Banksy
Published on Thursday, January 5th 2006
Banksy is a well-known pseudo-anonymous English graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate (near Bristol) and born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy “was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier engineer, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s.” His artworks are often-satirical pieces of art that encompass topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti with a distinctive stencilling technique, has appeared in London and in cities around the world.
Career
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An example of Banksy’s artwork on the Palestinian side of the Israeli West Bank barrier.
Naked Man image by Banksy, on the wall of a sexual health clinic 1in Park Street, Bristol, England. Following popular support, the City Council have decided it will be allowed to remain – (wider view).
Stencil by Banksy on the waterline of The Thekla, an entertainment boat in central Bristol, England – (wider view).
Banksy art in Brick Lane, East End, 2004.
A stencil of Charles Manson in a prison suit, hitchhiking to anywhere, Archway, London
Banksy on Pulp Fiction. Image since removed by graffiti cleanup crews.
Banksy on Pulp Fiction again.
Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist in the late 1980s as one of Bristol’s DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), often assisting writers Kato and Tes. In 1998 he arranged the enormous “Walls On Fire” graffiti jam along with fellow Bristol graffiti legend Inkie on the site of the future “@t Bristol” development. The weekend long event drew artists from all over the UK and Europe and his organisation of the event established his name within the European graffiti scene. By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a “piece”. He claims he changed to stencilling whilst he was hiding from the police under a train carriage, and soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London.
Banksy’s stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment or pro-freedom. Subjects include animals such as monkeys and rats, policemen, soldiers, children and the elderly.
In late 2001, on a trip to Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, he met up with the Gen-X pastellist and visual activist, recluse James DeWeaver in Byron Bay,where he stenciled a parachuting rat with clothes pin on nose above a toilet, at the Arts Factory Lodge, the stencil is still there, six years later,at last reports.
He also makes stickers (the Neighbourhood Watch subvert) and sculpture (the murdered phonebox), and was responsible for the cover art of Blur’s 2003 album Think Tank.
2003
In 2003 in a show called “Turf War”, held in a warehouse, he painted on animals. Although the RSPCA declared the conditions suitable, an animal rights activist chained herself to the railings in protest. He has moved on to producing subverted paintings; one example is Monet’s Water Lily Pond, adapted to include urban detritus such as litter and a shopping trolley floating in its reflective waters, another is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, redrawn to show that the characters are looking at an English football hooligan dressed only in his Union Flag underpants, who has just thrown an object through the glass window of the cafe. These oil paintings were exhibited at a twelve day exhibition in Westbourne Grove, London in 2005.
2004
- In August 2004, Banksy produced a quantity of spoof British £10 notes substituting Princess Diana’s head for the Queen’s and changing “Bank of England” to “Banksy of England”.* SEE PHOTO Someone threw a large wad of these into a crowd at Notting Hill Carnival that year which some recipients then tried to spend in local shops. These notes were also given with invitations to a picturesonwalls.com Santas Ghetto exhibition. The individual notes have since been selling on eBay for about £200 each. A Limited run of 50 signed posters containing 10 uncut notes were also produced and sold by pictures on walls for £100 each to commemorate the death of Princess Diana. One of these sold in May 2007 on eBay for £17,500.
- Banksy decorated a corridor in The Carlton Arms hotel in NYC.{{Fact|date=September 2007})
2006
- In 2006, Banksy held an exhibition called Barely Legal, billed as a “three day vandalised warehouse extravaganza” in Los Angeles on the weekend of 16 September. The exhibition featured a live “elephant in a room”, painted in a pink and gold floral wallpaper pattern.
- After Christina Aguilera bought an original of Queen Victoria as a lesbian and two prints for £25,000, on 19 October 2006 a set of Kate Moss paintings sold in Sotheby’s London for £50,400, setting an auction record for Banksy’s work. The six silk-screen prints, featuring the model painted in the style of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe pictures, sold for five times its estimated value. His stencil of a green Mona Lisa with paint dripping from her eyes sold for £57,600 at the same auction.
