On Facebook, a friend recently posted a story about a new work by Banksy. It happens a lot actually, and normally I don't pay much attention because, while I'll admit to liking a few pieces, I've never really been able to articulate exactly why I otherwise find Banksy thoroughly objectionable. I get the humour, I'm entertained by the pranks, and I enjoy smites upon authority just as much as the next white middle-class male who has never had any real reason to. But there is something about Banksy's practice that troubles me. This new work provided an opportunity to interrogate it in real time as new works are emerging on a daily basis for the month of October.
Better Out Than In is a "residency" Banksy is undertaking "on the streets of New York", the title obviously referring to the fact that his work is taking place outside, in the streets rather than in the stuffy confines of the mainstream art gallery. Cool. Despite its lack of imagination, the title does reflect one of the truisms of street art - that it is in fact better outside on the street than in art gallery. By contrast the Space Invaders exhibition that toured Australia a few years ago was an absurd exercise, but made street artists and the galleries that showed it feel as if they were doing something edgy and contemporary, the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist themes sat surprisingly well within the walls of the museum. When it showed at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Triple J presenter, Rosie Beaton told the reporter covering the exhibition that she'd heard there were some boring old portraits in the space the previously. Good thing then, that street art came in to fuck shit up! The problem is though that street art is made in the street and it derives most of its power from that environment. The immediacy and brevity of its message work on the street precisely because we're usually there doing something else in that context and a good piece of street art can interrupt that urban somnambulance. It just doesn't have this effect in an art gallery. It's not that street art should not be allowed in the art gallery, it's just strange that it willingly ends up there. Nevertheless Banksy manages to enjoy commercial success from gallery exhibitions and some entrepreneurial souls have taken to removing works, presumably intact, from the concrete walls upon which they are painted. I am not the first to make the suggestion that as little sense as these events make, they are inevitabilities of the capitalist art world. Both the capitalist concrete thieves and gallery exhibitions of street art remove two of street art's key characteristics - one is its connection to the specific site in which it is created and the other is the fact that the works have a finite lifetime. Whether it is destroyed by philistine plumbers or painted over by civic authorities or other artists, longevity is just not part of its nature.
This limited lifespan is something of an anathema to the art establishment but is not an unfamiliar one. Where preservation is the norm, a few art forms and art works have presented challenges to it. Recently at a public lecture at the Queensland University of Technology, Peggy Phelan argued that the fragile and friable work of Eva Hesse not be preserved in the traditional sense but be allowed to deteriorate (as the artist had apparently intended), and if the work is to be shown after such time as it has deteriorated beyond exhibition standard, then the work should either be recreated or shown through documentation only, but would in this process become something else. She bases this argument on her understanding of performance art that, she says, draws its emotive and political power from the immediacy of the live experience, occurring in real time and space. Because performance is tied absolutely to this specific spatial, temporal and experiential moment, it "cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance," there is no way to truly preserve it. Phelan believes that this logic could legitimately be applied to other forms of art where longevity is either not the intention of the artist or a realistic expectation of the materials used. The difficulty in convincing the capitalist art world of this is that it trades on authenticity and originality as the determinants of value. Phelan's is a progressive view that challenges the traditional conservatism of the museum system, but one that makes infinitely more artistic sense. The trope of performance art that Phelan puts forward is useful in a discussion of street art and identifying the absurdities discussed above, but also because of the primacy that performance places on site and temporality. But the argument can be extended into a discussion of the work in Banksy's New York residency which includes sculpture, mobile works mounted in trucks, his usual stenciled work, and actual performances. In looking at this work through the lens of performance art the figure of Banksy is revealed as a vacuous mythology with motives more conservative than might be expected.
Street art now enjoys a widespread following largely driven by Banksy's cultivated mythology. But it is a meticulously constructed mythology that the New York residency provides ample opportunity to analyse. In an interview about the residency Banksy was asked why he began painting in the street, his reason is, predictably, "...because it was the only venue that would give me a show" and of course because "it saves money on having to buy canvases." Remarks like these are part of the reason I hate Banksy, and also evidence that Banksy hates us. They build an image of a self-deprecating subjectivity, that struggles, just like the rest of us cash-strapped, undiscovered geniuses, to get a show in a nice gallery. It appeals to our resentment of the art establishment for not recognising our obvious talent. Similarly, on the website for Better Out Than In, the word "residency" is quaintly misspelled with an extra "e" which has been visibly corrected.
