Banksy
Oct 27, 2008
What do you keep on your bedside table? If it’s not too personal a question? The permanent fixtures on mine are as follows: my Great Aunt Kate’s onyx lamp with its old silk shade, my specs case, some pens, a notebook, a lavender pouch that lost its fragrance many moons ago and a prehistoric digital alarm clock radio with livid green numbers that must make the house look haunted from the outside - perhaps even from outer space - by night.
Also, well on its way to becoming a permanent fixture, is Andrew Marr’s breezeblock-sized “A History of Modern Britain” which, in a self-improving frame of mind, I imported from the bookcase to the bedside table aeons ago. One day I shall get beyond the introduction. Oh, who am I kidding.
There is almost always a recipe book, and some sort of paperback - currently Stephen Fry’s “Moab is my Washpot“, the rambling autobiography of his early life.
But now there’s a new bedside man in my life. His name is Banksy, he’s a graffiti artist and his book, “Wall and Piece”, is one of very few where, after getting to the end, I immediately turn back to the start and read it all over again.
It’s mainly drawings and photographs, you see. Powerful images and statements illegally painted or installed, sometimes in high-profile places but mainly just on random walls in random streets; messages and comments about society that make you stop, smile (mostly), think about the state of stuff, and then move on. Genuine Pop Art, I guess.
The cover quote is from a Metropolitan Police spokesman and it reads: “There’s no way you’re going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover.” Round one to Banksy.
From the Warhol-esque image of the clown being dragged away by riot police, under the tiny caption: “You told that joke twice”, to the characters from The Jungle Book, bound and blindfolded by axe-wielding loggers in the middle of a torched wasteland, Banksy always makes me think: ‘I wish I’d thought of that’…
He sneaks into animal enclosure in zoos and scrawls groups of lines on rocks, with diagonal strokes through them, as though the animals are counting off their days in captivity. He attaches wheel clamps to statues of chariots in Central London, he recreates famous landscape masterpieces, and then adds sinister CCTV towers or police ‘do not cross’ scene-of-crime tape. He outlines primitive shopping trolleys on cave paintings, daubs ‘Late Again’ on the sides of trains and depicts ferocious, masked hoodies, hurling bunches of flowers.
Problem. It’s easy, after a few read-throughs of “Wall and Piece“, to start fancying that you can see an art installation in everything. I can no longer look at a row of traffic cones without wanting to do a Banksy and return in the dark, wearing a balaclava, to cut their bottoms off at diminishing heights and angles, making it look as though the ground they’re standing on has turned to quicksand.
Similarly, there was a flashing sign near me for weeks saying ‘Work starts here on 25th August, delays expected.’ And when the 25th came and went with no progress I thought I was onto something - aha! The very delay is the delay! It must be art!
Banksy takes an aggressive stance on what constitutes art. Who decides what art is? He says, “when you go into an Art Gallery you are simply looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.” Which is a fair point. I am no expert, as will be obvious by now, but I do recall someone who sounded like they knew what they were on about explaining on Radio 4 why The Mona Lisa wasn’t, technically, a very good picture. It’s all very confusing.
But I admire people like Banksy, who nudge at the boundaries of things that we accept as inevitable parts of modern life, in clever, entertaining ways - see Bob Geldof for more details. That’s not to say I’d be happy for someone to come and paint on my wall - they’d get raced faster than you could scream “Oi! Not In My Back Yard!”
Unless, of course, it was Banksy himself. He’d get coffee and maybe a nice scone.