2007
On 7 February 2007, Sotheby’s auction house in London auctioned three Banksy works and reached the highest ever price for a Banksy work at auction of over £102,000 for his Bombing Middle England. Two of his other graffiti works, Balloon Girl and Bomb Hugger, sold for £37,200 and £31,200 respectively, which were well above their estimate prices. The following day’s auction saw a further three Banksy works reach soaring prices. Ballerina With Action Man Parts reached £96,000 whilst Glory sold for £72,000 and Untitled (2004) sold for £33,600 – all three auctions sold way over expected estimates. To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website front home page with a new image of an auction house scene with people bidding on a picture that said, “I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit.”
In February 2007, the owners of a house with a Banksy mural on the side in Bristol decided to sell the house through an art gallery after offers fell through because the prospective buyers wanted to remove the mural. It is listed as a mural which comes with a house attached.
In April 2007, Transport for London painted over Banksy’s iconic image of a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns. Although the image was very popular, Transport for London claimed that the “graffiti” created a general atmosphere of neglect and social decay which in turn encourages crime.
On April 27th 2007, a new record high for the sale of Banksy’s work was set with the auction of the work ‘Space Girl & Bird’ fetching £288,000 ($576,000), around 20 times the estimate at Bonhams of London. On the 21st May 2007 Banksy gained the award for Art’s Greatest living Briton, Banksy as expected did not turn up to collect his award and continued with his notoriously anonymous status.
Banksy has recently made a tribute art piece over his famous Pulp Fiction piece. The tribute was for English graffiti artist OZONE, who was hit by an underground train in Barking, east London along with a fellow artist WANTS, on January 12th 2007. The art piece was of an angel wearing a bulletproof vest, holding a skull. He also wrote a note on his website, saying:
“The last time I hit this spot I painted a crap picture of two men in banana costumes waving hand guns. A few weeks later a writer called Ozone completely dogged it and then wrote ‘If it’s better next time I'll leave it’ in the bottom corner.
When we lost Ozone we lost a fearless graffiti writer and as it turns out a pretty perceptive art critic.
Ozone – rest in piece.“
Ozone died at the age of 19.
A picture of the art piece, along with the note, can be seen on Banksy’s official website.
Banksy has published a “manifesto” on his website. The text of the manifesto is credited as the diary entry of one Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO, which is exhibited in the Imperial War Museum. It describes how a shipment of lipstick to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation at the end of World War II helped the internees regain their humanity.
A small number of Banksy’s works can be seen in the movie Children of Men including a stenciled image of two policemen kissing, and another stencil of a child looking down a shop.
Proclaimed Art Pieces
In addition to his artwork, Banksy has claimed responsibility for a number of high profile art pieces, including the following:
- At London Zoo, he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted “We're bored of fish” in seven foot high letters.
- At Bristol Zoo, he left the message ‘I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring.’ in the elephant enclosure.
- In January 2001, he travelled to the areas controlled by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico, and in sign of solidarity with their movement, painted murals with scenes depicting the struggle and also made stencils on the walls of San Cristobal de las Casas.
- In March 2005, he placed subverted artworks in the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
- He put up a subverted painting in London’s Tate Britain gallery.
- In May 2005 Banksy’s version of a primitive cave painting depicting a human figure hunting wildlife whilst pushing a shopping trolley was found hanging in the British Museum, London.
- Banksy has sprayed “This is not a photo opportunity” on certain photograph spots.
- In August 2005, Banksy painted nine images on the Israeli West Bank barrier, including an image of a ladder going up and over the wall and an image of children digging a hole through the wall.
- In April 2006, Banksy created a sculpture based on a crumpled red phone box with a pickaxe in its side, apparently bleeding, and placed it in a street in Soho, London. It was later removed by Westminster Council. BT released a press release, which said: “This is a stunning visual comment on BT’s transformation from an old-fashioned telecommunications company into a modern communications services provider.”
- In June 2006, Banksy created an image of a naked man hanging out of a bedroom window on a wall in central Bristol. The image sparked some controversy, with the Bristol City Council leaving it up to the public to decide whether it should stay or go. After an internet discussion in which 97% (all but 6 people) supported the stencil, the city council decided it would be left on the building.
