Banksy Profile (NYT)

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/arts/design/16bank.html

September 16, 2006

In the Land of Beautiful People, an Artist Without a

Face

By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 15 — As a metaphor for problems

that people are uncomfortable talking about, “the

elephant in the room” is not the most original.

But then, few people actually put the elephant in the

room, paint it red and adorn it with gold

fleurs-de-lis to match the brocade wallpaper, and then

dare viewers not to talk about it.

Banksy, perhaps Britain’s most notorious graffiti

artist and public prankster, has done just that with

“Barely Legal,” a new show at an industrial warehouse

in Los Angeles, as part of what his spokesman says is

his first large-scale exhibition in the United States.

Such a show — complete with advance publicity, an

opening party with valet parking and Hollywood

glitterati, including Jude Law and his posse, and

sales of numbered prints at $500 each — would seem to

go against Banksy’s rebel image.

“Yes, there probably is some contradiction,” Banksy’s

spokesman, Simon Munnery, said on Thursday in an

interview at the warehouse in a commercial district

east of downtown. (Details on the exhibition site can

be found at www.banksy.co.uk.)

“It depends on what he does with the money, right?”

Mr. Munnery added. “Maybe he makes more art. Maybe

he’s getting more ambitious.”

Banksy makes a habit of not revealing himself in

public, a practice that is part survival technique and

part publicity ploy, but he has shown projects in the

United States. Most notoriously, he carried his own

artworks into four New York institutions last year —

the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of

Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of

Natural History — and hung them on the gallery walls,

next to other paintings and exhibits, without guards’

taking notice. He has performed similar stunts at

museums in Britain.

Earlier this month Banksy surreptitiously placed a

blow-up doll dressed as a Guantánamo detainee inside

the fence of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at

Disneyland, where it apparently remained for more than

an hour before park officials shut down the ride and

removed it. Recently he also smuggled 500 altered

versions of Paris Hilton’s new CD into record stores

around Britain and placed them in the racks.

All of those stunts are featured in a video that loops

continuously at the show, which also includes two

large rooms displaying stenciled images on canvas,

sculptures and mixed-media productions, like the panel

van with the notice on the back, “How’s My Bombing?”

and an 800 number that links to a Navy recruiting

office in Phoenix.

All of this is arranged around a sort of

mock-self-loathing, elephant-in-the-room theme, or, as

Banksy puts it in a handout: “1.7 billion people have

no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people

live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of

people are made to feel physically sick by morons at

art shows telling them how bad the world is but never

actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free

glass of wine?”

Many of the pieces have been seen before, either on

the streets of London and other cities, in books of

Banksy’s work or at his Web site. Many comment on war,

like the stark image of a television camera crew

filming a child amid ruins as the producer holds back

aid workers to allow for just one more shot.

With seemingly so much to say, and being so clearly

desirous of an audience, surely Banksy would show up

at his first big exhibition in the United States,

then?

Perhaps he’s the gaunt chap over there, with the nose

ring and the “Tagger Scum” T-shirt, touching up the

gold fleurs-de-lis on the elephant. Or is he Mr.

Munnery, who is also a British comedian with a

penchant for rhetorical questions (“Why are some

people dying of obesity, and others are starving to

death?”) and who, in fact, looks quite a bit like the

mysterious hatted and bearded fellow who appears in

Banksy’s videos?

“I’m not him,” said Mr. Munnery, who is credited for

“additional inspiration and assistance” in one of

Banksy’s books, titled “Cut it Out,” which was

distributed to journalists as part of the promotion

for the new show.

The Guardian, the British newspaper, has identified

Banksy as Robert Banks, an artist from Bristol. Some

commentators have identified him as Stephen Lazarides,

a photographer who set up Banksy’s Web site and whose

gallery is the sales agent for the Banksy prints at

the show here.

Mr. Munnery would not divulge the artist’s identity.

Banksy “requests the right to remain silent,” he said.

“He insists on it.”

But the artworks are Banksy’s alone, he said. “And I

do know that some of them took literally hours to

paint.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company