Banksy (19 page)

Surveying all this from the biplane on high was a new and improved version of the prisoner who escaped from Guantanamo and was last seen in Disneyland. When the life-size orange-suited doll
first arrived in Bristol, he was placed on a bench in the museum. But the exhibition evolved as the weeks went on, and soon someone in the Banksy team had the bright idea of putting him in the
pilot’s seat of the biplane where he could see and be seen.

The New York animatronics which had started the whole idea of the exhibition had been imported wholesale and given their own space, christened Unnatural History, in the rear hall. Next to
Tweetie Bird, the swimming fish sticks, the sleeping leopard skin and the rest of the cast, the museum’s main exhibition space held a mocked-up version of Banksy’s messy studio. The
studio came complete with spray paint, stencils from some of his work and preliminary drawings of other work, used stencils of his tag, drawers of a filing cabinet labelled ‘good
ideas’, ‘bad ideas’, ‘other
people’s ideas’ and ‘pornography’. A pixellated – and thus frustratingly unrecognisable
– self-portrait of the artist sat on an easel opposite the artist’s chair with a knitted cardigan reading THUG FOR LIFE hanging off the back of the chair. (The cardigan had a pedigree:
in his Los Angeles show he had painted two grannies looking a picture of happiness as they sat in their armchairs knitting contentedly. One was knitting a cardigan with PUNKS NOT DEAD on it, the
other was knitting THUG FOR LIFE.) All around were the products of his real studio, a whole new array of Banksys; in total there were just over 100 exhibits in the show. But while these were the
bulk of the Banksys on display, there were many more dotted around the museum. As Banksy said at the time, ‘Some of the fake historical relics I’ve inserted among Bristol’s
permanent collection should be entertaining – you can’t tell what’s truth and what’s fiction. It’ll be like walking through a real-life Wikipedia.’

Simon Cook remembers he was wandering around on the last day of the exhibition ‘because I wanted to get a final look at it. And up in the galleries I was watching people looking for
Banksys, finding them eventually, but also looking at our permanent collection and not realising we had a Renoir and other major artists.’ Yes, the museum has always had ‘depth’,
but it needed either a certain dedication or Banksy to discover that depth.

There was everything from a dildo nestling amongst the stalagmites and a plastic salt shaker sitting among the Reserve Collection, to a muzzled lamb in amongst the World Wildlife and a hash pipe
among the Pottery and Ceramics. Even the gypsy caravan had been got at: one of its wheels had been clamped and an eviction notice stuck on the front door. Banksy was clearly having great fun.
Looking at these stunts on the web reminded me
of my days as a prep school boy when we were taken on an outing to the local museum and got so bored that a couple of us
resorted to swapping around all the exhibit captions, making a nonsense of the whole thing. Banksy received nothing but admiration, while I was hauled up before the headmaster and beaten for it a
couple of days later.

More seriously, a whole string of altered paintings were hidden amongst the museum’s old masters. These interventions ranged from the Virgin Mary with child and iPod, to a rat
‘improving’ one of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings and a couple ‘dogging’ amidst a typical nineteenth-century English landscape scene. My personal favourite is his
version of Millet’s
The Gleaners
, painted in 1857 and showing three peasant women exercising their right to hunt for any bits of grain left over in the fields after the harvest. One of
the women had been cut out of the canvas (it’s a copy, the original is in the Musée D’Orsay) and was sitting on the corner of the frame having a fag break. This was renamed,
unconvincingly, as
Agency Job
, but it brought yet another layer of humanity to this haunting picture. Like most of the other Banksys hidden among the Old Masters, it was attributed to
‘Local Artist’.

Was anything that Banksy wanted to put up just a step too far for the museum? ‘There were a few things,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘It was very little really, which was quite
surprising. There was very little where we said no, that’s not appropriate, and it was negotiated through as you would with any artist.’

The whole exhibition was mounted amidst great secrecy. Notices were stuck on the doors saying ‘Closed for essential maintenance’ and although the Banksy team had been constructing
exhibits off the site for months, they had just two days to bring everything in and set it up. Anyone at the museum not yet in on
the secret was told it was closed for
filming. ‘It was like a big sort of
Changing Rooms
,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘We shut and it all came in. The only reason we could do that was because they had the manpower and
finances. They were incredibly professional. I am used to putting on exhibitions but it was done in such a large and accelerated fashion. It was a bit like working with a film crew.’

In television interviews at the time, she was always asked if she had met Banksy and she always gave the same answer with a big smile on her face. She knew he had been in the museum, that he had
planned the show in detail. But when asked, ‘So you don’t know which one of the crew he is?’ she replied, ‘No, we still don’t, and that’s part of the real
charm.’

The hype surrounding the exhibition was the least impressive part of it. The show was improbably titled
Banksy versus the Bristol Museum
and described as an ‘audacious heist’,
as though Banksy had suddenly become a true vandal and gatecrashed the museum, when in fact the whole thing had been planned down to the last detail of the pre-show party and the public relations
campaign that went with it. The
Bristol Evening Post
described how two of Banksy’s ‘PR people’ had arrived at the newspaper on a ‘hush hush visit’ a couple of
days before the show opened and ‘giggled excitedly’ as they described what was about to hit Bristol – hardly a ‘heist’.

But even more revealing was the contract that Banksy had the council sign, which was later released – with key sections blanked out – after a freedom of information request. To be
fair to Banksy, this contract revealed that he had charged only £1 for the exhibition and that he agreed to give one work to the museum (he actually gave two: the paint-pot angel and an
intricate scale model of Jerusalem made in olive wood, which he bought and to which
he added 284 soldiers and one terrorist). Given he was paying for virtually everything
except the insurance of the exhibits, he was entitled to call the tune – which he very certainly did.

