Phantom of graffiti: Banksy remains an intriguing phenomenon

Welcome to a world where an individual who has created some of the most succinct, effective and impactful art ever seen is someone who is never seen. He has been called the man who does not exist, a myth, and even invisible. He is written about in more publications, online and off, than anyone can keep track of, but there are three main facts that nobody knows about him — or if they do, they don’t tell: his real name, his date of birth and his birthplace, though he is believed to be British. He is known the world over as Banksy and his reputation as a graffiti artist, political activist, social commentator, film director and painter is indubitably fabulous. His invisibility has a mundane rationale attached: graffiti is considered a crime in a number of countries. Someone suggested that he is actually Blek le Rat, a graffiti artist who began working with stencils in Paris in 1981 and is often called the ‘father’ of the art, but that gentleman is more publicly known and was born in 1952 as Xavier Prou, which takes away some of the mystique of the man called Banksy.

He hides behind a paper bag, if he appears at all —  reportedly as a tall, lean and bearded man covered from head to toe in a trench coat — or ‘speaks’ from behind a wall of email. He was last ‘seen’ in a television interview in 2003, but may have been caught on CCTV in April, 2014 when he was installing graffiti in Bristol of a couple embracing while looking at their mobile phones. One theory is that he is a she, but a report in a British newspaper maintains that he is indeed a he who was once a student at a public school in Bristol. A few have suggested that Banksy is not one person, but a group or collective of seven artists that does pop-up work all over the world — a credible explanation, given the fact that one day a new mural could be found on the ruins of a house in the Gaza Strip and the next, on a door in a posh part of London. In a shocking exposé that some people may have believed, in October 2014 the Internet announced that Banksy had been arrested — a 39-year-old man called Paul William Horner was in police custody on charges of vandalism, conspiracy, racketeering and counterfeiting.

A wave of protest later, it was revealed that this dramatic story was fake. Banksy fans everywhere heaved a sigh of relief that they waited to see depicted in his typical style somewhere…anywhere.

But Banksy art, while overtly cute and friendly — like that fuzzy-faced kitten on the remains of someone’s home that had been destroyed by a targeted Israeli airstrike in February 2015 — has a message that is darker, often frightening. And the artist has his own explanation, given without revealing his identity via his publicist, someone obviously excellent at keeping secrets: “I don’t want to take sides, but when you see entire suburban neighbourhoods reduced to rubble with no hope of a future — what you’re really looking at is a vast outdoor recruitment centre for terrorists. And we should probably address this for all our sakes.” Banksy himself addressed it more directly in a two-minute video called Make this the year YOU discover a new destination, about his trip to the Gaza Strip. He blended cute with cutting, reflecting his kitten, with “I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website — but on the Internet people only look at pictures of kittens.” He comments pointedly on almost everything noteworthy, mostly from an anti-perspective, be it terrorism or Hurricane Katrina, global warming, the British royal family, child abuse by the church or The Simpsons.

Yet, this anonymous artist is known to play club-level football, has a publicist, a website, presumably friends and family, and a filmmaking gene, one that first expressed itself with Exit Through the Grit Shop, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. It was tagged the world’s first street art disaster movie and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary in January 2011. Did he attend the ceremony? Did he eat pizza with Ellen de Generes? What he did do was comment: “This is a big surprise…I don’t agree with the concept of award ceremonies, but I’m prepared to make an exception for the ones I’m nominated for. The last time there was a naked man covered in gold paint in my house, it was me.” Was he masquerading as one of the statuettes at the event perhaps? Long before that, Banksy had found fame and presumably — who knows! — fortune. He started as a freehand graffiti artist in the early 1990s as part of the Bristol underground scene and soon had an agent, a photographer called Steve Lazarides with whom he parted company in 2009.

Stencils became his bon mot by the turn of the century, perforce because the police had almost caught up with him when he was 18. “I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there …I realized I had to cut my painting time in half or give it up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stencilled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank when I realized I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high. As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.” 

His work became well known, anticipated, prized and exhibited in galleries in the UK and the USA, bought by celebrities like Christina Aguilera — who took a fancy to an original work of Queen Victoria portrayed as a lesbian — at astonishing prices. For that, Banksy had a report; on his website he used a new image of the auction house with people bidding on a picture that exclaimed, I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit. Over the years the ‘morons’ have made him Art’s Greatest Living Briton, an award he was given on May 21, 2007. And guess what! He didn’t appear to collect it.

The man that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg called a vandal — and many others, things rather more unmentionable — unveiled his newest creation on August 21 this year: a ‘theme park’, aka a large-scale installation he dubbed Dismaland in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset. It is staffed by a team that has been trained to be deadpan, miserable, aloof and…err….dismal, as unhelpful to visitors as is possible. Fake security — an installation of cardboard X-ray machines and objects ‘taken’ from visitors —  precedes very real checks before the revelation of what is possibly the world’s most depressing spectacle. Based on the happier version in California, the centrepiece is the fairytale castle, nastily festering, with the familiar icons of a happy childhood twisted to become dark and evil. Political comment is sharp and snarky and art makes its statements loud and ironically clear. Banksy’s weirdness is joined by the bizarre works of Damien Hirst, Jimmy Cauty, Bill Barminski, Dietrich Wegner, Brock Davis, Jessica Harrison and others. It may make viewers long for a world that is more familiar, sweeter, happier, but it does make them think about what is being said…and that, in all, is the aim of what Banksy does.

Maybe someday he will be seen — or not — in India, commenting on the delightful vagaries that this country is all about. But then, how would anyone know that it’s him?

The author is a Mumbai-based senior journalist