Graffiti in Paris, photo by Ciana Pullen

Graffiti in Paris, photo by Ciana Pullen 2014.

Exit Through the Gift Shop: Banksy

Mister Brainwash, limited edition print for a London show.
Mister Brainwash (aka Thierry), Marilyn-Spock.


[Alert: every spoiler possible plus a bad attitude] I guess the movie is old news to everyone else, but I just saw Exit Through the Gift Shop last night. Banksy directed this documentary about a French man living in LA who decided to make a documentary about world-famous street artists like Banksy, Space Invader, Shepard Fairey and (I reluctantly mention) Borf. But the French-LA man, Thierry, was not a film-maker, and when he showed his weird-ass experimental film to Banksy, who had trusted this man with his secret identity, etc., Banksy felt that his trust had been broken. So Banksy made a film about Thierry instead.

We see Thierry the humble roadie following the famous street artists, filming and helping and putting his ass on the line. We see his wife (!) and kids (!) at home worrying about how to make ends meet while Dad roams the streets of Paris with a bunch of punks. We see him explain how he got into filming with a sad and genuinely touching story about how his mom died when he was a kid and now he wants to capture everything because he worries it will escape him as did his mother. The street artists are interviewed, Thierry the lovable imp entertains us, and then Banksy reveals: Thierry had ripped them off, fooled them into thinking he was a filmmaker. I thought, "Oh Thierry, you stupid jackoff. Look at your stupid film." And then we see Thierry go and mount his own uppity art show. Suddenly he thinks he's an artist. He takes out a second mortgage on his house to hire local starving artists to make pieces based on his instructions. They make a LOT of artwork. He gets a show, and markets it. REALLY well. The guy is, as it turns out, a good showman, and a risky but confident businessman. "Oh Thierry," I thought, "You uppity Frenchman. You're practically stealing the work of REAL artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey and SELLING it at a massive profit! That's capitalism for ya--whoa, you just made over a million at your first show! Bastard. It's like the emperor's new clothes. Everyone around you knows it."

But at that moment I remembered, "Hey, Banksy directed this thing. Could it be a little... biased?" I considered the interviewees: wouldn't Banksy's friends share his opinion? Wouldn't low-paid artists resent their rookie boss? Wouldn't Thierry's fans sound like morons, since most random people off the streets of LA sound like morons? Hmm. And look how Banksy focuses on how Thierry (gasp!) didn't make the work with his own hands. And look how he shows Thierry thinking about (gasp!) making a living. Look how he's pretending to be an artist.

Wait a minute, though: didn't Thierry just spend years as a sort of apprentice to the best of the best? Hasn't he been making videos his entire life? And wasn't his work they just showed really witty and entertaining?

When the film opens Banksy explains that Thierry wanted to make a film about him but Thierry was just more interesting than Banksy, so the film was about Thierry instead. But now I'm thinking it was a little more malicious than that, more like, "Hey let's turn the camera back around on that traitor Thierry and see how he likes it!"

By the end of the film I had formed some opinions on both men. Thierry seems maddeningly irresponsible, charming, egotistical and full of joi de vivre. He seems like a real artist who thinks had about what he creates, like the director of a play. I enjoyed how he mixed graffiti with a very Warhol-looking pop-art language. He, perhaps unwittingly, mixed two bitingly ironic forms of art into a vernacular that is very appropriate and sincere for a man his age, his socioeconomic status, his town of LA. Wouldn't it deserve a big old eye-roll if a relatively well-off middle-aged white dad decided to go undercover and become a anarchy-touting graffiti artist?

And Banksy. That man is way too rich, famous and adored by the entire fucking world to play the underdog. The irony of a graffiti artist who uses other people's property without asking and makes it his own, having his precious trust broken by an fan who isn't as experienced as he let on is a little much. And he's counting on an audience of seventeen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds-at-heart who won't think too deeply about this. People who are just waiting to be told by someone they trust, "this is great art. This other stuff isn't." People who think they're rebellious but hold surprisingly conservative opinions: Artists should be too idealistically pure to make money. Art is only real art if the artist made it by hand. Ideas in art are fine, but only if contained in impressive displays of craftsmanship. Real artists are self-sacrificing geniuses of truth who look like a dictionary definition of a rebel. They're just waiting to be told that what they already believe is right. And they desperately want to be in on Banksy's joke.

