Brand new spray
The Age
Saturday August 8, 2009
The good folk of Bristol have brought Banksy in from the alley, writes Fiona Gruber. BRISTOL'S staid public museum has been transformed in the past few weeks, with its halls and galleries rearranged in a celebration of graffiti artist Banksy. Instead of being viewed down a grimy alley, his work has been given an official stamp of approval, in this, his largest exhibition to date. The work, a mix of graphics, painting, animatronics and installation, has the punchy one-liner quality of his street art, but Banksy Versus the Bristol Museum is on a scale that allows the artist to test his ambitions, with elaborately staged visual jokes and messages scattered throughout the three-storey building.The show was kept under wraps during months of preparation, with the museum's director Kate Brindley keeping her bosses, Bristol City Council, and most of her staff in the dark until the opening. The ostensible reason was fear that the controversial artist, who is regarded by many authorities as a vandal, would not find favour with the city's leaders. In reality, the result has been a cannily crafted marketing ploy, maximum media coverage and huge crowds for the free exhibition. There's also a prodigal son factor; Banksy hails from this West Country port city and took his first hesitant steps with stencil and spray can down its dark lanes and on the sides of its railway carriages.Celebrity must be an interesting experience for the internationally famous cultural commentator, who has successfully hidden his identity for more than a decade and has often scoffed at the prices paid for his work. His anonymous stance is supposed to undermine any chances of a personality cult, as well as protecting him from authorities who refuse to distinguish between Banksy and the clumsy tag of a teenager. Just as importantly it gives him an everyman status akin to a highwayman or bushranger, qualities of greater durability than the modishness of many of today's artists.A lot of Banksy's art is influenced by the grammar of advertising, and he has been quoted as saying that this industry has attracted the country's brightest creative talents, leaving the "slow and self-obsessed to become our artists". This populist (and popular) stance has added to his folk hero status, without blunting his collectability among the wealthy and celebrities willing to pay six-figure sums.The show is billed as an art intervention, an interaction or juxtaposition with existing works and sites, and this is immediately apparent, with a burnt-out ice-cream van in the grand entrance hall concealing the reception desk. A copy of Michelangelo's statue of David now sports a suicide bomber's belt, a life-sized model of a policeman in riot armour jerks backwards and forwards on a miniature playground rocking horse, another statue wears bondage gear. A flying machine suspended from the ceiling, a permanent exhibit, is now piloted by a jaunty manikin in Guantanamo Bay orange.There are more than 100 works, 80 of which are on show for the first time. Two galleries are dedicated to Banksy and it is here that many of his best-known images appear. A painting of the House of Commons debating chamber populated by apes and a stencil of two overweight Westerners in a rickshaw being pulled by a malnourished Third-World child are typical of his political stance, his social-conscience raising.The messages are straightforward. Greed and indifference cause poverty and Third-World poverty is caused by Western multinationals and society's indifference; we live in a police state with suffocating surveillance and a surfeit of control (a stencil on canvas of skipping riot police echoes the riot policeman in the entrance hall); we are destroying many ecosystems; our desire for novelty is leading us away from real and simple pleasures. The jabs are satirical, the iconography a contemporary mishmash of popular culture and "high art".His installation work, concentrated in the rear hall, with its arrangement of iron cages in the dimly lit space, successfully evokes a century-old zoo aesthetic. Instead of live or stuffed animals, the cages now contain animated models, a series of visual punchlines that include a tail-swinging leopard on a tree branch that turns out to be a fur coat, a mother hen with a series of animated chicken nuggets and a series of sinister sausages and salamis, semi-sliced and blindly waving their raised heads.To see the rest of Banksy's work, the visitor has to trail through all the museum's galleries and peer into every case. "Banksy the educator" is perhaps not the hippest tag in town, but as a way of seducing the reluctant, his ploy works a treat. Sly re-workings of iconic paintings dot the walls, including Millet's The Gleaners with one of the three peasants stepping out of the frame for a quick smoke. Unexpected objects litter cases filled with the usual museum fare of stuffed birds and painted teapots.It's all immensely popular: the flash of phone cameras and the bursts of laughter that surround every work underline the fact that Banksy has managed to pull off a one-man blockbuster that has garnered serious critical attention.
© 2009 The Age
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