pleasure of working with
Banksy was he was footing the bill so I didn’t have to worry in the same way. It was an odd position to be in actually, where they were saying “If there’s a problem we’re
dealing with it.” It was quite bizarre.’ The deputy leader of the city council, Simon Cook, put the cost to the city at about £60,000 in extra security and the economic impact of
the
ten-week run at about £15 million. ‘In the case of some businesses I think it literally saved them from going to the wall. Some of the retailers said that
without it they would have found it difficult to continue and then promptly asked us what we were going to do next year.’ Even though these figures are rough, there was certainly a Banksy
bonanza. The
Bristol Evening Post
was so excited it called it ‘the greatest gift he could have presented to his home city’.
To understand just how radical the exhibition was, you have to have some concept of what the museum was like before Banksy got working on it. Housed in an imposing Grade II listed building, it
had been opened in 1905 as a gift to the people of Bristol ‘for their instruction and enjoyment’ from Sir Henry Wills, Baron Winterstoke, who had made his fortune through tobacco.
‘Encyclopaedic’ is a kind description, so too is ‘eclectic’; ‘dusty’ is less kind, but they all sort of fit. A brochure you can pick up inside describes how the
museum ‘tells the story of our world from the beginning of time to the present day’. It is all Edwardian confidence on the outside and marble steps and brass banisters on the inside.
You enter and on the left there is a gallery of British and South West wildlife, while on the right Sekhmet the lion goddess and Hapy, the god of inundation, guard the Egyptian galleries. There are
dinosaurs, a world wildlife gallery full of very excited schoolchildren and an equal number of stuffed animals, there are twelve pianos and there are fossils, silver, minerals, Chinese glass and
Chinese ceramics. A biplane hangs in the central hall while a gypsy caravan sits on the first floor. There is Eastern art and Bristol art, Turner and Titian, Botticelli and Bellini, Sisley and
Seurat, Holbein and Harris (Rolf). There is the slightly faded swagger here of Bristol as a great trading port, stretching out its influence – collecting in its treasures – to and from
all corners of the world.
And into this unruffled environment came Banksy. The
Observer
called the exhibition a ‘sell-out in every sense’ – meaning it was both a crowd
pleaser and the moment when Banksy gave up his outlaw past and joined the established art world. In the
Sunday Times
Waldemar Januszczak, usually a supporter of Banksy, said he would rather
he had not done it: ‘Banksy the rebel was an artist you could trust, a free creative voice that owed nothing to anybody. Banksy the respectable museum artist is something else. What is being
destroyed here is not the anonymity of Bristol City Museum, it’s Banksy’s raison d’être.’
Both these judgements seem incredibly harsh. The show was a huge, joyous leap of the imagination. The established context for contemporary art has become the white cube, all cool and focussed
without any interruptions. It is seen as a neutral space; it is in fact incredibly loaded, and for many who are not part of the art world incredibly off-putting. But Banksy chose a completely
different context and made it work brilliantly. There was no standing, staring, reading the notes on the wall and still being totally bewildered about what it might mean. No, this was part gallery
show, with his pictures hanging normally – or relatively so – in one part of the museum, and part treasure hunt. A modern-day treasure hunt, a bit like the one I had enjoyed so much in
London, where you had to spot the Banksy amidst the exhibits in the permanent collection, and where almost everyone came armed with digital cameras so they had a record which they could enjoy
themselves and email their enjoyment to friends.
At Middlesbrough Kate Brindley now runs an institute which is all white space and high-end concepts, but she remains a great admirer of Banksy. His work, she says, is ‘smart, it’s
intentioned. It’s political, it’s humorous. It’s current. It’s site specific, it’s
universal. He thinks very carefully about it but there is
also a lightness and playfulness which I really enjoy about it. And there was clearly a great affection for Bristol Museum.’ For, quite apart from what it did for Banksy, the exhibition
brought the museum back to life, just over 100 years since it first opened.
The slim guide to the exhibition came with Banksy’s usual, slightly irritating humour – the exhibition was rated PG, ‘Contains scenes of a childish nature some adults may find
disappointing.’ The slightly over-grand ‘Bristol School of Artists’ he demoted to ‘Artists from Bristol’; ‘World Wildlife’ became ‘Wildlife in Glass
Boxes’, ‘Pottery and Ceramics’ became ‘Boring Old Plates’, and the room for under sevens became the ‘Children’s Shouting Area’.
But the exhibition itself was very skilfully and humorously thought out. And it showed too how Banksy could successfully push the boundaries of his work way beyond the limits of the stencil. A
scaled-down version of a sculpture he had made at Glastonbury,
Boghenge
– Stonehenge constructed in Portaloos – was sitting in the entrance hall to welcome visitors. A month
after the exhibition opened a rather sozzled-looking Ronald McDonald was to be found sitting precariously on a ledge outside the museum entrance, a bottle of whisky by his side. In the big hall
inside there were seven sculptures, and if you hadn’t got the message from Ronald McDonald and the Portaloos that this was a very different show from anything else ever seen in the museum,
then there was no escaping it here.
A satisfied lion with a whip in its mouth and specks of blood on its cheeks had all too obviously eaten its trainer. Paris Hilton, or someone who resembled her, was clutching a heroic number of
shopping bags. Michelangelo’s David had a suicide vest strapped around him. A beaten-up Buddha, last seen painted on a wall at
the Cans Festival, now came as a statue
complete with a neck brace and one of his arms in a sling. A homeless Venus de Milo had her dog and a few scattered coins at her feet. An angel with rather pretty wings had a large tin of pink
paint stuck over her head, its contents dribbling down to the bottom of her plinth, but happily stopping just before it reached the dedication on the pillar to Baron Winterstoke. In the centre of
the hall, surrounded by these sculptures, stood a partially burnt-out ice cream van, complete with the usual irritating ice cream jingle, with graffiti on one side and on top a giant cone melting
out all over the place. Next to the van was a big riot policeman, wearing a badge that bore the words ‘Metropolitan Peace’, all geared up and looking ridiculous as he rode a small
child’s mechanical rocking horse (this piece was later reported to have been sold for £140,000).
