Through the Lens of Banksy

TH: When did you first encounter Banky’s artwork and what about his artwork intrigued you to follow him more closely and ultimately write the book?

KG: The first Banksy to hit me between the eyes was his famous ‘Love is in the Air’, aka ‘Flower Thrower’, sometime around 2003. I was struck by the simplicity of its graphic power: a spare silhouette of a masked rioter, his body fully cocked and ready to unleash not a rock or molotov cocktail but a bouquet of beautiful flowers.

It’s not easy to pull off parody and poignancy with the same stencil, but Banksy does it unforgettably time and again. Adding to the intrigue was the suspicion that the mural must, on some level, be a pseudo-self-portrait of the masked artist who anonymously hurls unexpectedly explosive images into cultural consciousness – a mute manifesto of what’s to come.

TH: Banksy’s artworks are instantly recognizable using his signature stencil style. How did this begin and how has it enabled him to convey his message more clearly?

KG: Well, the instinct to start stencilling was a survival one. Banksy tells the story of how he found himself trapped beneath a dump truck one night while hiding from British Transport police after being spotted laboriously spraying the words ‘LATE AGAIN’ in balloon letters on a train. He knew he had to come up with a much quicker technique.

Scratched up and greasy, he spotted something painted with stencil on a fuel tank and it lit a spark. (Well, not literally …) Fashioning stencils at home before hitting the street, Banksy could create far more crisp and complex images that took a fraction of the time to spray onto a wall.

Though he wasn’t the first artist to turn to stencilling, Banksy’s independent ‘epiphany’, as he called it, would change contemporary art.

TH: How would you describe Banksy’s gaze and how has he succeeded in making art history more accessible?

KG: Banksy’s is an unflinching gaze that doesn’t so much size up cultural icons for defacement as lay them bare. His acerbic send-ups strip overly-familiar paintings and sculptures of their perceived pretentiousness. We live in a time when many masterpieces – the Mona Lisa, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Water Lilies etc – are so famous we’ve stopped seeing them. They’ve become so fatigued from centuries of staring that a kind of invisible, though impenetrable, patina has encrusted their surfaces.

Banksy glimpses in their world-weary condition an opportunity – a blank space in which to rewrite the stories these works tell us. The Romantic poet Shelley wrote that great works of art are inexhaustible and that every generation pulls layer after layer off of them without ‘the inmost beauty of their meaning’ ever fully being exposed.

Banksy is a great puller of veils. By stripping away at masterpieces, he paradoxically brings us closer to their unreachable meanings.

TH: Can you give an example of how Banksy strikes up this dialogue with the past and what he exposes by doing so?

KG: I think Banksy’s witty 2005 intervention into Claude Monet’s Japanese Footbridge – Show Me the Monet – is especially effective. Banksy unveiled his response to Monet’s work a year after another one of the French Impressionist’s countless water lily canvases sold for $17 million at auction – a huge price tag that some felt was at odds with the pristine paradise that Monet was depicting in his painting.

In Banksy’s canvas, the idyllic pond in Giverny becomes a kind of mucky contemporary bog in which the skeletons of stolen shopping trolleys and discarded traffic cones clutter up the scene. Far from random or irrelevant, however, the hefty urban litter brings to the surface aspects of Monet’s canvas we’ve pushed outside the frame, such as the French artist’s penchant for racing expensive automobiles (which he collected) through village streets and his habit of shopping for and introducing into his pretty pond foreign plant species that threatened the indigenous ecology  – a practice local authorities demanded he stop.

Banksy’s work doesn’t disfigure Monet’s. It demystifies it. It makes it real.

TH: Where do you think Banksy sits in the canon?

KG: Banksy sits outside the canon. I suspect he would rather be fired from it than situated comfortably inside. Fame and respect aren’t the same thing, of course, and inclusion in the canon is conventionally a function of the latter.

Banksy’s fame today is unparalleled. Every new work he unveils is front page news. Those who construct the canon, however, don’t like to be circumvented. But that’s exactly what Banksy does by bypassing institutions and critical regard and giving his work directly to people on the streets where they live. How long can he make that fly? Only time will tell.

TH: Is your book making a point that goes beyond Banksy? What would you like readers to have learned from reading it?

KG: A work of art never ends. Its materiality is mystical. Banksy’s work powerfully illustrates how the art of the present can alter the art of the past – how artistic influence isn’t a force that only flows forward.

Great artists today grind the lens through which we see the great artists of the past. T S Eliot once said that whenever a new work of art is introduced into the canon, the works of art that came before are suddenly forced to adjust themselves – to budge up like bodies on a crowded couch when someone new sits down.

Banksy’s best works break the couch. And while the old masters he sits on may seem a little rumpled by the weight, when we look again we always find something shining between the cushions – something we didn’t see before.

Pre-order your copy of How Banksy Saved Art History, publishing 12 September 2024