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| I'm even ignoring the missing apostrophe |
This seems like a fairly innocuous act of poor spelling, and poorer correction, but is in fact a highly contrived performance of a particular kind of identity. It makes no sense to retain such a correction in a digital format, so it must therefore have been deliberately included for a reason. This is the language of contemporary mythology: a contrivance is made to appear natural and self-evident through an excess of signification, concealing the true motivations for the contrivance. This form of mythic speech is the essence of Banksy-as-performance. The corrected "e" is a deliberately included 'error' that works to demonstrate just how down to earth and anti-elitist Banksy is, after all, correct spelling and grammar, just like the scarf and t-shirt look, are the property of the artworld elite. This typo, understood as a deliberate contrivance, is intended to conceal Banksy's true identity - a commercially successful artist, as reliant on the market gallery system as Jeff Koons. The performance of 'Bansky of the street' conceals the fact that he actually is, and has always been, 'Banksy of the gallery'.
The first work posted from Bansky's New York residency is an image of two children, one standing on the other's back to reach a spray can that appears in a presumably pre-existing sign informing would-be vandals that "Graffiti is a crime." This kind of intervention into public space and critique of figures of authority and state power are typical of Banksy's work and really, what he does best. With most of these works Banksy has included an audio tour style commentary available on the website or by phoning a number posted near each work. These are obviously parodies of the usual audio tours you get in museums and take a predictably tongue-in-cheek tone, pre-empting and poking fun at all possible intellectual readings of the works, a clever strategy Banksy employs to avoid at all costs being mistaken for smart rather than smart-arse.
The audio tours in these works hark back to the physical museum interventions he did in New York in 2005, installing his own works in the institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum some lasting for days before museum staff realised and had the works removed. These works do actually make some worthy points about museums, cultural authority, and curatorship but the concept owes more to Dada, and to some extent artists like Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson, than it does street art. 'Institutional critique', as such practices are known, is now a recognisable form art practice and as such has been adopted by the mainstream gallery and museum system as part of a self-reflexive revisionism emerging out of postmodernism. A similar thing is happening with street art today, with institutions expanding their collection and exhibition policies to include street art, and Banksy is complicit in it rather than against it.
Rather than take aim at civic authority or the art world, the second work posted pokes fun at one of his fellow street artists. Mind you, it is unlikely that Banksy would bestow that title on the authors of these particular works, as there is an ongoing internal debate, apparently, about the difference between 'graffiti' and 'street art'. "This is my New York accent" reads the text painted in white spray paint in the angular typeface that spray cans seem to force their users to adopt. Banksy highlights the obvious pretention in this statement by adding a line beneath it in a boring, less expressive italicised Baskerville font, "normally I write like this" as if the New York accent is an unnatural, performed identity, one accent among many possible others. A similar subversive strategy is adopted in a couple of other more recent works where Banksy inserts the words, "The Musical" at the bottom right of existing political ("OCCUPY!"), or gangster ("PLAYGROUND MOB"), or childish ("Dirty underwear") graffiti. A mockery that instantly knocks any efficacy or power out of the statements like a punch in the guts, that is, of course, assuming that they had any power to begin with.
These are clever and accurate, though not necessarily intelligent, criticisms of graffiti and art world clichés. But what is it that grants Banksy such a vast and overarching critical distance that he is able to critique both the conservative values and practices of the mainstream art world and the clichés and pretentions of "underground" graffiti practices? The answer is that his is also a performed identity, or an adopted "accent". His kind of branded anonymity, stylised covert operations, and collectable anti-capitalist imagery have fed his cult status beyond any sense of grounded identity, or in other words, a real person. A real person would have to answer questions, respond to criticism, the buck would be forced to stop. But Banksy-as-performance is able to operate outside of these burdens of reality and is therefore always removed enough from the conversation to rubbish its content regardless of what it is. He is always able to have the last word because he can theoretically pop up whenever its suits him, he is not burdened by having to think on his feet, or to respond to the conversation in real time, he never walks away from an argument saying "THAT'S what I should have said!" because he is never in the argument at the time. In fact, whether or not their identity is known to the wider public, all street artists use this method of deferred argument to some extent.