Buried amidst all the memos, the rewrites and the rewrites of the rewrites there are odd little titbits to be found in this contract. In the list of exhibits needed for the insurers, for
example, it was possible to discover some but not all of the secrets of the animatronics.
Tweety Pie
was made of marine ply and Jesmonite (a solvent-free resin). The swimming fish sticks
were constructed of iroko hardwood and birch-faced ply. In another report which ended up online with the contract documents it was clear that the fish sticks were causing problems for the
museum’s Health and Safety Working Group. ‘Concentrated chemical required to keep water clear in fish tanks has been risk assessed. Chemical now locked in plant room – large
container to be taken away as only small amount will be required.’ The ‘trip hazards around the ice cream van’ were also being monitored – it was all a far cry from an
aerosol can and a wall.

But for the most part there were just pages and pages of legalese – there was the main agreement, plus a separate confidentiality agreement for the council to sign and another for
individuals to sign. The museum agreed to use ‘all reasonable endeavours’ to ensure that the ‘privacy and anonymity of the artist and those working with him is preserved . . . and
acknowledges that such obligation includes an agreement not to store, distribute or in any way seek to make profit from the sale or release of CCTV footage to any third party’. If the museum
was forced to make any disclosure of CCTV footage because of legal requirements ‘it shall obscure the faces of all personnel including the artist’.

As for the press, Banksy was again in complete control: ‘the
Museum shall obtain written approval over all publicity, media, print and website information relating
to the exhibition.’ He wanted to protect his identity from the press, but certainly not his presence. All media relations were to be undertaken by Banksy’s PR agent, who would supply
the press with any images needed. The museum merely had to provide the staff for the press call. But perhaps the arrangements for the private view of the exhibition, all laid out in great detail,
demonstrated most vividly how far he had come from his days as a Bristol vandal. There were to be three sessions and reasonably enough, since Banksy could hardly apply for it himself, the museum
had to be responsible for obtaining the licences for alcohol and music. In addition the museum had to submit a list of its guests twenty-one days in advance (the contract did not say what would
happen if Banksy did not like any of them). Six hundred guests could be invited to each session. The first session was from 4 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. and for this session the museum had the right to
select all the guests. The second session was from 4.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. and here Banksy could select 500 guests and the museum 100. The hours of the third session – party time – were
from 7.30 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. and Banksy was entitled to select
all
the guests. No guesses as to which session everyone wanted to be invited to. Some old friends arrived at the museum to find
that with their correctly coloured wristband came a note from Banksy thanking them for their silence over the years – but rule by wristband disintegrated somewhat as the night wore on.

But this control-freak contract should not be allowed to drown the fact that the show was an absolute triumph. In July 2008 the museum had 20,861 visitors; in July 2009, the year of Banksy, the
total was 111,285. With just under 4000 visitors a day it was the second most visited exhibition in Britain in 2009 in
The Art
Newspaper
’s annual attendance
survey, just beaten to the top by the Saatchi Gallery’s The Revolution Continues: New Art from China
.
Banksy’s team had warned the museum that they knew from past experience they
were going to be inundated. ‘We couldn’t even envisage what that meant actually, if I am frank with you,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘I think it surprised everyone and we had to
manage it.’ The queues sometimes stretched for three or four hours. Simon Cook says, ‘I used to feel quite embarrassed driving past.’ The museum had briefly considered timed
ticketing, but Banksy had been against it anyway – the idea of kicking out hardcore fans on the hour every hour would have been hard to stomach. At one point in the queue you had to have your
hand stamped but some were so desperate they managed to forge this, forcing the museum to come up with a couple of rather more complicated stamps.

The
Bristol Evening Post
‘Souvenir Edition’ included a map of where the visitors had travelled from – Uruguay and Taiwan being two of the more unexpected countries. But
perhaps most important was the fact that a large proportion of the visitors had never been to the museum before, or had not visited it in many years – Banksy was drawing in a new crowd.
However, when the visitors were categorised in the way that statisticians delight in categorising, the great majority of them were ‘wealthy achievers’, ‘urban prosperity’ or
‘comfortably off’, so even this, the most populist exhibition imaginable – and free at that – could not quite reach the audience that Banksy might have hoped for.

The museum did ask if they could extend the exhibition – without success; all they could do was extend the opening hours for its last two weeks. The following summer they put on Art from
the New World, described as ‘a big brash exhibition of the new
American art scene’. It came with the burlesque queen Dita Von Teese at the opening party and a
huge fifteen-foot-high double-scoop ice cream cone in the front hall, created by Buff Monster, just to try and show that the museum would never be quite the same again. The year after that, they
reverted to more familiar but very popular territory, with an exhibition of the late Beryl Cook’s work. But without the magic missing ingredient, these exhibitions were never going to have
quite the same pulling power.

‘I thought it was a real gift that he gave us actually,’ says Kate Brindley. ‘He could have worked with anyone from the Guggenheim to MOMA in New York but he chose to work with
the Bristol Museum. I didn’t do any of the work. I allowed him through the door, that’s all I did. People enjoyed it, they came out smiling, saying “I’ve never seen the
collections before, I’ve never seen the museums before.” They loved it.’

When Baron Winterstoke gave the museum to the people of Bristol he hoped it would provide them with both ‘instruction and enjoyment’. Among the comments left by visitors was one from
Vera Flemina: ‘Last week I came to see the Banksy Exhibition. I am 87 years old: I can’t recall when I last had such a wonderful experience. I was happy, my ancient batteries re-charged
(hopeful) . . . Perhaps I will go to Glastonbury next year.’ How much instruction they gained from Banksy is arguable, but there is no doubt that more than 300,000 visitors got all the
enjoyment the Baron could have possibly hoped for.