The film blog All These Wonderful Things has an interview up with Banksy about Exit Through The Gift Shop. Despite the usual unbelievable claims like “I paint my own pictures” and “I’m not clever enough to have invented Mr. Brainwash” (Okay so maybe that’s half true, but I’m sorry there’s no way Banksy and Shepard just let that show happen with no involvement, as seems to be shown in the film), this is definitely one of less jokey and comparatively transparent Banksy interviews out there.
Here’s what I found to be the most out-of-character and insightful comment:
I think its pretty clear that film is the pre-eminent art form of our age. If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel. Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it.
Also, this is pretty much sums up the film for me:
If we’ve done our job properly with EXIT, then the best part of the entire movie is the conversation in the car park afterwards.
After today, I’m going to try to avoid posting or commenting about this whole Blu/Deitch/MOCA seriesofblunders until at least April because I think I’ve pretty much said I feel needs to be said. After having a number of discussions with some people I respect, some who agree and some who disagree with what I’ve said in the past about all this and who’s insights helped me to better strengthen and develop my own opinions, and with some new statements and facts coming out, it seemed worth writing a bit more about all this. Anyway, the actual post with my thoughts on all of this…
I think that those of us on different sides of this debate disagree less than some people realize. Mostly, we seem to see the responsibilities and rights of a museum differently.
What I’ve seen from all this are the difficulties of bringing street art into a museum context. It is important that art history and museums recognize the street art and graffiti movements, but it isn’t easy to do. A show of only work on canvas or screenprints or other “gallery art” clearly wouldn’t be a street art show, but the Tate Modern missed an opportunity by keeping things outdoors. So it seems that the solution would be a show that mixes outdoor projects with a gallery component, like MOCA is planning to do in April. Except that a museum cannot commission street art. They can commission public art by street artists, and there is a difference. Public art, such as that commissioned by MOCA, comes with certain responsibilities and considerations that do not exist in street art.
That’s why festivals like FAME, Primary Flight and Nuart are so important. Their focus is on bringing street art and graffiti to an area, and they don’t have the same considerations of museums. A lot of what goes up at FAME still goes up illegally and without anyone’s permission. While museum exhibitions are important for securing street art the place that many people believe it deserves in art history, those mural projects are of at least equal importance for actually bring new street art into the public space.
Blu says he was censored. I respect Blu for not bowing to the concerns of working in a museum context and not subjecting himself to “self-censorship,” but public art involves what Blu would term self-censorship. Until Blu’s statement, I had been under the impression, now obviously incorrect, that Blu might be returning to paint another mural for MOCA. That made me feel less upset about his wall getting buffed. Unfortunately, Blu will not be returning. It’s too bad, because as I’ve said before, a mural by him could have been a highlight of MOCA’s street art exhibition, but I respect Blu for sticking to his principles.
That doesn’t mean that Deitch was wrong to remove the mural though. It was a difficult decision well but within his rights as a curator and museum director. It is not the decision that I wish he had made and I highly doubt that Deitch took any joy in his decision either, but it may have been the right move for the exhibition and more importantly I can see why it would be the right move for the museum as a whole.
The (admittedly imperfect) analogy that I’ve come up with for this situation goes something like this: A curator at MoMA is putting on a show and wants to include a new painting by Murakami. Somehow through some crazy miscommunication with Murakami’s studio, a painting arrives that the curator hates or for whatever reason cannot be included in the exhibition. The curator screwed up. He should have communicated his thoughts more clearly to get something closer to what he wanted to include in the show. What does the curator do? He sends the painting back to Murakami and doesn’t include it in the show. That’s part of his job as curator.
Unfortunately at MOCA, that situation played out in public and in the artwork had to be destroyed instead of being sent back. MOCA removed a mural that they had not approved to have painted (they asked Blu to paint a mural, but mistakenly did not approve a specific design beforehand) in the first place. In that sense, I can certainly appreciate the argument that MOCA buffed a piece of street art, and that’s ironic and not desirable.
Probably the person who has expressed his balance of support for Deitch with disappointment in the destruction of the mural best is Shepard Fairey (and I’ve used some of his ideas in this post). Here’s some of what he said to The LA Times:
However, a museum is a different context with different concerns. It would be tragic for the break through of a street art /graffiti show at a respected institution like MOCA to be sabotaged by public outcry over perceived antagonism or insensitivity in Blu’s mural. Graffiti is enough of a contentious issue already. The situation is unfortunate but I understand MOCA’s decision. Sometimes I think it is better to take the high road and forfeit a battle but keep pushing to win the war. Street art or graffiti purists are welcome to pursue their art on the streets as they always have without censorship. I think that though MOCA wants to honor the cultural impact of the graffiti/street art movement, it only exists in its purist form in the streets from which it arose.
No matter how hard they try or how much some people wish this were not true, institutions are not the streets. Once upon a time, Banksy put this very well on the side of the National Theatre in London:
I’m about to get my virtual ass kicked with this post. This might get more negative comments than anything I’ve ever written before. I know that. Any yet, here I am.
