Any-Space-Whatever

The Preservation of Banksy

There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.
-Friedrich Nietzsche “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”

Banksy has been on a graffiti tour of the United States promoting “his” new film, Exit through the Gift Shop (see trailer below), which I finally saw this weekend. I’m placing “his” in quotes, because while the movie is identified as “A Banksy Film” and ostensibly about him, in the end it is really about Thierry Guetta (aka Mr. Brainwash), a tragic-comic figure Banksy found more interesting—and thus a more apt documentary subject—than himself. As a result, the film moves from Guetta’s documentation style, which is as interesting as the art he documents, to his own foray into street art and his subsequent transformation into Mr. Brainwash, finally ending with Mr. Brainwash’s first solo show in Los Angeles. It has also been suggested (here and here, among other places) that the film itself is a prank within a prank. Whether or not this is true, the film is incredibly entertaining, and its narrative is punctuated by a series of observations and quips by Banksy, whose flawless comic timing is probably the most surprisingly memorable part of the film.

The subtitle of the film, “The World’s First Street Art Disaster Movie,” hints at the difficulty of “getting” the film. At a certain point we realize that irony is all that is there (in the film, in most of the street art, in the personal narratives being exposed), but these ironic events and objects that the film documents are productive enough to make perennial (and otherwise largely exasperated) discussions—What is art? Who gets to decide? What roll does the market and marketing play? etc.—seem (at least temporarily) fresh again. The most obvious references in these works of street art are to figures like Duchamp and Warhol—artists who draw attention to themselves, their caprice, chance, superficiality, the creative and conceptual genesis and contingencies of art. However, the in situ performative nature of these works also alludes to the Situationists’ mapping and derives, as well as more recent urban detournements.

The sudden conversion of the film into a documentation of Mr. Brainwash’s attempt to break into the art world and Banksy’s commentary on it both deal with the irony of a situation in which someone with no formal (or even autodidactic) training in art and with no apparent artistic aspirations until it is off-handedly suggested that he should try creating some art of his own, rapidly attains “success” without the critical journey, inquiry, reception and acceptance that usually emerges gradually (if at all) over the course of a career. The final act of the film also introduces the difficulty in “getting” irony, which the (alleged) millions of dollars in sales of Mr. Brainwash’s work reinforces. Banksy himself seems unaware of an additional level of irony as he takes an extremely critical stance toward Mr. Brainwash’s approach to art, when in reality nothing about it is inherently different from Banksy’s own approach.

Banksy has previously said, “To actually [have to] go through the process of having a painting selected must be quite boring. It’s a lot more fun to go and put your own one up.” His successful attempts to install his own works in major museums is documented in Exit (his trip to the Met can be seen in the second video below), along with his “Elephant in the Room” show in Los Angeles and Mr. Brainwash’s “Life is Beautiful Show” also in LA. Banksy’s solo show actually has less power than Mr. Brainwash’s, because Banksy’s gallery show forces Banksy’s work to act as static and acontextual objects. Mr. Brainwash’s show, while featuring “art” works much more derivative and uninteresting, at least acts as an extended variation on Banksy’s Met performance. Instead of installing one work or a series of works, Mr. Brainwash is simply taking the concept to its extreme and installing an entire career in one fell swoop. However, neither of these shows has the power of the Met “installation” nor most of the performative installations of the street art within its urban milieus. That is, none of the works in the film have much power as set pieces but gain significance in relation to their environments, which in turn attain new meaning by refocusing the attention on certain physical, material details and social constructions.

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The complex and playful dynamics involved in urban critique through street art in general but in Banksy’s in particular is why I found a recent attempt to “preserve” one of Banksy’s works in Detroit disconcerting. Presumably as part of his publicity tour for the film, Banksy (or his minions) has been installing his works in cities across the United States. He installed one such work in an abandoned debris- and ruin-filled lot in Detroit. (I’m not familiar with Detroit, but apparently the fact that the lot was the site of the Packard Plant has significance for a city left financially reeling even more than most during our current economic downturn.)

The Metro Times has a particularly good look at the significance of the environmental and social contexts, but The Detroit Free Press has provided a concise exposition of the events:

Discovered last weekend, the stenciled work shows a forlorn boy holding a can of red paint next to the words “I remember when all this was trees.” But by Tuesday, artists from the 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios, a feisty grassroots group, had excavated the 7-by-8-foot, 1,500-pound cinder block wall with a masonry saw and forklift and moved the piece to their grounds near the foot of the Ambassador Bridge in southwest Detroit.

