Bansky - The Bristol Legacy

Gough,  Paul,  Banksy,  The Bristol Legacy,   (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2012).

Paul Gough, Professor of Fine Arts at the University of the West of England, has brought together an eclectic, and multi disciplinary group of contributors to explore the uneasy relationship between the renowned street artist, Banksy,  and his native city, Bristol.

The book centres on exploring the conflicts and ambiguities which lay behind Bansky's first comprehensive   gallery show, staged by Bristol City Museum during the summer 2009. Aptly, given the artist' s long standing reputation as an irritant, outlaw, yet canny observer of both the cultural and political establishment, the exhibition was titled,  Banksy v Bristol Museum.

Gough summarizes succinctly the nature of the controversy which surrounds calling his introductory essay - Bansky: Painter, Prankster, Polemicist. The nature of each of these labels is subject in themselves to debate and contest.

The book addresses this in three broad sections.. After veteran correspondent, John Hudson' opens by sketching a 'potted biography of the world's  elusive artist'; the remainder of the opening essays place both the show and Banksy' work generally in the context of Bristol's  long history as a centre of dissent and popular urban protest.

Particularly illuminating is Dr. Steve Poole's carefully researched work on the history of political and populist graffiti in Bristol during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He traces the legal strictures placed by municipal authorities on Banksy's predecessors, noting the influence of broader national developments on the severity of the clampdown, such as the protests leading up to the 1833 Reform Act, and the response by authorities to the suffragette movement.

Gough further develops these themes in his essay 'The 'versus' habit', which points out the longstanding political divide between Tory minded Merchant Adventurers, based in Clifton, and the non conformist entrepreneurs such as Wills and Fry, associated with Bedminster and South Bristol. The statues of Colston and Burke symbolise the divide, each over the years becoming the focal point for dissent. Gough makes the point that 'Bansky's exhibition was clearly attuned to the vexatious histories of his home city'.

The middle section concerns Bansky's show itself. Given the mixed attitude towards  the artist within the local authority who variously regarded him as à cultural asset, a renegade or a vandal, then Kate Brindley, as Bristol Museum Service director acted with some conviction in agreeing to the secrecy, total access, and full control demanded by the artist. It reveals a frustration with the 'the hands-off' culture of traditional curation  and a desire to find more engaging ways for ,museums to engage with their public.  Anna Farthing's contribution places this within the broader move towards constructivist practice over the past decade or so where museums, rather than presenting an expert view, become more exploratory spaces allowing individuals to construct their own narratives, that positions  the artifacts  within their personal heritage. Farthing proposes that the Bansky show represents a move beyond constructivism, towards activism.

The limits to how 'activist' a museum can actually become is revealed in Kate Bauer's, 'A view from Stokes Cross' an engagingly honest account from the point of view of a volunteer working with the community group 'The People's Republic of Stoke Cross which outlines the mixed response to Bansky's 'assistance' with their 'stop Tesco's campaign. The artist's donation of 1500 posters of a Tesco 'Basic' Molotov Cocktail was felt to be too inflammatory, both literally and figuratively in the context of recent street disturbances.
Herein, one senses, one of the many contradictions which surround Banksy. He remains close enough to street culture and radical activism for his actions to provoke grassroots debate and controversy; yet Kate Brindley, as Museum Director, clearly relishing her moment in the limelight, describes hosting a press conference to the world's press 'in four inch Gucci heels' to launch the Banksy show. It poses the question, can Banksy be simultaneously a global brand and a street artist?


The final section of the book attempts to gauge the impact of the show from a variety of perspectives.