As I suggested above, the concept of Banksy-as-performance, goes much deeper than simply the performance of his identity. His wider practice and also the practices of street art generally, and the ways it is appreciated and created, are actually embedded in the tropes of performance art. On the surface, the kind of performance that was made famous in the 1970s through work of artists like Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden and Mike Parr seem to be antithetical to contemporary street art. In contrast to the street art methodology suggested above, based on stealthy absence and perpetual critical distance, the work of the 1970s performance artists and the traditions that followed them, privileged presence as the key element of the work. The presence of the artist is simultaneous with the audience in a unique spatial, temporal and experiential moment. A fact made poignantly clear in Abramovic's recent work The Artist is Present featured in the documentary of the same name. The argument or the conversation is conducted in real time between real artists and real audiences. Street art, conversely, trades on a kind of myth of presence. However rather than position the two practices as binary opposites, it is an analysis of their commonalities that reveals the mythological nature of street art.
Street art shares a number of key characteristics with performance art; site specificity; temporal specificity; the primacy of the act of making the work, and; the presence of the artist. These are obvious important tropes in performance art theory but they are also relevant to street art, however only in a kind of inverse state. Site specificity for example is most easily applicable to street art because the works often incorporate elements of their immediate surroundings as in the first work of Banksy's residency. Performance art, particularly that occurring in public space, often incorporates site in a similar way but performance (as distinct from theatre) is able to respond to sites and objects as they are encountered, and in fact this encounter may often be the primary purpose of the work (see artists such as Lee Wen, Valie Export). The sense of engagement with site however differs vastly between each practice. And the reason for this is the role of the audience. The audience is present to witness the performance work but hidden from by the street artist. The audience shares the same temporal moment with the performance artist but always arrives after the fact for the street artist. The audience is integral to, if not a participant in the creation of the performance work, but this moment is only ever imagined by the viewer of street art. This is, of course, the case with most gallery based works of art but with street art the stealth, brazenness and often illegality of the work mythologises this moment of creation to the point that it is as important as the live moment of the performance, that the content of the work is often secondary to the brazenness of its creation. It is essentially this moment that is the central message of street art: "look what I got away with!" It is therefore presence that is the shared central premise of performance art and street art: immediate presence in the case of performance, and deferred presence in the case of street art. The co-presence of the artist and audience is what gives performance its central power, street art also trades on this experiential power but never delivers, it simply works to self-perpetuate the mythology. Audiences make pilgrimages to the sites of Banksy works as if they were significant historical mythologised sites like the Normandy beaches or the Roswell crash sites. They don't expect to see Banksy himself but simply bask in his delayed aura. Knowing that he was here is enough. Marcus Westbury's desire to take home a Banksy rat from one of Melbourne's laneways in his TV series Not Quite Art, is an example of this. The public outcry when a Banksy rat (maybe the same one, it doesn't really matter) was destroyed by a plumber is another, as is the diligently prompt vandalism of the daily New York works.
Street art's perceived value owes as much to presence and authenticity as performance art does. But street art trades on a mythological version of these concepts. Mythological because the narrative that is suggested by street art, particularly that created by anonymous celebrities, is a narrative of presence told through perpetual absence and trace. Performance artist Chris Burden demonstrated this process succinctly when he exhibited remnant objects from previous performances as Relics. The original performance, became totally absorbed into the objects existing now only as a semiotic ghost, animating it in the present moment as a myth. A piece of street art is this same kind of ghost but there is no original performance of which it is a trace, it begins its life as a myth with the attendant stories and exaggerations built into the practice itself. And Banksy is a seasoned professional in putting this myth of presence to work.
