Alright the title is a little bit of an exaggeration but Bristol may as well build themselves a Banksy Museum for keeps, I mean, what a tourist trap! Banksy is the biggest thing to hit Bristol since erm… slavery? Okay that’s a low blow but I have to admit all this gushing about Banksy in Bristol because he’s from Bristol kinda does my head in.
Bansky has ‘taken over’ Bristol City Museum (well I’m sure it was handed to him on a plate actually) today Saturday 12th of June for the next 12 weeks – it’s free and it’s on from 9am to 5pm every day – so if you’re down there you are legally required to attend or you will face a lynching by an angry mob of Banksy devotees.
There’s a big difference between fame and success, I can’t tell you what it is because I have neither, but I do feel that Banksy is leaning in a direction that won’t seal his place in the annals of art history, at one point, especially early in his career here was a guy that I honestly believed could, but there’s only so far a highly attuned sense of sarcasm and wit and a self-defence mechanism can take you.
In truth Banksy lost me at the pet shop, I know he loves animals, we all do, but his well meaning animatronics didn’t exactly grab the art world by the nuts. Banksy has fast become a brand rather than an artist, he’s like a band that’s just got too big, and now he really needs to get back to basics. I really like some of his latest works, although however much I embrace kitsch (against the wishes of many of the so called art intelligensia), sometimes even I feel that Rob is so enmeshed in the immediate he has trouble standing back and looking at the ‘big idea’.
I know a lot of you out there are scratching your heads thinking what the **** is Paul going on about? But it has to be said, this retrospective, and come on that’s what it is, won’t be taking the world by storm, it’s just more of the same, pictorial jokes, one-liners, nothing more. If Banksy was The Beatles he’d be throwing his psychedelic garb in the bin by now, donning a ratty old beard and sitting on the roof playing ‘Hey Jude’.
Banksy is a highly adept technical painter, however, intellectually a lot of his works don’t cut it these days, it’s not his fault, it’s just his position in the world, like all of Britain’s most successful post modern artists, he’s found himself performing a very tricky balancing act, one that’s more about courting popularity than communicating meaning on a level any deeper than a tabloid headline.
I do wonder sometimes if the guy is thinking ‘ Oh **** I’m becoming my own worst enemy’. It’s like the Pope exhibiting a collection of finger paintings in Rome, no one is going to say, "hey, these suck." But then again, it’s all about the attention it brings to the city, sure Banksy is loved by the common man, fine Banksy likes to stick two fingers up at the plutocracy, but guess who is actually buying his works these days? I’m telling you now they don’t live in council houses and they probably don’t even hang up his works in their stately homes or luxury loft apartments. They cover them up with bubble wrap and store them in vacuum sealed safes and storerooms, like first edition comics.
Still perhaps, just maybe, there’s a proverbial chink of light at the end of the tunnel. If Banksy is busy making paintings of monkeys running the government or chiselling blocks of stone with famous artists’ quotes, the rest of the world can finally start to turn their attention to a whole swathe of talent out there that have for the main part been ignored by the world. What Banksy has done is important, don’t get me wrong, he’s lifted graffiti out of the gutter and provided a route for the common man (whoever the **** he might be) to appreciate art. Now it’s up to the rest of us to get on with the serious job of teaching these art newbs that there’s more to life than the trite immediacy of a limited concept or kitsch, and the waning efficacy of pop iconography and bring back some depth, some gravitas to the movement, if it can be called that.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not Banksy’s fault, all of us whatever we do, graffiti artists, street artists, urban artists, we are all in this together – we are all to blame. It’s like being the member of an opposition party, we can pick holes in the ruling classes’ arguments, we can point out their failings, we can reduce their image to a shambolic heap of greed and callous self-interest, but we don’t have any answers, we don’t lead the way, because we can’t find an alternative direction. So we sit here, jibing, grinning at the chaos that ensues until the moment one of us makes it so big that the public starts to ask questions, ‘so what’s the big idea?’, ‘where do we go from here?’, and we shrug, we’re artists after all, we don’t run the country, we aren’t elected into a position of power, well most of us anyway.
