Curated interviews of Banksy.

The Enemy Within Metaphysical Graffiti Cheeky Monkey Banksy and Shok 1 Chatting Creative Vandalism Banksy Banksy Interview Something to Spray All Things Considered Interview Art Attack Banksy The Naked Truth Village Voice Exclusive: An Interview With Banksy, Street Art Cult Hero, International Man of Mystery Village Voice Exclusive: An Interview With Banksy, Street Art Cult Hero, International Man of Mystery Banksy meets Run The Jewels Banksy's Dismaland 60 Seconds with… Banksy Extra: A beginners guide to painting with stencils Extra: Advice on Making Stencils The Enemy Within Bristol’s Banksy bucks the system… Hip-Hop Connection Issue 136 By Boyd Hill Source April, 2000 Graf culture often just plods along, writers painting piece after piece of meaningless crap. That said, there’s always a subversive waiting in the wings to really tear shit up. Bristol artist Banksy does things differently, often to devastating effect. HHC went along to ART 2000 at the upmarket Islington Design Centre to talk strategies with the nation’s most wanted. Hip-Hop Connection What influenced you to start using stencils? Banksy About five years ago I saw an image in a newspaper, cut it out as a stencil, then painted it in half a dozen places. Purely from the reaction I got I realised it’s all about efficiency these days. A tight image in 30 seconds is the way to go. HHC What was the idea behind the piece in Poland Street, W1? Banksy The Poland Street piece was about the fact that artists don’t matter. You’re made to feel very aware that in this country doctors and entrepreneurs are at the top, then estate agents and plumbers, then the unemployed and slightly below them are your artists. You know, we don’t fucking matter. A lot of what I do is about taking the control back. The riot image is about throwing colour but in a dark way. It’s difficult to describe in words but having a balaclava on and chucking paint around is very similar to wearing a mask and throwing flowers. It’s all pest control, but it’s pests controlling them, not them controlling the pests. HHC How do you view the British art scene? Banksy I’m not part of that scene. I never went to art college and I’m not from a family of artistic people – I never even had the connections to be part of the art world. You’ve got to be fine about it and not bitter and twisted, but I use it to my advantage and operate on a different level. Like if you put up a stencil, more people will see that as opposed to a painting in a gallery and it costs nothing to see. HHC What’s the public’s reaction to your work? Banksy I try to get as little feedback as possible because that involves talking to people. Everyone has their own interpretation of my work. When I did the clown stencil holding handguns some people hated it and thought it scared their kids, whereas others thought it was the funniest thing out. You have to be careful who you listen to. HHC How different is painting in London from Bristol? Banksy Well, it takes ages to get anywhere and the anti-terrorist police are a bit more edgy than in Avon & Somerset. I’d say 70 percent of the stuff I’ve done has been cleaned. I paint for about 25 people and if anyone else likes it then cool, but if they don’t then ‘fuck you’. HHC You’ve scored a few ‘hits’ in clubs. Do you find door security a problem these days? Banksy I did a couple of hits in Bar Rhumba and this prick comes up to me and says, ‘My brother owns this club, what are you doing?’ So I said, ‘Yeah I spoke to him about it and he was safe,’ so the guy just fucked off and nodded. It’s like if you’re going to front, I’ll front because we can talk all about it. Clubs are good because it’s always nice to get past security, no matter who it is. HHC What was it like painting in New York? Banksy I’ve lived in New York on and off for about two years, and last year I was asked to do a series of paintings. I did a picture of a guy sitting on a subway train, then Mickey and Minnie Mouse get on and start mugging the guy and painting graffiti all over the train. It was a comic strip and was put onto the side of the Carlton Arms Hotel as four pieces. Some people got really shitty about it, especially they found out I was English. These two women who happened to be the wives of lawyers started a campaign to have it taken down. The New York Post ran a story on it but thankfully it stayed. HHC Your canvas paintings have a very anarchic feel. Is rioting a big passion? Banksy I’ve been to a few and I like it when the world’s turned on its head. It’s something that taking drugs will never give you. I was in London for the Poll Tax riot in 1990 and someone put through the window of a music store and all these saxophones which cost two grand were suddenly free. It’s your graffiti writer’s dream when you run things and the police are shit scared. I’ve got a passion for rioting and it makes good pictures. Canvases are for losers really. You’re looking to sell to people who are on your level and I don’t like the fact that you’re selling to people you don’t