TIME OUT LONDON has just released a “collectors item” issue featuring a cover story BANKSY interview with matching poster to boot (order HERE). Have a read:

AN INTERVIEW WITH BANKSY
By Ossian Ward | Time Out London, Mon Mar 1 2010

Reclusive street artist, Banksy, comes out of the shadows to tell Time Out about his notoriety, ongoing graffiti wars and increasing the value of London property. But not to plug his new film.

Many people claim to have done so, but I have indeed met – albeit accidentally – the real Banksy, an unremarkable, medium-build man wearing glasses, at an East End graffiti jam a few years ago. However, direct access to him is strictly limited nowadays. Banksy nevertheless agreed to an exclusive interview to settle some scores and to create a brand new piece of work for Time Out’s cover, in which he revisits some of his classic pieces featuring royal Foot Guards variously pissing or spraying graffiti on walls. After lots of waiting and furtive messaging, the trail having gone cold many times, he responded to our questions from his bomb-proof bunker. But like Kirk Douglas, I had to make sure that this really was Spartacus first…

Is this definitely you? After all, some hacks have been duped into unofficial interviews with imposters, naming no names (the Guardian Guide)…
I wish you were talking to an imposter. I don’t have much of a personality, so it’s difficult to “be” one. Also I want to talk up the film, but I don’t want to talk about it – I’m worried I might ruin the ending. Can we just run a blank page that people can draw on?

Can you at least say why you’ve dubbed this the first ever street-art ‘disaster movie’? Does that mean it’s your last film?
I consider this whole experience to be a disaster on many levels. I think it will be known as my first movie, the one that didn’t lead to a career in filmmaking.

First came the art, then your move into animatronics, then a feature film… does that make you the next Walt Disney?
I’d never thought about it like that. I guess opening a giant theme park for vandals would be next. I was at a holiday camp when ìLicense to Illî by the Beastie Boys came out. Practically every kid had a VW badge hanging around their necks that they’d stolen off a car in town. I remember the police raided the camp and the mayor came and gave us a stern lecture by the paddling pool.

Now that your mugshot has appeared in the paper, do you get recognised on the street?
I know a couple of years ago a bloke claimed he was Banksy to get into a nightclub in Shoreditch and when word went around he got a kicking off some other graffiti writers. It’s in my interest not to comment on any of the photos doing the rounds.

What’s this battle with Robbo and Drax all about, then?
I didn’t deliberately start a battle with Robbo – have you seen the size of him? In the ’90s him and Drax were infamous enough that we’d even heard about them in Bristol. The truth is I didn’t paint over a piece that said “Robbo”, I painted over a piece that said “nrkjfgrekuh”. But either way, I don’t buy into the idea a wall “belongs” to a certain writer, or anyone else for that matter.

Traditional graffiti writers have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn’t become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do. If you’re the type who gets sentimental about people scribbling over your stuff, I suggest graffiti is probably not the right hobby for you.

You are accused by the graffiti community of selling them out? How do you plead?
It’s hard to know what “selling outî means – these days you can make more money producing a run of anti-McDonald’s posters than you can make designing actual posters for McDonald’s.

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.” Click HERE to continue reading at Time Out London…

BANKSY IN “THE WORLD’S FIRST STREET-ART DISASTER MOVIE”
By Elanor Mills | SUNDAY TIMES, February 28, 2010
He’s the most successful graffitist ever, the elusive outsider who has become our unlikeliest national treasure. Now we are about to glimpse him in ‘the world’s first street-art disaster movie’

Whether it is snogging policemen, a House of Commons full of chimpanzees, Princess Diana on a £10 note, or I Don’t Believe in Global Warming half-submerged in a canal, a Banksy makes you smile, but it also forces you to take a second look, to think a little deeper.
It’s funny how this anonymous graffiti artist evokes such strong affection in people, particularly those who don’t usually reckon that art has much to say to them.

“Banksy, love ’im,” says a mate who wouldn’t be seen dead at Tate Modern. Another friend, who met him at a crusty travellers’ party in Bristol, says: “He’s very quiet, sweet though, very Bristol, scruffy and funny, but you’d never know if you didn’t know, if you know what I mean.”

So why does everyone have a favourite Banksy? Perhaps because he catches us unawares, shows us a clever take on our culture from a topsy-turvy angle on a scruffy bit of wall, or bridge, or hoarding we’ve looked at a million times but never noticed before.