Local journalist, Eugene Brand and the city's Director of  Cultural development, Andrew Kelly each contribute articles which seek to evaluate the impact of Banksy, and the exhibition on Bristol's image. Banks concludes, 'what the show did was to make everyone realise that the street art in general and Banksy in particular were more potent global marketing tools for the Bristol brand than anyone had previously dared imagine. Kelly makes the point that as well as changing Bristol's image to outsiders, Banksy has effected how Bristolians, particurly younger inhabitants perceive their native city: '..in a visioning exercise Bansky was chosen by a group of fifty 13 to 14 year olds representing five Bristol secondary schools at a Leaders of the Future event Workshop in 2010, (Banksy was chosen) as among the things that made their city unique - others included Brunel's SS Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge, TV and media production, Cabot Circus, Concorde and aviation and the Bristolian accent.' (p.97)

It is the cultural impact more than anything else which is seen as Banksy's legacy - though as is pointed out, this builds on a legacy of Bristol's 'cool status' which can be traced back to the emergence of Triphop in the early 1990's - bands such as Portishead and Massive Attack have a global following. In terms of  more direct, measurable benefits the impact is less certain. The exhibition attracted over 300,000 people and the economic contribution, calculated by Mearman and Plumridge, economists at the University of the West of England, adds up to an impressive £12.5 miilion  resulting in the creation of up to 200 full-time jobs; however, it is pointed out that this in fact represents less than 0.01% of the total local spend.

From a personal viewpoint the most interesting part of the book is the essay by art critic, David Lee, entitled 'Endearing enough, but its not art'. Lee freely admits that his position may be snobbish, but he dismisses Banksy's work as lacking the complexity of serious art, it is one dimensional - 'what Bansky does has nothing more to do with art than the quickly jotted lyrics of a pop ditty relate to literature....in some respects he has learned much from his buddy Damien Hirst: the paintings might be crap but the husbanding of the reputation is pure genius.' (p.125)   Although more outspoken in his views, Lee's position is probably close to my own in 2009. My son was at at University in Bristol at the time, I was in the city more than once during the time of the exhibition. I observed the queues. I could have tagged along, but I chose not too. However Lee concedes the fact that so many people did find the show interesting is something that cannot be ignored. He notes that at least the exhibition contained works that non-specialists could under understand: 'Not everyone wants to state at blank white canvases, or blue ones or significant 'sctibbles' and skid marks dispersed across half an acre. They don't want to be told that this pile of dust is more meaningful than that one because this special one was put there deliberately by an artist.' (p.127)

Last week, as I concluded a visit to Palma de Mallorca's recently completed Gallery of Modern Art, I reflected on David Lee's observations regarding 'fashionable', elitist art. Palma's new gallery is lovely, a cool, low-key series of art spaces in wood, glass and steel, subtly  lit, tucked inconspicuously within a bastion on the city's sixteenth century walls. The exhibits? Well exactly the kind of incomprehensible minimalist works and random 'installations' that Lee describes above - though he forgot to mention the bill-board sized average photographs and looping, monotonous videos whose epic ordinariness had been rendered semiotically significant by the addition of the odd quote from Barthes and Benjamin stencilled next to them in a mid-grey, fashionably hi-tech font.

Later, as I wandered up one of the stylish boulevards nearby I noticed a ragged homeless woman; languorously she held out her hand in a gesture of need and despair. She sat hunched beneath the window of an up-market boutique. Behind her, framed within a curvilinear, modernista window stood a stick-thin, headless manikin dressed in a sumptuous deep-blue designer evening gown - a 'red-carpet' frock, if I ever saw one. I realised straightaway where 'the art problem' is situated. We live in a culture where we are constantly visually stimulated and challenged, by still images and moving ones, slogans, strap-lines, brands, soundbites all assail us; almost everything we touch, use, operate is the result of deliberate ergonomic design. The effect is twofold. Most of the time the media overload is too much, we simply zone-out or are absorbed by it. However, on the rare occasion that we engage our visual sensibilities, or a critical response is provoked by an arresting sight - like the beggar and the manikin - then the effect is more powerful than most artists can magic, either in a gallery or on a wall. We lapse into a post-modern take on the picturesque; the urban environment providing a vibrant, ever changing, thought provoking 'street art'. It intrigues and immunises us simultaneously; the woman's desperation is somehow neutralised by an accidental juxtaposition which transformed her plight from the socio-political, moral sphere into the pictorial.

Banksy's power is how he manages to reverse this process, transforming, through his interventions, the amoral visual environment into the socio-political.

Perhaps I should have queued with the rest back in 2009.