know. I like to think there’s a side of me that wants to smash the system, fuck shit up and drag the city to its knees as it screams my name. And then there’s the other, darker side. Catch Banksy’s work on the streets of Bristol, London and New York City. Metaphysical Graffiti (out and about with Banksy in Bristol) Squall Magazine Source June 07, 2001 An art activist from Bristol has been causing a right ol' stir with his brazen approach to conscious graffiti. Recent hits on the checklist include Regents Park Zoo and the Tate Gallery. Si Mitchell holds the ladder and manages to grab some chats with the elusive but awesomely prolific Banksy. "The only problem was the penguins. I didn't realise it, but they're kinda vicious really." It's the middle of a starry Sunday night, and Britain's most maverick painter and decorator, Banksy, is up a ladder in downtown Bristol. A ten foot monkey has leapt from the spray can in his hand and has started to trash a particularly insidious looking CCTV camera. Whilst I'm standing there at the base of the ladder he's recalling his last bit of natural history graffiti work, in the Regent Park Penguin enclosure just a few days earlier. "It's deathly quiet in the zoo at 3am. Then the penguins all started jumping in the water. I'm going: 'Shh... for fucks sake.' And they're splashing about, making a right racket. I'm writing things, that I assume a penguin would write if it was writing graffiti, right close to the floor. About a dozen of them all got out of the water and start edging towards me in a little gang making this 'aaaaarr', Mars Attacks sort of noise." Despite Banksy's animal antics, you won't have read in the BBC's Wildlife magazine how a flock of renegade Emperor Penguins managed to daub 'Laugh now, but one day we'll be in charge' and 'I'm bored with fish' on the walls of their Regents Park enclosure. The zoo caper was what Banksy would describe as a "well executed" piece of graffiti. Like Fume's thirty foot Westway tag, or his own stenciling of a London Underground style 'Mind the Crap' on every step leading up to the Tate gallery on the night before last year's Turner Prize. Banksy came to his art form pretty late. He left his native Bristol in 1993, to hang out with Nottingham's DIY free party posse, after a baptism by repetitive beats at the now legendary Castlemorton Common free festival. He got into drawing when asked to do a flyer, and from there into graffiti. "Spray paint's actually quite hard to use, and I found myself painting embarrassingly bad pictures, illegally on a wall, at 21 years old. That's not acceptable." He pauses while a police car idles at some lights not fifteen feet from where we're painting. A van partially conceals us, some of the monkey and the huge sack of paint cans. The weekend's in its death throes and the streets seem to be populated solely by cops and pissed up unlicensed taxi drivers. "Fifteen years ago there weren't 24 hour supermarkets and boozers open round the clock. You could paint for 40 minutes on a main road without a car going past. Now you're lucky to get fifty seconds." To overcome both his own incompetence and the need to work fast, Banksy began using stencils. Five years on, there aren't many grey walls in Bristol that don't attract the odd passing smile with an inimitable Banksy stencil. From the 'Heavy weaponry' missile-bearing elephant, to the little boy ominously nursing a sickle behind his back, as a policeman bends to talk to him. With the artist now in residence in the capital, London's walls are quickly following suit - as are a legion of cardboard-and-can handed imitators. Like every other half decent subculture idea, the marketing people are starting to tag along too, (Day One's latest album promotion being a prime example). Apart from getting grief from the Bristol stalwarts he left behind (his reply to them was to tag a monkey riding a bomb towards Big Ben all over the city on his return), Banksy found London offered its own pitfalls. "I don't have a motor and the nightbus to Brixton is not the speediest of getaways. Also, I got lost after doing the Tate and ended up in front of Buckingham Palace. 4am with twelve cans of paint and a bunch of stencils in the most heavily policed part of Britain - I was lucky to get out of that one." Back in Bristol, the monkey has developed an evil glint to his eye. "It's kinda my logo at the minute. I love animals, they don't have any malice. But you can make a monkey fucking malicious... if you want." He tags tonight's picture and we pack up and go. "Its amazing the way people take different meanings out of things. I did this piece in Soho, with a masked man throwing a bunch of flowers over a giant barcode. I put 'Pest Control' on it, meaning 'the pests control the city', as opposed to the pests being controlled. This mate of mine rings me up and says: 'Are you homophobic?' I'm like, no not at all. But coz it was in Soho, and had a geezer throwing flowers, that's what they thought. It's fantastic in a lot of ways. You don't want to explain yourself too