Even if we resist cynicism and accept that it was not opportunism that led the gallery curators to resituate Bansky’s mural (a difficult assumption to make given that the owner mentions the address and operating hours of his gallery during his “defense” of this act as seen in the third clip below), and even if we ignore the technical or legal issues of ownership, it is still easy to take issue with this method of preservation. The gallery owners seem to take it as given that the best method of preservation is to uproot the work from its original site and transport it to a more secure and predictable one.

In actuality, this approach is only enabled or justified by denying any meaning to space or context, but also by insisting on a linear notion of time and a teleological notion progress, all of which undermine the ephemeral nature of Banky’s work. That is, the two most powerful sensations Banksy’s works create are the tensions between the existing built environment and his new insertion into it and the knowing that his works are at great risk of destruction. The first sensation is related to classic detournement, taking a familiar object and making it unfamiliar or taking a codified site and bestowing it with new meaning. This act also entails a larger ontological move of revealing the virtual through (or within) an actual object. The concrete block, the site, the city contain within themselves the capacity to create meaning anew. The second sensation introduces the ephemeral nature of time. Banksy correctly understands events to be fleeting, a revelation of constant change, as well as the creation of meaning through this qualitative state of flux. The gallery owners, on the other hand, see time, space and objects as static and eternal, the institutional codification of which will ensure meaning is properly attained.

That is, Banksy’s work decodes its environment, detourns its milieus, and only works insofar as it in turn remains ripe for further acts of deterritorialization. The event here, this constant state of becoming, signifies the potential for destruction as much as creation. Part of the appeal of street art is its potentially ephemeral nature. Street art is at constant risk of being destroyed by laws, by neighborhood groups, by vandals, by thiefs. While Banksy’s work certainly takes on new meaning in its new gallery context, it is a comparatively codified and sterile meaning. Banksy’s work in Detroit is certainly ripe for further deterritorialization, commentary and critique, but placing it in a gallery only reinforces the staid institutionalization  of the work and prevents it from having anything further to add to the urban development discourse. The criteria for judging a work within the gallery remains conventional and regards the dynamics of art history, theory, neoliberal economics and so forth. While the criteria for judging and experiencing the mural in its original context remain more elusive in their state of flux, this is a good reminder that criteria and expression need to be constantly decodified, questioned and returned to their creative geneses.

According the Free Press article, “[Gallery 555] Staff member Eric Froh said that while the painting’s meaning has shifted outside of the Packard plant, it retains an expressive power akin to Renaissance religious artifacts or antiquities uncovered by archeologists and now seen in museums. He also noted that the controversy has already become part of its accumulated meaning.” It’s ironic that the gallery owners mention Renaissance preservation as if the preservation of antiquities by Renaissance scholars, artists and archaeologists were a simple issue of maintaining the classical world in the state it once existed (or restoring it to such a point). In reality, preservers of antiquity during the Renaissance made choices about what to preserve, what parts of which items suited their world views and which were expendable. That is, preservation of the classical world, like all forms of preservation, always entails a simultaneous construction and destruction. David Karmon’s essay, “Renaissance Strategies to Protect the Colosseum: Selective Preservation and Reuse,” from the Winter 2005 (V2N2) issue of Future Anterior, provides a brief but compelling historical overview of the issues and processes at stake. (The essay can be downloaded here.)

This method or ontology of preservation in which events emerge as part of continual, qualitative change rather than eternal truths is also a means for creating tension within an art world in which avant-garde and street art alike have lost meaning. Works of street art, including video game graphics, appropriation of pop culture icons and company branding graphics have little inherent tension, and certainly not to the extent they did for the pop artists of the 1960s. In the end, the gallery owners were unwilling to put forth the effort necessary to address these issues, which in the end may have entailed an ostensibly passive (though still subversive) act of leaving the work alone. Digging up and transporting a block of concrete may have taken time and physical effort, but not nearly as much creative effort as leaving the mural to chance. This is also to contend that sometimes leaving a work in impending danger or destroying it physically is much different from absolute destruction. It is important not to conflate the two.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 11:10. It is filed under Art, Featured, Film and tagged with Banksy, Event, Preservation, Time, Urbanism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.