Banksy VS Mr. brainWash

I  just saw the film Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary about a documentary about street art.  In case you are unfamiliar with the movement, street art is a derivative of the graffiti culture, mainly focusing on manipulation of pop icons and stenciled, stickered or rolled/pressed onto city walls,alleyways, roofs, ceilings, bathrooms, etc.  The one that sticks(no pun intended) out in my mind since the early 90's is Shepard Fairey. His Obey campaign & Andre the Giant has a posse stickers have littered stop signs, brick walls & overpasses since I was a teenager in the 90's.  What I didn't realize since I saw this movie, was just how much it had grown from being an underground movement, connected with the main stream art circuit & how it intertwines between the two.                                                                                   

This movie rocks.  Having dabbled in graffiti & incorporating it into my painting, I found it interesting that there was so much footage of the underground artists risking life, limb & justice to spread their own brand of propaganda.  It gives you that inside look into those images we see in the corners, shadows, abandoned buildings & subways.
 

It's not selling anything.

It's not condescendingly telling you to something.

It's simply telling you their message.

What you take away from it is you're own.

You might share that with others or disagree, but it's   

 there for all, rather than confined in a space like a 

gallery. 

But wait, these artists are now doing gallery work & making a killing selling these at exhibitions. This is how they intertwine between underground(outside) & the galleries(inside).  

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So the basic premise of the movie is that there is a guy with a video camera scene, Thierry Guetta, who is the cousin of Invader , submerses himself into the street art/graffiti for eight years, taping everything.

Tiles done by Invader

All the while the street artists, like Obey, Banksy, & Invader are wondering what Guetta is going to do with all the footage.  Guetta ends up making a 90 minutes piece that screens more like material used for Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange, but on crack.  So, as the movie claims, Banksy turns the camera around on Theirry as he adopts the street art movement.  He starts putting up his own work outside, mainly in LA as Mr. Brainwash(MBW). In what seems like overnight, MBW creates a Warhol like factory of modern pop art, acquiring an army of workers & equipment.

MBW outside

 The film concludes with lamenting the acceptance of Guetta into the scene, for allowing & encouraging him to develop into MBW.  While getting rave reviews, thousands to attend his edgy exhibitions, and thousands more of dollars made from sold art, MBW's style was simply to merge existing techniques, fads & images into a cookie-cutter product line.  However, other street artists were also showing their work in galleries, selling higher end works to rich art collectors & dabbling in the mainstream art world. Shepard Fairey's opinion/promo for MBW on his Obey blog endorses MBW's work & ridicules it at the same time.  Banksy says in his last line of the film that MBW "broke the rules, but there aren't suppose to be any rules."  So the question is left at the end, is MBW just an natural extension of the movement or a rip-off artist who ran with an idea?

So this got me thinking, what's the deal?  Who's legit, who's a sell out, how can underground art and mainstream bleed into each other so much?  Sure they have always influenced each other, but artists always coexisted in both?  Then I realized that I had been struggling with this concept for most of my adult life, especially in my experience with art, music & culture(namely the the commercialization/branding of hip-hop/skating/graffiti culture)  Skateboards in Fine Art Galleries?  Fine Art Collectors acquiring Obey originals?   

After discussing these & other ideas/questions about this with the people I saw the film with, the underlining question is: what is more important, the means to making the art or the end product?  I do believe, personally, that it is the means to the end that is more important.  But I also honestly believe if your an artist-and you subscribe to "making it" by being popular & commercially viable-that at the end of the day it's how effective were you at spreading your message to as wide of an audience as possible.  For Banksy, it's being as subversive & controversial as possible; for MBW, it's a matter of overkill.

After being compelled to write my take on this film, I began to realize the controversy surrounding the two artists.  While the film does not elude to this, some are asking if MBW is merely a huge performance art experiment put on by Banksy.  He certainly has it in him to pull it off.

Banksy art outside
taken from website:
*Products not actually included, serving suggestion only. 
All images are made
available to download for personal

amusement only, thanks.

Banksy does not endorse or profit from

the sale of greeting cards, mugs, t-shirts,

photo canvases etc. Banksy is not on  

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter or Gaydar.

Banksy is not represented by any form
of commercial art gallery.

The question that interests me the the most is the how "Traditional" Graffiti differs from Stencil/Sticker Art.  Sure sticker/stencil art uses elements of tagging, pieces, wild style, etc., it definitely diverges from the free form.  By using pop culture images, it is graying the line between mainstream & underground.  Wild Style on the contrary creates it's own standards of shapes, lines & even language/script.  Rarely do you see free form graffiti utilize images from other art directly.  This doesn't make it better or worse, just different.

It's certainly easier to make copies of a drawing or design, especially one made in the Adobe Suite, turn it into stickers or huge posters then poster them up everywhere.  But does the ease of this method make it less legitimate or more effective?  Does it do both?  Is it a paradoxical art that uses the methods of commercial advertising with the content of graffiti/underground art?

It's not impossible to spread your pieces, throw-ups, bombs lines as far & wide as stencils/stickers.  It just takes more time and dedication.  You also need more space.  Most of them you won't see in the places that stencils/stickers are.  For these, you need a train yard, old warehouse, dumpy truck, or abandoned building.   You might see them out & about if you look carefully.

That's the difference, because you can stick or stencil quicker & more discretely you can put them in more heavily trafficked areas.  I can only conclude then that graffiti artists delve into both.

When they want to work on their own, more involved creations they work on pieces & productions then find a spot where they can work for awhile.

When they get a "campaign" going, they arm themselves with stickers, stencils & roll-up posters, hit the streets.  They litter walls, street signs, post boxes, subways, anything outside with a surface.  It gets their message out clearly & directly.  In the end, isn't that what we all want?  To have our message be distributed to as many people as we can.



Local Scene:
Oakland/SF Street Art Blog

Media Dissent