well. I guess, if I could explain it in words, I wouldn't need to do the picture. It's being fluffy in a militant way - something about going round in a balaclava and splashing colour onto buildings, it's all tied in there." Despite the infamy he's created, Banksy dismisses accusations about being any real threat to the state. "It's only a bit of painting and decorating," he says. "The real villains I know, think I'm a fucking idiot attracting so much attention." But he's openly agitated by what he calls: "Blair's castration of the politics in this country," and when asked about who inspires him, he cites the women who trashed the Hawk Jet bound for East Timor, before he names any artists. "I got politicised during the poll tax, the Criminal Justice Act and the Hartcliffe Riots - that was Bristol's Rodney King [sparked by the death of two local lads whose motorcycle was chased into a wall by the police]. I can also remember my old man taking me down to see the Lloyds bank - what was left of it - after the 1980 St Pauls riots. It's mad to see how the whole thing of having to do what you're told can be turned on its head, and how few people it takes to grab it back." By now, we've stopped walking and are standing on a corner, outside Bristol's Central Police Station. "Now the police," says Banksy, whipping a stencil out of his bag. "They are the bane of my profession. I have to think about the old bill all the time." He gaffer tapes the cardboard to the station wall, and proceeds to spray on a stencil of two running officers. "So much about my images is governed by the police: where I put them, how quickly I can slap them up. But maybe it gives them an edge they wouldn't otherwise have." He finishes the stencil and draws in a chunky little stick man hot footing it from the cops. "You know, sitting in a studio in Cornwall where the light is beautiful. What good does that do you?" The plan was to paint the same stencil flipped round twenty yards down the wall, with a bunch of tooled up stick men chasing the cops back, but two policemen choose that moment to bundle out of the main doors. Banksy white's the eyes of the stick man and we leg it "I've never actually been nicked for graffiti," Banksy admits half an hour later, over a beer in a St Pauls blues bar. "But we've had some scrapes. We were painting 'Late Again' in eight foot letters on this passenger train and they came over the tracks in a transit. They were making a right racket, it must've ripped the bottom out of the van. But there was these high steel railings that ran as far as you could see, we had this one loose strut that you could move and then move back. So by the time they got round the train, we were on the other side and all they could see was an unbroken fence." 'Late Again' was gone by daybreak. As Banksy points out, the more politically uncomfortable the message, the quicker it disappears. "We did this painting on the waterfront, and this geezer turned up who actually owned the wall. I told him we worked for a mural company, gave him a blag number, and told him to go and ring my boss. He fucks off and we stick the lyrics on it, tag it and wheelspin off round the corner. It was a TV with: 'All this noise, but you ain't saying nothing." One of the speech bubbles said: 'HTV makes me want to smoke crack.' The piece is still there, but someone has carefully edited that bit out. It's not just the law and the landowners who are in pursuit of Banksy either. Wall of Sound records have signed Banksy up as an artist after he inadvertently painted the front of their building. Damien Hirst has given him an endorsement, he's been flown out to New York to paint hotel rooms and to the Costa del Sol to jazz up a lap dancing complex. "These gangsters had bought up the old set of [failed TV series] El Dorado. True to form they tried to make me pay for it by buying the paint upfront. I'm not a remarkably clever bloke, but I understood the rip-off that was going off, and instead spent the week with this stripper going to work around various different bars. It was interesting." No doubt. A week later and we're at the launch of Banksy's first exhibition of canvasses in an arty Bristol wine bar. Like the street pieces, the pictures are big and bold and anarchic. A world away from the beautiful young things moving and shaking around The Severnshed trying not to spill their Chablis. Banksy's not there. I ring him up. He's in a bar in South London, killing time before heading off to liven up a track siding. His curiosity extends to: "Any fit birds? Any filth turned up?" As far as the art set are concerned, his absence just adds to his mystery. Portishead's Adrian Utley and members Massive Attack are there reportedly buying four figure pics. Cops, monkeys, burning buildings. They're all represented. Some of the influences are even more discernible here - though maybe not to this crowd. One riot scene, 'People Di Every Day' (inspired by "the mob sentimentality that swept Britain when Princes Di died"), includes two figures from that ubiquitous Paris '68 