At the end, both men seemed extremely common: adult children in the Neverland of an Art World already oversaturated with man-children.

Cool Graffiti Animation

http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm

Wow, this is so cool! I don't want to think about how much work this took.

Graffiti in Galleries

This past weekend notorious graffiti artist Ishmael enjoyed exposure at Kulture Klash 3 and his solo show opening at Eye Level Art in Charleston. This is his first show as a gallery artist working on canvas instead of illegal graffiti art as well as a major point of departure from recognizable graffiti to sinewy abstract forms that look, to me, to be inspired more by current graphic design than anything else. I thought the two influences, graffiti and commercial design, were interesting: two outside art forms, one delegitimized by money and commerce, the other deligitimized by lack thereof, both a form of branding and reinvention of oneself, both covering the outside world and signifying some sort of ownership over that small section of street. It seems natural that the two should meet in a gallery-- the traditional fault line between lands of Haves and Have-Nots.

In addition to artists like Keith Haring and Bansky, I'm reminded of a similar show by a notorious (and recently released from jail) graffiti artist and art student at the Corcoran who goes by "Borf," in Washington, DC., in 2006. It was a similar point of departure, from illegal art to big pop-punk canvases in a gallery. So was he selling out, or what? As a fellow art student at the time I thought so, but then again selling in a gallery was my eventual goal, too, so what does that make me? And of course I was happy for him because he was putting his reputation to use and getting, more or less, his "big break." But money definitely took the edge off his work. The undeniably raw, daring, desperate and authentic aspect of graffiti on the streets disappears once the work is in a gallery, no matter how much the artists and dealers try to preserve it.

So what's left? At both shows I saw intense dedication to craft, either through labyrinthine swirls of shape or immaculately detailed stencil work; brilliant color and strong graphic impact; sophisticated symbolism; political dissent; homage to the artist's community; and a sense of the artist's life as a mythic story complete with obscured origins, remembrance, and a prophecy of rebirth. Interesting, too, was the way the artist's sincerity shone through.

In my opinion, the currency of postmodernity is irony; is a work offensive, or ironically offensive? primitive or ironically so? traditional or merely quoting tradition in an ironic context? In effect, is it hopelessly old-fashioned and completely sincere, or has it broken through to a postmodern time, enlightened through obscurity and emboldened by doubt? I don't want to condemn this trend, in fact I think irony is a brilliant way of dealing with a post-Vietnam, post-Clement Greenberg, post-Joseph McCarthy world in which every inherited ideology must be regarded with doubt. But as all major trends are, it is limiting. Great masters of doubt like Richard Prince and Damien Hirst may be enjoying a zeitgeist, but plenty of artists still feel, deep-down, a starry-eyed belief in Genius, a modernist hope for the Universal Experience, a romantic quest for Truth.

In Borf's and Ishmael's work, as well as many graffiti artists, I get a different sense of the dynamic unity of pure sincerity with acrid anger. I wouldn't really classify either artist's work as angry work because they're full of symbols of hope and of secret worlds existing outside of reality that hint to me of religion and spirituality. But this straightforward human quality is always wrapped up in angry political dissent, bitter laughter at the betrayal of authority and society at large, and defiance that helps sincerity survive in reality. I think it's a really interesting contrast to the Art World's esteem of irony, one that will enable this work to hold its own in a contemporary gallery.

And what does a collector buy when they buy this work? Obviously, they're buying something they don't have; in a sense, I think many people buy an attitude or experience that their life doesn't afford them as a way of participating in and supporting a movement or a way of life they admire but cannot experience. So in this case, in addition to buying a very beautiful and sincere piece of work, they've bought into the defiance, subversiveness, and energy that undermines the very status that someone who can afford this art likely enjoys. It's an uneasy alliance, but maybe one with unexpected and worthwhile outcomes.