Banksy (30 page)

Across the country a very different Banksy piece, a 7ft × 8ft cinder block wall, has caused even more controversy, giving birth
to an absorbing and entirely
unexpected tale involving art, money and the law. This time there is much more to the piece than seven stencilled words. A rather forlorn boy of the kind that Banksy seems to specialise in,
although this time – given that its location is inner-city Detroit – he is black, stands with his paint pot and brush (no spray paint here) beside the words he has just written on the
wall: ‘I remember when all this was trees.’

What made this work so poignant was that it was surrounded by total urban desolation. For it sits – or rather sat – amidst the 35-acre site of the former Packard motor factory. The
luxury carmaker once employed 40,000 people here, but the factory closed in 1956 and has remained abandoned ever since, a relic of Detroit’s days as the automobile city that ruled the world.
(The devastation is abundant enough to attract artists and photographers whose bleak images are attacked as ‘ruins porn’ by some in Detroit.)

In May 2010 Carl Goines, executive director and one of the cofounders of the 555 Gallery in Detroit, was tipped off by a photog rapher that Banksy had hit the city. The photographer, a fan, had
been to
Exit Through the Gift Shop
on the Friday night when it opened in a cinema just north of Detroit; he had seen an image on the Banksy website the next day, recognised the location and
went out and found the boy that night – a very short treasure hunt. Carl rounded up his father and two other artists connected with the 555 Gallery and went to inspect the site. They tried
and failed to contact the people who they thought might own the site – in some parts of Detroit land and the taxes that go with it can be a burden rather than a goldmine – but crucially
they did find a foreman on site, who gave them the go-ahead as long as they did not take any scrap metal. Armed with a masonry saw, an oxyacetylene torch, a mini tractor, some plywood boards and a
truck,
they set to work. By the end of Monday they had cut it out, and they crated it up and off the site on Tuesday.

Goines, who is a sculptor, says he had no interest in Banksy before all this – in fact ‘I was unaware of Banksy’s work and his notoriety. So it’s been an education for
me.’ For what followed was a wonderful narrative – should the 21st-century echo of the Elgin Marbles be preserved or left to die a natural death? – which took Banksy’s work
to a sphere he could never have dreamed of.

Goines says they realised very early on that ‘selling it was an option that we couldn’t do lightly.’ The gallery might possibly sell the piece in years to come, but for now the
only reward they would get for their efforts would be the publicity. However, the smell of money to be made always pervades anything to do with Banksy and sure enough, the owners of the site
emerged from the deepest undergrowth. They wanted their wall back and they went to court for it, claiming it could be worth $100,000. They argued that the foreman who had given permission for the
wall to be taken away was not their representative. ‘The acts of the defendants constitute an illegal conspiracy to take wrongful possession and control of the mural and constitute a wrongful
conversion of the same’; note that at the stage when Banksy’s work entered the law courts, it had been elevated from a piece of graffiti to ‘a mural’.

It was time for the City of Detroit to wade in. The city had had trouble establishing who exactly owned the site but now, a city official said, that it was ‘clear and publicly acknowledged
who the responsible party is, we will pursue all applicable areas of enforcement to hold the property owner accountable for this unsightly and dangerous situation.’ It could cost up to $20
million to demolish what was left of the factory and clear the site, and now that Banksy had inadvertently established its ownership the city was
threatening to do the
clear-up work and send the bill to the site owner. The city was also demanding taxes on the site stretching back over five years, and this dispute still remains unresolved. So, quite apart from
anything else, Banksy had brought the issue of this huge stretch of wasteland on Detroit’s East Side sharply back into focus. As one comment posted on the blog dETROITfUNK suggested:
‘The fucking Packard is a ridiculous and insane site, which has been allowed to sit in this condition for ages. Wide open. We live here, and we almost become blind to the insanity.’

But quite apart from ownership, should the gallery have liberated the painting? The gallery found itself in the midst of an argument so bitter that after having had the wall on display for just
ten days, they decided they needed to hide it. Their fear was not so much that someone would steal it, rather that someone would destroy it in protest at the fact that it had been removed from its
all-important original context. ‘We had some strange threats,’ says Goines, ‘also some conversations with individuals saying they were going to come and load it up and just take
it from us. The threats came from all sorts of people, including those who thought we should have allowed it to stay in the plant and be destroyed, as it would have been eventually.’

The argument in essence came down to this: context is all-important. There was no chance of the painting lasting in situ. Builders were salvaging scrap metal from the site, and if you look at
some of the pictures of the painting before it was moved there are beams both beside and above it awaiting their fate. But that does not matter, argued those who were horrified to see it moved. If
the Banksy stayed where it was, there would be pictures on the web which would provide a permanent record of the piece in the environment in which it was created.

Given that the wall was going to come down, the gallery members saw themselves as stewards preserving the piece, in much the same way that the British Museum has done for
objects taken out of context but preserved over the centuries. But did the act of saving a piece of art actually destroy it? Goines has no regrets. The idea that street art has rules at all seems
strange to him: ‘Many times they are breaking the rules and yet they say there is a rule against removing a piece from where it is installed. It just seems contradictory to me, they are
setting up rules to break rules.’