On Thursday, word hit the internet that Blu had painted a mural on The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in LA but that it had been whitewashed. On Saturday, Vandalog was the first site to publish any official comments from MOCA. And late on Monday, The LA Times has finally published some substantive comments from museum director Jeffrey Deitch about the whole series of events.
Here’s a selection from the article:
Reached by phone while traveling, MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch confirmed that he made the decision because the mural was “insensitive” to the community.
“This is 100% about my effort to be a good, responsible, respectful neighbor in this historic community,” Deitch said. “Out of respect for someone who is suffering from lung cancer, you don’t sit in front of them and start chain smoking.
“Look at my gallery website — I have supported protest art more than just about any other mainstream gallery in the country,” he added. “But as a steward of a public institution, I have to balance a different set of priorities — standing up for artists and also considering the sensitivities of the community.”
He rejects the talk of censorship. “This doesn’t compare to David Wojnarowicz. This shouldn’t be blown up into something larger than it is,” he says, describing a curator’s prerogative to pick and choose what goes into a show. “Every aspect of the show involves a very considered discussion.”
The unfortunate thing, he acknowledges, was the timing, as the artist began the mural while Deitch was out of town earlier this month for the art fair in Miami. “Blu was supposed to fly out the second-to-last week in November, so we could have conversations about it in advance,” Deitch said. “But he said he had to change his flights, so he ended up working in isolation without any input.”
When he returned from Miami and saw the mural, then more than halfway completed, Deitch said he made the decision to remove it very quickly, unprompted by complaints. “There were zero complaints, because I took care of it right away.” He asked Blu to finish the work so it could be documented as part of the exhibition and appear in the accompanying catalog.
I’ve got to stand by Deitch 100% on this. Besides the very legitimate reasons he mentions for removing the mural, his appointment to MOCA was a very controversial one. We don’t live in a perfect world, and this was a pragmatic move which takes into consideration the larger concerns of MOCA and the LA community. Yes, this whole thing was a poorly managed series of unfortunate events resulting in a great artist’s work being destroyed (after, what I assume was extensive documentation which is how the vast majority of street art and probably art in general is viewed these days), but Deitch made the right move for the wider museum. Things shouldn’t have gotten out of hand, and they did, but Deitch has acknowledged that. Look at the situation from Deitch’s perspective when he showed up in LA to a half-finished mural that he knew would not work.
Deitch made a curatorial, respectful (of the LA community) and politically pragmatic decision to remove a work from an exhibition that he had not approved for inclusion in the show. If he had seen a sketch beforehand (as he should have), let the wall get painted and then removed it, this would be a very different discussion. Although some have suggested that this signals disaster ahead for his upcoming street art exhibition in April, I am not so sure. Sebastian at Unurth and I have a friendly bet going based on the average of reviews of MOCA’s street art show in the LA Times, Unurth and Vandalog: If the reviews are positive, he buys drinks next time we see each other and if the reviews are negative, I have to buy the drinks. So we’ll see how that turns out in a couple of months.
The street art community has been in a bit of a hubbub over a mural by Blu being painted over less than 24 hours after it was completed. Until now, MOCA, the museum that commissioned Blu to paint the mural on one of their walls, had stayed silent on why the mural was removed. In my post I tried not to jump to conclusions, but given what’s going on at the Smithsonian and the silence from MOCA, it was hard not to speculate and assume the worst: pointless censorship. Some people also speculated that the whole thing was a preplanned stunt. Luckily, it sounds like all this was just a series of unfortunate events, but with a reasonable explanation.
I’ve just received word from MOCA as to what happened:
MOCA commissioned Blu, one of the world’s most outstanding street artists to create a work for the north wall of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.
The Geffen Contemporary building is located on a special, historic site. Directly in front the north wall is the Go For Broke monument, which commemorates the heroic roles of Japanese American soldiers, who served in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, and opposite the wall is the LA Veterans’ Affairs Hospital. The museum’s director explained to Blu that in this context, where MOCA is a guest among this historic Japanese American community, the work was inappropriate. MOCA has invited Blu to return to Los Angeles to paint another mural.
Certainly not the way you want mural projects to go, but if Blu understands and respects MOCA’s decision enough to paint another mural there, then I do too. This was not the pointless censorship that it has been painted to be by the internet, it is being respectful to the community that would be living with this art every day.
I heard the most wonderful news recently: Blu was about to paint a huge mural in LA. This week, that’s exactly what he did. Blu was invited to paint the wall by MOCA, the museum where Jeffrey Deitch is about to put on a majorstreet art exhibition. In fact, the mural was painted on one of the walls of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. A mural by Blu would probably be, for me, a highlight of that exhibition. Unfortunately, less than a day after the mural was finished (and yes, it had been finished), it has been completely painted over by MOCA workers. What’s going on here? So far, nobody really knows. MOCA has declined to comment.