My commute takes me through Shoreditch and Hoxton in east London, and I’ve learnt where to look for them. Recently he has been painting in Camden Town, north London, where he has had a running spat with a fellow graffiti artist called Robbo. On a freezing day I went down to have a peek. Past the lock, along a grotty towpath in the snow, under a most insalubrious bridge, and there on a bit of concrete on the far side of the muddy canal is a stencil of a workman painting a wall. The workman was added by Banksy to the original Robbo tag. Since then, a vengeful Robbo has revisited the work to daub “King Robbo” in giant silver letters over it.

Back towards Regent’s Park there is a charming stencil of a little boy fishing in the canal, which now bears the aggressive slogan “Did you think it was over? Team Robbo”, and the words “street cred” where the fish should be, implying that Banksy has lost his. Click HERE to continue reading at the SUNDAY TIMES…

BANKSY’s subterranean screenings of his new documentary, “Exit Through The Gift Shop” in a makeshift pop-up theater in an unused subway tube beneath London’s Waterloo Station kicked off this week to queues of rabid fans. Miraculously, the UK bomber managed to keep news of the screenings and his dank setup totally secret until last week’s surprise announcement when screenings (twice daily until March 4th) instantly sold out via online sales. The theater features copious amounts of street art inside and out and functions as much as an impromptu Banksy art show as a movie theater. Ironically—or perhaps, appropriately—enough, patrons were forbidden to bring any spray paint or other graffiti marking tools into the screening. Of course, Mr Banks was a no-show (or was he?), but his melted ice cream truck concession stand proved a hit across the board. Have a look at the setup: Read the rest of this entry »

Leave it to BANKSY to roll out the premiere of his “EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP” documentary in an unused London subway tunnel beneath the Waterloo train station—AND manage to keep the whole thing secret till now. Billed as “London’s newest, darkest, and dirtiest purpose-built cinema,” the venue is adorned with new Banksy art installations and rows of couches and theater seats, and even features a “popcorn stall, lounge bar, and stunning temporary toilet facilities.” Daily screenings will take place at 6PM & 9:30PM daily until March 4th. Book your tickets HERE now…

A derelict 200-year-old pub in Liverpool, England, bearing one of BANKSY’s largest existing guerilla murals has just changed hands at auction today for £114,000. One of the artist’s largest existing pieces, the massive rat was painted illegally under cover of darkness in 2004 during the city’s Biennial festival and has since been declared a landmark by the city and granted protected status. Now, in a twist that Sir Banks himself probably couldn’t imagine, the image must be preserved by the new owners going forward with renovations…

What has to be the final nail in the “Street Art” coffin was driven in last weekend by none other than MR. BRAINWASH (aka: “The Christian Audigier of Street Art”) when he opened his massive, self-produced “Icons” show in a rented space (which, ironically, was once a real art gallery, pre-recession) in the heart of Chelsea. As the subject of Brit Street Art king Banksy’s recent docu-parody film, “Exit Through The Gift Shop,” MBW has been the focus of much hype and speculation as his presence finally seeps into the fairly muddy stream of mainstream consciousness. Last week’s Wall Street Journal article articulated this particularly well:

“Fueling the buzz around Mr. Brainwash is that no one knows exactly who the 44-year-old is. Some Web sites have speculated that he may be an invented character, part of a performance-art hoax. Others think he may, in fact, be the popular British street artist Banksy, whose face has never been shown on camera … “Maybe I am Banksy,” says the enigmatic artist, who says his real name is Thierry Guetta and speaks in a thick French accent. “Maybe not.”

Of course, the most amusing part of all this dumbfounded hypothesizing is how real—and accessible—Mr. Brainwash actually is. Far from actually being Banksy or any other legitimately mysterious street art phantom, MBW is simply Thierry Guetta, aka “French Terry,” a Los Angeles-based French transplant who cut his teeth in recent years by following around the architects of the scene, Shepard Fairey and Banksy, camera in hand, capturing film of them in action for what was to be his own documentary on street art. In the process, Guetta was inspired to follow in the footsteps of his idols and ultimately passed through the looking glass, assuming the incredibly ridiculous moniker of “Mr. Brainwash.” Guetta then forged a visual identity for himself by mining literally every Pop Art gimmick of the past 50 years and running it through the stylistic filter of Fairey and Banksy to achieve his own heavily derivative results. Of course, this would all be an act of genius (or at least considerable humor) if French Terry was doing it as a grand act of parody, skewering the scene he had been so closely observing for all its inherent gimmickry and blasé appropriation. In the process of his conversion, however, French Terry, like the computers in so many Sci-Fi tales, became self-aware, and convinced that he himself was in fact a true artist and the bona-fide “next big thing” of street art. Enter Banksy…