No work makes this clearer than the October 13 work. A stall set up near Central Park was selling "100% authentic original signed Banksy canvases. For $60 each." Banksy himself was of course not present to be selling his works. The public were fooled into thinking that the works labelled "SPRAY ART" were just cheap imitations of the 'real' Banksy's work. The few sales that were made on the day the stall was operating could not have been more perfect. One woman wanted something for her kids, but only for half price, and a man wanted something for his walls. A mad rush on the stall and a sell out would have been a disaster for Banksy, luckily he was still able to run the self-deprecating line that he, a world famous artist, only made four hundred dollars, and that those that did sell, sold to people who had no idea anyway. The underground cred remains intact, and Banksy continues to smirk down from above... or behind, anywhere but here and now.
The truth is though, even the most diehard Banksy fanboy would not recognise the "authenticity" of the works at the stall anymore than the nice mum or the man with bad interior decorating taste. Anybody with any ounce of scepticism would dismiss them as rip-offs. Banksy has of course gone out of his way to make them appear so. Apart from Tim Rogers from You Am I spitting into the crowd at the Godfrey Tanner Bar at Newcastle Uni in the late nineties, I can't think of another instance where an artist has shown more contempt for their audience. As Banksy's website informs us with aggressive courtesy: "This was a one off. The stall will not be there again today." As is the case with every other Banksy work, the audience misses out. In fact, the audience missing out seems to be the entire point of Banksy's work. The soft targets of civic authority, multi-national corporations, the art establishment, other street artists, himself, are not the real targets of Banksy's acerbic wit and school boy pranks. These are just decoys to fool you into thinking that he's on your side. The real target is you. With each work that you smirk at knowingly, raise your fist in support of, or alter your political beliefs to align with, you are perpetuating the myth that something has actually happened, that some left wing agenda has subverted the march of capitalism, that Banksy actually exists, and that you are part of something bigger. But you're not. You're too late. You don't know who Banksy is, and more importantly he doesn't know who you are and he doesn't care. Your sole purpose is to wish that you were there, to yearn to not miss out, to continue your desire for a piece of Banksy. Because that is what makes Banky's work valuable.
As a reader called "shakers" commented on a story on the stall published in the Sydney Morning Herald, "Its my dream to buy a Banksy at such a low cost...please come to Sydney!" But even if Banksy did listen to shakers and came to Sydney, he would not really be there in the sense that shakers wants him to. Because he is never anywhere, at least never anywhere you are. He is not in New York at the moment because he is not anywhere. His myth of presence has already inspired a couple of supposed sightings which, like the inane discussions of whether Banksy is a he, a she, a few, or a many, go nowhere in uncovering who Banksy actually is but a long way in figuring out what he is. He is a business with a shrewdly effective marketing plan that participates in the capitalist system while critiquing it, insults its clientele while sending them away happy customers. You are Banksy's primary medium, you are the material that he uses to communicate with his real audience - the market.
When Marina Abramovic is present in her work it is a respectful, selfless, rather than egotistical, presence. To be challenged on such an individually intimate level is the highest mark of respect an artist could pay to an audience. But the myth of presence that Banksy trades on is the opposite. To use an adoring audience as pawns in a marketing plan whilst appearing to operate in solidarity with them is the ultimate in contempt. But this relationship between performance art and street art is not simply a convenient academic comparison, nor is the mutual reliance on presence the only element that necessitates it. Banksy himself has suggested such a comparison:
Graffiti is an art form where the gesture is at least as important as the result, if not more so. I read how a critic described Jackson Pollock as a performance artist who happened to use paint, and the same could be said for graffiti writers-performance artists who happen to use paint. And trespass.
That Banksy has the audacity to make this comparison with reference to "gesture" proves that he possibly even believes his own myth of presence. It is either through a misunderstanding or manipulation of the meaning of presence that Banksy attempts to legitimise his practice. Either way his adoption of the trope of performance here is one of egotism and theatricality, not one of respect and relationality. This is the essence of the Banksy myth, and the reason, ultimately, why Banksy hates you.
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