This isn’t a socialist revolution, this isn’t the long defunct USSR, this is a greedy, immature and impatient consumerist world with the shortest attention span in history and gushing over art with the intellectual clout of a rock tour poster isn’t going to prevent man from regressing back to the evolutionary equivalent of an over pampered and well dressed ape. The irony is that most of Banksy’s work actually encourages a lack of thought rather than engenders a new and emotive value, a deeper perception, a time of reflection, a step forward in the arts and culture in general. I know, I know, it’s unfair to heap this weighty responsibility on to the shoulders of a kid from a private school the ghetto made good. We don’t expect rap stars to write tomes that beat Shakespeare or Keats hands down, we don’t look to the latest bands to produce music that’d make Beethoven and Mozart cry, but it’s all about the position, if you’re at the top of the world in any form whatsoever, you have to move things along at a brisk pace before the sheep begin to bleat, before the kids begin to yawn, before the critics start to grind their teeth and tap their fingers on the table.
It’s happening already, right now, and it’s not a good thing Rob, it means you (and all of us) have to evolve, we know you’re not a bona-fide intellectual genius, you are a great graffiti artist with some of the most classic ideas ever – but one day – maybe very soon, you’ll produce a piece and scratch your head and wonder why the hell everyone’s yawning and shuffling their feet? It’s because you’re just too famous. If you have the money, try something on a far vaster scale, something like, I don’t know, sculpting Lands End into a knob, perhaps that will keep them coming back for more. In the meantime, remember, the praise and adoration from Bristol is more about city pride than your art, they’re just relieved that someone from their corner of the planet has finally made it.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love a vast majority of Banksy’s work, if I didn’t I wouldn’t have mentioned him a dozen times or more in this blog, but for me, personally, I think we may finally be looking at the end of an era here. The establishment, especially the Bristolian establishment, are so wrapped up in Banksy fever now it’s become the equivalent of a day trip to Euro Disney. I’d love to see Rob Gunningham turn on the faithful, throw them, show them that there’s more to him than poptastic social commentary. I think there’s a storm coming, people are getting poorer, art is becoming more angry, life is harder than it ever was, and sarcasm doesn’t provide us any more answers than Cameron and Brown having a barney, because cynicism simply breeds more of the same. If the world doesn’t learn to raise its expectations soon we’ll all be hanging from the trees and scratching our proverbial arses wondering what the hell went wrong. Sure, Banksy isn’t a saviour or the next Obama, but you name one other inspirational Englishman (who’s still alive) and you’re in the minority. Before you all pile on I know I am guilty of the same, if I had the PR and financial clout of Banksy I just hope I’d evolve a little faster that’s all. Evolution takes time, but now and again, with the right resources it can jump. Revolution is messy, it’s violent, we’ve been through that, graffiti has grown up and gone to work, it has a family to support, it has a role in society, it’s just that Banksy seems to be at the forefront of that key change for me – I just wonder if he truly understands the responsibilty involved? If Rob wants to have his say I’d be glad to let him trash this blog with a succinct an most probably highly amusing argument, but what’s the point, I don’t have a circulation of millions.
It’s all about presentation these days, it’s the packaging, the brand, the name, the sort of junk they made up in the 1950s to take everyone’s minds off the Cold War and the continuous imminent prospect of global nuclear destruction. If it was your last moment on earth and you had a choice of looking at any piece of art for those last few seconds would you really want to sit facing a Banksy or would you rather something from the Renaissance, or an impressionist master, or a Picasso, or well anything that let you think beyond the immediate? I suppose I am guilty of unwarranted expectation of the man but isn’t everyone these days? Banksy is the closest I’ve found to an artist in modern history (who’s still alive) who can prove my point once and for all to the likes of people like Roy Grayson, a tutor who once said to me ‘It doesn’t matter what the public think, they don’t know anything’.
I’d love to think that Banksy is taking a little time out right now, assessing his direction, wondering if he can make the leap to a new echelon of art, there must be a higher ground, however lowly your roots, there must be a little cloud of divine inspiration hovering over Rob’s head. Let’s hope it rains soon, let’s pray for a down pour.
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