brick throwers photograph. Another character is modelled on the girl, who was snapped belting a riot cop with a scaffold bar during the 1990 Poll Tax riots in Trafalgar Square. ("That was the girl I wanted to marry," says Banksy). But instead of bars and bricks, Banksy's figures throw flowers. Fluffy meets Spiky again. A week later we meet at his studio. He's cutting out stencils to the strains of a Radio 4 phone in. "Occasionally you get images that speak to you, from people who don't have a voice. That's what I want to do. It's not about making money," he says in reference to flogging every picture in the exhibition on that opening night. "But it's a means to an end for me, not a hobby. If you go into it for any other reason than wanting to get up and put a bit of power back, then you're fucked up and you won't do well." "I just want to make one fucking great image that goes out real cheap to every mothafucker," he says. But there's more to it than that. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the message embedded in Banksy's paintings isn't 'look at me', but 'look around you'. They are a wake up call to the unwittingly oppressed. "To make a piece of art that actually provoked something serious to happen? I couldn't even dream of that... but yeah...I guess that's the aim." Though he empathises with direct activists, the enigmatic Bristolian feels what he does is less easily defined. "There have been times when I've wondered about what I do," he says reciting an incident when some paint bomb balloons ended up covering everything in a twenty yard radius, including a few parked cars. For similar reasons, he rarely just drops his name these days. If he does it's "the really big one and in a funny place (check out the front of Centrepoint), otherwise it's subtracting and not adding to the world". "Part of it is I'm fighting boredom," he says. "But what I perceive as boredom, other people perceive as beautiful grey buildings." At the minute Banksy needs a chemist. "The plan is to stencil lacquer, then remove the stencil and spray on acid which would eat into the limestone. That should give you a relief image an inch deep. It's unbuffable. You just can't paint over that shit." Despite losing a few fingertips he's yet to find an agent that will do the trick. Until that day, his career spirals upwards. A website, http://www.banksy.co.uk, has been launched. He's begun what he describes as "a high profile campaign of guerilla art" in London (watch this space), and he's involved in the Burner Prize - a graffiti competition, reminiscent of 2000AD's Chopper from Oz storyline, timed to coincide with this year's Turner prize. The winner will be chosen by an all-star panel at a bash at the International Contemporary Arts Centre, on "style, skill and the ability to avoid security systems." They hope to get it banned before judgement day. The last time I saw Banksy he told me a story about the fall of Ceausescu. In November '89, in response to a small uprising in Timisoara, Romania, the country's corrupt and brutal dictator was persuaded to address a public rally in Bucharest. A lone man in the crowd, Nica Leon, sick of Ceausescu's dreadful regime started shouting in favour of the Timisoara revolutionaries. The crowd around him, obedient to the last, thought 'Long live Timisoara!' was a new political slogan and started chanting it to. It was only when he began shouting 'Down with Ceaucescu!' that they realised all was not right. They tried to get away from him, banners were getting dropped and broken in the crush and women started screaming. On the balcony, the panic sounded like booing. Ceausescu stood there ludicrously frozen, mouth opening and shutting. Then the head of Romania's security walked over to him and whispered 'they're getting in'. It was clearly audible on the President's microphone and was broadcast live across the whole country. The revolution had begun. Within a week Ceausescu was dead. Somewhere in a bar in Romania sits Nica Leon, a solitary man who changed the course of history. Somewhere in a bar in England sits Banksy, plotting his next assault of renegade colour. Power to the pair of them - may they one day meet. Cheeky Monkey The Independent by Fiona McClymont May 27, 2000 It all started in Bristol six years ago. Strange and slightly sinister images began appearing on city-centre walls. They've now spread, via New York and various British cities, to London. Take a walk around Soho and you can't miss them. It's all the work of one 26- year-old graffiti artist known only by his tag, "Banksy". His work has been attracting a lot of attention, not least from the police, but despite this he's about to stage a retrospective next week, at a secret location in London. Naturally, this won't be at your average art gallery, but outside, on an enormous wall, on which a back- catalogue of his images will be sprayed, using his trademark stencils. Banksy is the first to admit, "I'm doing it with a smile on my face. On the wall will be my `greatest hits'. I'll also put some on canvases