- In August/September 2006, Banksy replaced up to 500 copies of Paris Hilton’s debut CD, Paris, in 48 different UK record stores with his own cover art and remixes by Danger Mouse. Music tracks were given titles such as “Why am I Famous?”, “What Have I Done?” and “What Am I For?”. Several copies of the CD were purchased by the public before stores were able to remove them, some going on to be sold for as much as £750 on online auction websites such as eBay. The cover art depicted Paris Hilton digitally altered to appear topless. Other pictures feature her with a dog’s head replacing her own, and one of her stepping out of a luxury car, edited to include a group of homeless people, which included the caption “90% of success is just showing up”.
- In September 2006, Banksy dressed an inflatable doll in the manner of a Guantanamo Bay detainment camp prisoner (orange jumpsuit, black hood, and handcuffs) and then placed the figure within the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California. More recently his work has appeared on Melrose.
Technique
Asked about his technique, Banksy said “I use whatever it takes. Sometimes that just means drawing a moustache on a girl’s face on some billboard, sometimes that means sweating for days over an intricate drawing. Efficiency is the key”.
Stencils are traditionally hand drawn or printed onto sheets of acetate or card, before being cut out by hand. Because of the secretive nature of Banksy’s work and identity, it is uncertain what techniques he uses to generate the images in his stencils, though it is assumed he uses computers due to the photorealistic nature of much of his work.
Real identity
Banksy’s real name may be Robert Banks. Banksy’s year of birth has been given as 1974. Simon Hattenstone from Guardian Unlimited is one of the very few people to have interviewed him face-to-face. Hattenstone describes him as “a cross of Jimmy Nail and British rapper Mike Skinner” and “a 28 year old male who showed up wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a silver tooth, silver chain, and one silver earring”.
The registrant of Banksy’s website is Steve Lazarides, a photographer. Lazarides is Banksy’s agent. Lazarides now has a gallery on Greek Street in London’s Soho called Laz Inc, where Banksy originals can be bought. The website picturesonwalls.com has the exclusive sale rights for all of Banksy’s limited edition prints.
Banksy’s parents think their son is a painter and decorator.
In May 2007, an extensive article written by Lauren Collins of the New Yorker re-opened the Banksy-identity controversy citing a 2004 photograph of the artist that was taken in Jamaica during the Two-Culture Clash project and later published in The Evening Standard in 2004. The Afflicted Yard, a website that documents Jamaican culture, created by Peter Dean Rickards, originally published the images, then sold them to The Evening Standard.
An October 2007 story on the BBC website features a photo allegedly taken by a passer-by in Bethnal Green, London, purporting to show Banksy at work with an assistant, scaffolding and a truck. The story confirms that Tower Hamlets Council in London has decided to treat all Banksy works as graffiti and remove them.
Controversy
Banksy’s “Stonehenge” from portable toilets at the Glastonbury Festival, June 2007
Peter Gibson, a spokesperson for Keep Britain Tidy, asserts that Banksy’s work is simple vandalism, and Diane Shakespeare an official for the same organisation was quoted as saying: “"We are concerned that Banksy’s street art glorifies what is essentially vandalism”.
Banksy gets paid for charity work (e.g., Greenpeace) and can demand up to £25,000 for canvases. It has also been alleged that Banksy has done paid work with corporations such as Puma although this has been denied.
On 4 June, Stranger Magazine reported that Banksy’s The Drinker had been stolen.
In June 2007 Banksy created a circle of plastic portable toilets, said to resemble Stonehenge at the Glastonbury Festival. As this was in the same field as the “sacred circle” which has always had a no plastic rule this was felt by many to be inappropriate and his installation was itself covered in graffiti before the festival even opened.
In October 2007, most of his works offered for sale at Bonhams auction house in London sold for more than twice their reserve price.
Reviews and comments
If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.
—Banksy, in The Independent
He does all this and he stays anonymous. I think that’s great. These days everyone is trying to be famous. But he has anonymity.
—Brad Pitt, in The Independent
Banksy has never let the world know his real name – and he has never even posed for a photograph. Funny kind of celebrity.
—Paul Vallely, The Independent
…he’s often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.
—Charlie Brooker, The Guardian
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