Banksy, for the uninitiated, is an artist that works out of the UK and who works in the medium of spray paint and building sides. His tags and images, full of dry wit and liveliness, have appeared all over the world, but Banksy himself is anonymous and elusive. He seems to delight in the secrecy of his opus and there are wild rumors (or not-so-wild) about who Banksy actually is.
His signature rats and haunting figures are perfectly matched to their environments. The environment itself is the picture plane or the compositional context for the work. His mysterious work pattern makes it even more exciting when one of his works comes to light, and over the past few years, the unknown graffitist has become a superstar in the art world, sometimes appearing to install and announce or publicize shows scant hours before they are to open, as was the case in Bristol last year and LA before that. Of course, anyone who was anyone managed to be there. (What up, Brangelina!)
So his works? Skyrocketing worth . . . one supposes . . . and in a recent visit to the United States Banksy managed to infiltrate an abandoned Packard plant and create another work on a crumbling wall in a post-industrial no-man's-land. Then, of course, he vanished, leaving behind an image of a hollow-eyed youth with a can of red paint in his hands and the words scrawled as though by the boy : "I remember when all this was trees."
Enter the folks at Gallery 555. They get wind of a Banksy original located in a place where the elements are sure to destroy it, sooner rather than later.
They swoop in. Using masonry equipment, they carefully hack the piece out of its site. They cart it back to the gallery and house it in a wood frame case. They put it on display.
The blogosphere ignites.
Art sure is good at exposing social conventions and questioning them loudly, and also very good at not handing off an easy answer. There is a rather loud reverberation, "What would Banksy think of this?"
If only we could find him and ask him. It's anybody's guess. As a prankster, maybe he won't mind being pranked. He may have an indulgent attitude but maintain that the people who moved the work didn't get what it was about, and you can't really fix stupid, in that case. He may be breaking his arm patting himself on the back for having set off a firestorm debate about the nature of art. My favorite so far is this blog that is the forum for a lot of Detroit artists themselves, who know whereof they speak . . .
There are a lot of arms to this octopus, but I will go ahead and just pick one and ask this question: Does art need to endure? Is it essential that art be protected, preserved, and essentially made immortal, or at least very, very long-lived? What is the role and use of archival durability and preservation in art?
There is a very deep automatic assumption at work that the greatest good in a work lies in its ability to stand the test of time, historically and materially. The reason this incident interests me so much is that lately I have been questioning that basic assumption.
Banksy's work is extraordinary in part because he releases ownership of his work when it goes to the street, and past choice of materials and site, he abandons the piece to its fate. His acceptance that the work is ephemeral is captured in some of his work.
The work isn't built to last forever. So if Banksy can accept this, why can't we? Why can't the people at 555?
They may see themselves as champions or conservators, but to my thinking they committed an act of editorial vandalism and denied Banksy's composition and very likely his intent. At the very least, the painting when taken from its site is robbed of its context. That may be a choice of the folks at 555, but nobody has the right to alter art in that way. That is a more serious depredation than the simple ravages of time. That wall would have eventually crumbled. I picture Banksy somewhere in England with his feet propped up and a brandy snifter in his hand, pondering his work's decay and disappearance with a kind of satisfaction.
Put another way, which is better: for a work of art to remain in its site for a short time and do its job well, or for it to be deprived of its context and therefore its meaning and message, so that it can be uselessly but famously and archivally displayed indefinitely? Does the need for preservation trump the work bearing out its shortened existence in a meaningful way?
And how long has it been since any artist began thinking of his or her art and how well it was bearing out that existential meaning, without regard to its lifespan, instead of thinking in terms of archival durability and whether that was achieved, having those considerations and putting them first before the paint is dry?
How many more artists are actively questioning the bedrock supposition of archival durability as a metric for the value of a work? If you're reading this, write and let me know so we can get into the weeds about this. I'm fascinated.
I come away from the incident with contempt for the 555 group. They putatively did this out of concern for the work, meaning that they destroyed what made it important in order to preserve it. They decided that they knew best. How does this make them any different from Clement Greenberg when he decided to take the paint off of David Smith's sculptures after the artist's death? I mean, besides the fact that he was the "Art Czar" whose overinflated ego could have been at least explained a little, and they are a bunch of schmucks?
It's not news to graffiti artists that most people don't respect graffiti work and won't bother to protect it or may try to destroy it, but it hurts when the ones doing it claim to be the good guys or on the side of the art. I sense that their motives had little to do with the nature of art and something more to do with self-importance. They say that they won't offer the piece for sale. We'll see.
0 comments:
Post a Comment