and then burn the limited-edition stencils". Which means that something which started its life being hastily sprayed on to a wall in the middle of the night can now hang in your living room. A strange path for a graffiti artist? Not really, says Banksy. "If you want to eat and make pictures then you don't have a lot of routes open to you." Besides which, "The more you paint on walls, the bigger the risk, and the bigger the catalogue of criminal damage you've got to deal with." So, will the man who once graffiti'd the inside of the elephant cage at London Zoo - "I wrote, `I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring''" - be giving up street painting for a life inside the studio? He thinks not: "There's absolutely nothing better than painting something illegally on a wall and getting away with it. Because, you've won." On the street "I use monkeys in my pictures for a lot of reasons - guerrilla tactics, cheeky monkeys, the fact that we share 98.5 percent of our DNA with them. If I want to say something about people I use a monkey. If you use a person in an image, then you have to use a specific type, so you're either picking on someone young, old, or whatever. I painted the clown with a gun (above left) near a roundabout in Bristol, where two lanes of traffic had to slow down. It's at such a height on the wall that it appears 3-D to the cars in the outside lane - it looks like it's coming over the bonnets towards them. That's what it's all about, impact. The rats (left) are just tiny, mischievous hits. I've called them `electronic tagging' - they're electronically controlled and `tagging' is the graffiti term to describe writing your name all over the place. They're on walls all over London at ground level, as if they're running along the floor." In the studio "When I get lit up by an image or an idea, I make it straightaway and then go out and paint it. Taking time on something is not necessarily helpful. The days of wandering around casually with a spray can in your bag are over - the more sophisticated the police get, the quicker and more ruthlessly you have to work. One of the reasons I use stencils is that they're very efficient - you have to split everything into black or white and eliminate all grey areas, it's a very good way to live your entire life by, in fact. I've burnt most of the ones I've made, because they are extremely incriminating evidence. The whole process you have to go through to paint - building yourself up to it, the paranoias, the tricks, the waiting - is dark and twisted and it's hard; it's a lot of stress just to put colour on a wall." You can view Banksy's work at his website www.banksy.co.uk and for details of the forthcoming show contact info@freewheelinmedia.com Banksy and Shok 1 Chatting A chat with Banksy. Big Daddy Magazine Issue 7 Source by Shok-1 2001 I should count myself lucky I wasn’t blindfolded like the reporter from The Face magazine on the way to the secret HQ of Banksy [apparently he enjoyed it. Each to his own!] Not easily categorised, the man is an unusual blend of aerosol attitude and fine art. Some narrow-minded purists have found his stencil based work hard to swallow, but the establishment can’t seem to get enough. Sitting amongst huge piles of street level photos and crisp canvases alike we caned caffeine and talked shop. This is not an interview but just a conversation with a normal bloke with big dreams… Shok-1 [looking at a photo of a plastic Mickey Mouse face full of bullet holes] Hahaha! You got a gun off someone to shoot holes in Mickey? Banksy Yeah, it’s that gun there. Shok-1 Pooor Mickey! Hahaha! I like these lumps of wall too. I saw a couple of your canvases up in a shop in Bristol last year but I haven’t seen all that many really. You think they transfer well to canvas? Banksy I just did a show in Glasgow that taught me a lot. I had a lot of these canvases up. What I realized is, these are just like your tea towels & mugs really, of what I do. The art is the stuff in the street, and then if there are canvases, people who have a bit of money who want a souvenir, they can take one home and put them on their wall! I’m lucky that I can rattle these off, they don’t take long, and I can sell them for 500. Shok-1 It’s good, because your stuff is about repetition being that it’s a stencil thing anyway so it’s not counterproductive to use the same image on a canvas as well. Banksy I mean it’s part printing, part screen-printing innit? Even if you do twenty of an image, no two are going to look the same. So it’s an original piece of artwork whichever way you look at it. Shok-1 The last thing I sold in Germany were laser jet prints and I’m much happier selling things like that. One-offs, I’m loathe to part with them at all to be honest. Banksy I’ve got over that bit now. Shok-1 Obviously if people keep crossing your palm with silver that helps too! Banksy I sold a canvas in Bristol and I wanted to get it back to put it up in Glasgow. I asked the geezer and he said, "Nah, it’s staying where it is" and I realized, it’s like