Friday 30 October 2009

sluttish slobby chavy snobby


Banksy, Banksy versus Bristol Museum, Bristol Museum.


Banksy knows the kitsch of western cultural garb, the naff children’s toys, the nude aprons, the whole sluttish, slobby, chavy, snobby, acquisitioning.


Yet the change of location from a slyly sprayed street corner to the established confines of Bristol Museum, transforms the functioning of these kitsch allusions: The graffiti medium itself becomes contrived where it was once visceral. It is no longer testament to real rebellion. A mode that is, on street corners, executed in snatched moments of unusual desertion (this anomaly itself highlighting the crowding, commercial, city-dependant nature of our time) or at least the absence of a disapproving eye. In this collision haste and care it is typically a paradoxical guerrilla art (depicting in Banksy’s case that which is kept secret on a large political scale), at once skilled and integral, advanced and primitive. Within the museum however these characteristics become cause for contention. It is in this unsettling, improper context perhaps that Banksy’s work is allowed the status of art. In turn the ideology of the museum is unsettled by Banksy’s disruptive presence- not only in the physical destruction he has reaped on some long-standing exhibits, but in the notion of the place – not many artists enable a museum to be tagged an ‘improper’ context.


But let’s not get carried away, Banksy may be no great thinker. If we look at his small grey figure of an emaciated child who pulls a massive, technicolour American couple along, it is evident how he pleases the crowd and eases Western guilt. The artist is providing a pain-free opportunity for the comfortable to deride themselves: Behind the grey boy the American partners happy-snap in a rickshaw, wearing a colourful slogan t-shirt (an ‘aren’t I edgy and pop’ opposition of colour, worthy of comic-strip cinema such as Sin City) claiming ‘I Hate Mondays’. The children are scuffed and diminutive, wide-eyes staring out at the viewer, and the depiction of the woman in the Burkha dons a naked apron for our chuckles. These singular figures satirise our conceptions of the cultures we perhaps think little about in complex terms. No character is a true representation, but kitsch re-imaginings of wealth, of poverty, of fun: Sympathetic and absurd figures elicit their responses through Banksy’s scorn and simplification.


The work is impactful. Most people I saw were rushing about the museum searching out Banksy’s interventions, - make a brief smile, take a quick picture and then move along. (Not noticing that Bristol Museum’s contemporary art section houses work running from the 60s onwards that cause Banksy’s art to suddenly seem nothing but obvious for the themes hammers home have been reworked since Warhol). Yet this speed (which recalls Walter Benjamin’s description in The Painter of Modern Life of the rapidity of industrial life, and the painter’s fast sketching demanded by this pace) contradicts the critique of tokenism existent in the work.


This competitive art-tourism highlights the reason for the structure of many galleries as it currently stands, which are not just establishmentarian, but allow space for thought within their other restrictions of pace and noise. And there is nothing wrong with that; surely this is what Banksy’s work achieves on the corner of a bustling nine to five street.


Of course Banksy’s first conventional exhibit could not have been within the order of the museum, it does powerfully disrupt and joyfully play. Still, it has also come to the prominent museum context as a potent platform and thus gives the established order its credit. This is not necessarily a weakening as to not do so - to exclude that which it critiques - would be ignorant and self-defeating (like Fern Cotton disbelieving a person suggesting she isn’t the brightest spark in the plug (hypothetically)). Yet one need only imagine the meeting to start finding the claims to anarchy slightly farcical – Can we let Banksy do this? No. Can he do that? Yes, ok.


This raises the irresolvable issue of rebellious versus elite art and the inevitable recurring wave of assimilation that transforms one into the other. This inevitable drift mirrors the motion of not just aging, but society itself as a regenerating force constructed of margins and fads that become centres and trends. This obviously enables change, and life would therefore be a dull thing without the new that becomes old to make way for more new. In addition, if everything perpetually seemed new one would not need to the fresh gaze of expressive art. This is perhaps what some of Banksy’s most ardent fans miss: Sprayed or staccato daubs: It’s one and the same. Perhaps to admit its lack of revolt (because there is an extensive staging and production of marketing at work here), to take, dare I say it - Banksy with a pinch of salt as well as refined sugar, and concentrate alongside the humour on the essential intelligence and irony of each sketch or concept (for example in the brilliant Gorilla Parliament) might reveal how it functions beyond shock, how the play prolongs.


We might also ask ourselves about the cities where his art works so well- affluent, trendy places like Brighton and Bristol, where the incongruity stands and the audience is primed for any decent wacky attack on established mores. How would this hang in duller town centres? Or might someone be sent off dutifully to scrub the wall before we had time to consider?

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