It might be out of its original site, he believed, but it was not out of context: ‘I think the piece has evolved into something on its own. The whole thing has become a project in itself.
It’s an ongoing escapade for Banksy, it’s something that he gets the ball rolling on and then it keeps on moving and becomes something more.’ Banksy certainly would not support
the gallery’s action, but in an emailed interview conducted at the time of the Oscars he said: ‘I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down
your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.’ Becky Hart, associate curator of
contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, put it rather more academically, saying that the piece had acquired its own ‘patina of narrative’.

Nevertheless, to read the many posts on dETROITfUNK you would think the men from the 555 Gallery were vandals. Nearly all these posts made broadly the same point and perhaps one in particular
best sums them up.
@shlee
wrote:

ms
admits that moving Banksy does mean people who would not visit this part of town have a chance to see it:

But context isn’t everything; many of the exhibits we see in galleries have been taken from their original surroundings to give thousands the chance they would otherwise not have to see
them. This was a Banksy that would remain ‘social commentary’ wherever it was displayed. Compare this to the Berlin Wall where,
in 1990, eighty-one segments with
graffiti on them were sold off at an auction in Monaco for €1.5 million. These pieces can now be seen at places as varied as the parking lot of a business plaza in California, outside the Hard
Rock Café in Orlando, Florida or, almost unbelievably, behind the urinals of the men’s room in a hotel in Las Vegas. Now that is vandalism for you, and that’s leaving aside the
fact that it took five years in the courts for the artists who were the key painters of this section of the wall to win any share of the proceeds.

As for the wall in Detroit, the law suit between the gallery and the owners of the site was finally settled in the autumn of 2011, with the gallery paying $2500 for a clear title to their wall.
The plan was that by spring 2012 the wall would re-emerge from the well-protected studio where it had been locked away to go on public display in an old police station they were turning into a new
gallery. ‘It’s been a lively debate, a great experience and absolutely worth it in the end,’ said Goines.

The Detroit wall weighed in at almost one ton, but that was a lightweight compared to the one cut out near Croydon, which was made of reinforced concrete and came in at about four tons. Again
this was a Banksy that really worked. It showed a punk examining the put-it-together-yourself instructions that came from a box marked ‘LARGE GRAFFITI SLOGAN’ and branded IEAK. He was
obviously having trouble – like we all do – with these instructions, for on the wall behind him were written the words SYSTEM, POLICE, NO, MORE, SMASH and other components of a typical
revolutionary placard, but he hadn’t got the instructions right – the words were all jumbled up and made no sense. But unless Banksy was campaigning to get IKEA to write their
instructions more clearly or asking slogan writers to show more originality, or
perhaps giving a gentle rebuke to consumerism, there was no obvious message – just an
enjoyable painting.

Tucked away on an industrial estate, the wall was not easy to find, and it was almost a month before two south London friends in their early thirties – Bradley Ridge, who owns a restaurant
in Streatham Hill, and Nick Loizou, a builder – heard that Banksy had strayed into the deepest south of the capital. They had actually been on their way to east London on a shopping
expedition for Banksy prints when they got a phone call from a friend: ‘You know this Banksy, he’s done one in Croydon.’ They forgot the prints and a few beers later they decided
that the next morning they would take a look. What they found was a wall which Bradley says ‘looked a bit knackered. It was an amazing piece but it looked ruined. Nick lost a bit of interest
and I got more interested and told him, “Maybe we can get it cleaned up.”’

At first they were described as two scallies with no interest in art, just an eye for a quick buck, but this was unfair. While they might have a south London edge to them, Bradley had been
following and collecting Banksy ever since his college days in Bristol. He even kept – and still keeps – what he calls his ‘Banksy bag’, stuffed full with sleeping bag,
woolly boots and a few other essentials, permanently in the corner of the hall in his flat, in case he suddenly gets word that another Banksy print is up for sale. He bought his first two Banksy
canvases back in 2002 and he’s been buying prints ever since, including
Bombing Middle England
for just £20. But he has never yet sold a Banksy canvas or print. So yes, they both
thought the wall would be profitable, but there was also the sheer thrill of doing it – of cutting out and owning, for however short a time, a Banksy wall.

It was a far more difficult undertaking than they had ever
imagined. First they had to make a few phone calls to find out if there was someone who restored walls –
someone who could take off all the additional graffiti that had appeared after Banksy had painted it. Having satisfied themselves that such a man existed – thirteenth-century churches,
twenty-first-century walls, they can all be restored – they then bought the wall. But the owners played by the rules: the pair had to come up with a structural engineer to do a risk
assessment, a scheme of work, a schedule of work, high-vis jackets – a proper operation. And they had to provide a bricklayer to build another wall to fill the gap.

When they started work they discovered that Banksy had, by chance, chosen the only part of the wall that was made of poured concrete with steel rods through it rather than the breezeblock they
expected. Unhappily this made it a massively different job than the one they thought they had embarked on and it took them nine days to complete it. Four men, including Nick, worked on the wall
during the day. At night, Bradley says, ‘My job was to sleep with it. I was there in the van sleeping next to it, we never left it. We had to make sure nobody came along and whitewashed it.
We didn’t have any taggers but we had people round who I think were trying to steal the van. I don’t think they even realised what was on the wall.’