Posts Tagged ‘Space Invader’

If you’ve never heard of Banksy, chances are you still know who he is—especially if you’ve ever traveled west on Melrose. His art has appeared all over the world, from Bristol, UK, where he got his start, to the Palestinian segregation wall in the West Bank. His striking and humorous images and slogans with their subversive flair is immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with his work. Despite his popularity, Banksy has managed to remain anonymous in order to protect himself from legal persecution—his identity is known to only a small handful of chosen trustees. This Monday, Banksy’s excursion out of the night and into the world of film will prove Banksy to be more than just a cleverly-tongued and craftily-handed stenciler.

The film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, is not just a retrospective of the birth of the underground graffiti-art scene in the 80s. It also follows the story of Thierry Guetta, the LA-transplant from France who serendipitously stumbled upon the graffiti-art scene in the late 80’s and captured hundreds of hours of video footage of the artists in action. Guetta, an obsessive-compulsive character who was compelled to video tape every moment of his daily life, discovered at a family reunion that his distant cousin was the graffiti artist Space Invader, and turned his camera towards the movement. What began as a mild curiosity quickly turned into a new obsession for Guetta. Under the auspices that he was making a documentary on the movement, he managed to befriend and document every big graffiti artist working at the time, accompanying them on their nighttime forays and neglecting his family and life in LA for the span of a decade. Finally, he met and gained the trust of the notorious Banksy, whose reputation for his shocking and dexterous work was by then world-wide. In a grand gesture of faith, Banksy allowed Guetta into a world that few had ever entered—Guetta was the first and only person that Banksy ever permitted to film his secretive exploits in an effort to permanently preserve on film his artwork which was usually destroyed by authorities upon its discovery.

After it became apparent that Guetta’s obsession with the graffiti movement was not actually a passion for filmmaking (he had never made a film in his life, but was the owner of a vintage boutique in Hollywood), Banksy convinced Guetta to hand over his footage and take it easy. He advised him to go back to LA, maybe do some graffiti art of his own, have a little show, have fun. Little did he know what monster his friendly suggestion would birth. Guetta returned to LA, named himself Mr. Brainwash, and in an explosion of self-promotion that would impress even Octo-Mom, launched the biggest solo exhibition of graffiti art the city had ever seen.

At this point, Banksy takes a breath. The movie is no longer about graffiti art, or this crazy guy Guetta—but about the nature of trust, of art itself, and of hype—and how Guetta managed to exploit and violate all three in his manic drive for affirmation. Guetta, in his crazed attempt either to please Banksy, or inflate his own ego, or get rich—it’s unclear—created a humongous body of work practically overnight. He managed to cut through all the channels that most artists have to navigate to become successful. He never developed a craft—he hired real artists to actualize the ideas in his head, most of which were cheap rip-offs of the artists he had followed for so long. He refinanced his house in order to afford the warehouse space where the exhibition took place, filled it with pretty things in a matter of days, and with a shrewd knack for publicity (perhaps where his true artistry lies), got the press—and the art world—on board. The result was a wild success commercially, but it resulted in the loss of all those friendships with artists he had befriended as their accomplice in graffiti for so many years.

The real clincher is that it’s not clear that Guetta has any clue that he may have breached some kind trust in his creation of Mr. Brainwash and subsequent pillaging of graffiti culture and imagery. Operating under the same oblivious self-congratulation that fuels so many of the taste-maker types in the LA bubble, Guetta actually believes his own hype. He maintains an attitude of pleased insouciance—“Life is Beautiful,” he sprays in pink paint on a brick wall moments before it is bulldozed—after all, he is well-known, much adored, and rich. And Banksy? His relationship with Guetta wasn’t a complete disappointment. He proves that his ability for turning a wall into a window reach far beyond his stenciling skills—let Exit Through The Gift Shop be a lasting reminder of that fact.

By Helen Kearns

Exit Through The Gift Shop opens this Friday, April 16th in selected theaters in the US. Check out the website for more information.