Convinced that Terry—due to his own directorial ineptitude or self-possessed drive to become a street artist himself—would never finish the original film as planned and recognizing the inherent absurdity of the would-be filmmaker’s hilarious conversion, Banksy did what he does best and flipped the tables by taking possession of Guetta’s reels and creating a new documentary with his own team. Focused not on himself or Shepard Fairey as originally intended, “Exit Through The Gift Shop” would instead chronicle French Terry’s amazing transformation as a metaphor for the absurdity of the street art world and Banksy’s own brilliant “take a sucker for all they’re worth” ethos. The result was billed by Banksy as “The world’s first street art disaster movie,” with the film’s trailer showing footage of Terry spilling paint in his truck and walking into signposts while quotes like “in a world with no rules, one man broke them all,” flashed across the screen. You could almost hear the sound of journalists scratching their heads at screenings in Park City (Sundance) and Berlin.

Dateline, February 12, 2010: Following up his self-produced June 2008 one man show in LA (that was itself a direct copy of Banksy’s epic solo show there two years earlier) that was held in a cavernous old abandoned TV studio facilitated by his family’s extensive real estate holdings and chronicled in depth here on Supertouch, French Terry unveils the East Coast installment of his street art apocalypse with the opening of “Icons” at a massive rented defunct gallery space in Chelsea. Featuring an equally absurd array of Warhol-derived celebrity portraiture (using silkscreen and splatter paint along with broken 45 records as his prime medium), mixed with Claes Oldenburg-style object sculpture, and exact replicas of Banksy-style found old master hotel room paintings featuring modern ironic interventionist touches (ie: P-Diddy raising the roof in a Renoir style oil painting) with prices ranging up to the—hold your breath—$300,000 mark, the show was pure MBW through and through. And while serious art collectors scoffed, knowing that the only reason French Terry was going rogue to such extent in NYC (aside from the obvious financial gains of having no gallery to cut in on the take) was because no serious art gallery would touch him, new money suckers and socialites were lining up to fork over the green to invest in the street art equivalent of Bear Stearns. Of course, MBW loyalists would cite his sold out show of work at SoHo’s Opera Gallery late last year as evidence of a real art career, but Opera is simply a tourist art gallery dabbling heavily in so-called “lowbrow” and “street art” of late (with a heavily funded/deluded client base, no less).

So what’s the take away here? Do we love French Terry for what he is? Deride him for who he thinks he is? Embrace him for bringing laughter to our hearts and lips? In the end, we at Supertouch are left to mine our own previous coverage of MBW’s Los Angeles show to deliver an apt closing moral:

“To call last nite’s opening of newly minted and ridiculously named “artist” MR BRAINWASH an “art show” would be a disservice to artists everywhere and even Mr Brainwash himself. Instead, let’s call it what it really is: a grand art prank of epic proportions. A heist. A spoof. A joke. Or maybe just the biggest, funnest, sloppiest high school art fair of all time … In the words of one of LA’s most pioneering street art provocateurs, Skullphone, “if Disneyland wanted to open a street art ride, this is what they’d have done.”

Our prediction for French Terry’s next big project? Our money’s fully on the Mr. Brainwash clothing line by Christian Audigier. It’s just too bad Michael Jackson’s not around to see it (or this show), he would have eaten it up…

HAVE A LOOK:

Read the rest of this entry »

Unsurprisingly, our man BANKSY didn’t show up:

“An apparent press conference by “Exit Through the Gift Shop” director, and mysterious street artist, Banksy was canceled in Berlin today. A subject of the film, which debuted last month at the Sundance Film Festival, Banksy remains an incognito artist. He issued a video statement that was shown prior to the press screening of his movie on Sunday at the Berlinale, in lieu of a press conference.

He started by saying, in a recorded message, “Unfortunately I can’t be with you today, so I am speaking from my home in England via satellite link.”

“I guess my ambition was to make a film that would do for graffiti art what ‘Karate Kid’ did for martial arts, a film that would get every school kid in the world picking up a spray can and having a go,” said a silhouetted figure, identified as Banksy, in a digitally altered voice on the short video message. He added, “As it turns out, I think we might have made a film that does for street art what ‘Jaws’ did for water sking.” Click HERE to continue reading at INDIE WIRE…

BAKSY’s back in 2009 with a couple fresh hits in Fogtown. Unsurprisingly, his sense of humor remains undaunted by these dark days…