Unurth has more images, GOOD offers some speculation and LA Downtown News has a bit to add to the story. Most interesting given the content of Blu’s mural, LA Downtown News notes that the mural faced a Veterans Administration building and was also within sight of a war memorial. No evidence to say whether either of those things factored in to why the mural was removed though.
The buffing of this mural is especially worrying to me given the current controversy at the National Portrait Gallery about the removal of controversial art. Hopefully there will be more answers about what is going on in here in the next few days.
For a more detailed background to this story, check out theseposts on Hyperallergic.
Recently, a video, Fire in my belly, by David Wojnarowicz was removed from an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in DC after the religious right got upset about the content of the video. The video is about the death of a lover who died of complications resulting from AIDS. The particularly “offensive” footage is few seconds of ants crawling over a statue of Jesus on the cross, but it’s also been suggested that the objections to the piece stem from anti-gay sentiments. Whatever the exact reason, the censorship is some right-wing bullshit that shouldn’t be tolerated by the artistic community.
How this story sort of relates to street art is this: On Saturday, two artists went to the National Portrait Gallery and began playing Fire in my belly over an iPad outside the exhibit. This video shows what happened:
I’ve been out of the loop and stuck in libraries lately (and then in Miami for the weekend), and that’s led to me miss posting about a lot of things. I’ve got some catching up to do, so here’s the start of that:
EPOS 257built a fence in a public square in Prague. A. It reminds me of Richard Sera’s amazing Tilted Arc and B. Seems like a great way to screw with the local bureaucratic government. I guess there’s the important question left though of if the public actually thought about anything when looking at the work. I’m hoping that some did, but perhaps it was too nondescript to provoke much thought.
Ending on a very sad note, Brooklyn Street Art has received word from Faust that his friend and fellow graffiti writer Sure has died while serving the USA in Afghanistan.
Wild Hackney is a new project by some of the same people who helped to save Roa’s rabbit, which Hackney council in London recently almost painted over. I’m not quite sure what to think of Wild Hackney. Here’s some of how the project is described on its website:
The Wild Hackney project was created our of concern for the sanitisation of our neighbourhoods.
…
Our first campaign is to lobby Hackney Council about a new approach to graffiti that goes beyond paint it black by providing them with a policy written by local residents.
While I certainly like the idea of more lenient graffiti removal policies, I’m worried that Wild Hackney could turn into judges of what constitutes good street art; what should be preserved and what should be buffed. Without knowing the people making those decisions, it’s a tough idea to get behind. And of course, no street art fan wants their city walls covered in perspex frames. Street art is ephemeral, and that’s part of its nature. With any luck though, Wild Hackney could give property owners more rights in regard to commissioning murals and keeping up street art that was placed on their property, whether it was painted legally or not.
Wild Hackney has a meeting on December 2nd to hash out some ideas for the campaign further. It will be at the Fellows Court Community Centre from 6:30pm.
Wow. It’s actually Friday night already? This week went by really fast. I think I’ve been sleeping too much. Well, while I was sleeping, these things nearly slipped me by:
A film is being made about The Underbelly Project, and they are looking for reactions from the public. This Sunday, New Yorkers get have their reactions (positive or negative) on film. More info on the film’s website. I’ve been interviewed for this a couple of times, and I can’t wait to see the finished film.
Shepard Fairey is guest-editing the latest issue of PAPER Magazine. Great price for an art/culture magazine by the way: I just realized that a two-year subscription to PAPER Magazine is $15! Juxtapoz costs more than that per year just for a digital subscription (more issues per year though)!
Graffoto are raving about Mantis‘ solo show in Hackney Wick. Honestly, I saw a few photos in the preview and thought something along the lines of “What? These are paintings and they aren’t funny or clever and they aren’t amazing. This isn’t what I love about Mantis at all!” Well I stand corrected. While I still think a lot of the paintings are pretty unappealing, there are some great drawings and even a nice painting or two. The man can draw!
People have been tagging up Barry McGee’s wall of tags in New York. Not writers, but just regular people. As beautiful as that wall was when it was first painted, I love that more people are writing on it. I guess the existence of the tags and a while background is sort of inviting average people to interact.
The week’s not up yet though, and I’ve committed to doing at least one useful thing before it is: Tomorrow I’m going to try using my kitchen for the first time since going to university. Wish me luck…
While the police are taking a hard line on keeping people away — “This is not an art gallery; this is completely illegal,” one officer said — the paintings in what the artists called the Underbelly Project are likely to live on. Subway officials said they had no plans to paint over the artwork, even if they sincerely hoped nobody ever got to see it again.
“We have no intention of disturbing the works,” said Deirdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit.
Ms. Parker noted that the fiscally challenged transit agency would not want to devote resources to restoring a space almost entirely unseen by the riding public. “It’s in complete darkness and not really at all visible to anyone,” she said.
Of course, graffiti writers have already tagged over a good deal of the station…