selling a car – you can’t sell someone a car and then ask to borrow it back. Shok-1 [Looking at the canvas] That’s not a stencil is it, you painted that with a brush right? Banksy Yeah. Shok-1 I was looking through some of your older photos there. They were much more like, normal graffiti. [i.e. colourful New York graffiti]… I like to see an artist’s progression, one of the things that appeals to me about what you’ve been doing is that we’re on the same kind of wavelength in that I’m becoming more and more minimal as well. I’ve never been greatly into using millions of colours anyway. I like the fact your canvases are really plain, I can imagine people must really get into that. Banksy You do it in a different way when you do stuff to put in people’s houses, you have to think about things like colours and making pictures that will fit through the door… [getting out a matching set of canvases] also how you space them out is interesting. You have one on one wall … then you have the other on another wall next to it [the second canvas shows that they have been bowling bombs]. Shok-1 Hahaha’ I like it! So looking back at when you were doing the big walls with lots of colours, how did you progress onto the stencilling and leaving out the extra colours and detail? Banksy I got into this mindset that using colours is a sign of weakness, if you’ve got the fucking idea and you can lay it down, you don’t need lots of colours…… Shok-1 It’s funny, because I think what we do is really different, but in a lot of ways we’re heading in the same direction. The reason why I started doing really stripped down characters with just one colour and an outline was to make the same point. You see these kids with these incredible multi colored 3D shading techniques, but you strip away all the flashy stuff and the drawing is wack. Banksy There’s a beauty in simplicity. I think it’s a bit like maths, in that you have a right answer and every other answer is wrong. If you’ve got an idea about a picture you want to make there is a perfect picture for it and every other picture is wrong. I haven’t got there yet, but I want all my pictures to be like. bang on. No unnecessary colour, not a single unnecessary line on the whole thing. Just perfect. Like with this cop thing here [a painting of a group of policemen looking hopelessly for the culprit]. I was trying to say, "I got away with it" in as few lines as possible, even if you think you’re being really obvious, it doesn’t always work out like that. The funny thing is I sold one of these to this bird, I had a couple of drinks with her afterwards and she said, "I’m really pleased with that picture, because you don’t see policemen getting drunk do you?" She thought it was two people drinking beer. But I already had the cash in my pocket, like, so I just went, "Yeah, yeah sure". I thought, is someone going to tell her that they’re looking through binoculars not drinking beer? Shok-1 When we were on the phone a while back and I was trying to guess the symbolisms in your images and I got them all completely different to what you meant them to mean. Banksy But then I am fond of changing them halfway through myself! Shok-1 I think it’s quite nice in a way if art is a little bit open-ended. That way the onlooker can have more of a personal involvement. If it’s too regimented and directed in its meaning then it almost excludes the onlooker, like you’re just showing your idea at them. Maybe it’s good to let them come to their own conclusions… Especially if the art is at street level. When did you do that Mona Lisa near Poland Street? Banksy Oh that’s new. I’ve still got to go and put the lyrics on that. Shok-1 That’s a big fucking stencil man! Banksy Did it look right? I painted it and fucked off so I haven’t even looked at it yet. I put "Boom or bust" on it but then I scrubbed it off because it didn’t read very well. I did another one in Leicester Square on the same day. You know, after a while you think, fuck it, I’m in London, let’s take it to the fucking art of London. Doing Leicester Square was satisfying, you can’t get much more central than that. Shok-1 My other favourite hit I saw of yours was the Centre Point one. I tell you what I like about when you use the lettering on its own is that it almost slips past you. Because you get bombarded with so much typography in adverts and stuff…. I saw that hit from the car and I had to double-take because it almost looks like it’s meant to be there, like some official thing. Do people say that to you? Do people think the logo’s like… well I guess branding in a way. Banksy It’s funny because sometimes it goes up so quick and so nice that it’s almost too close to regular signwriting. I did one on the side of this building in Bristol, their sign was really shitty and it was on one end of the wall and my name was right across the middle looking crisp. It was only there for five days, I assume because the owner was like, "Why is someone else’s name across my building better than my own name?!" You could just tell by the way that it was painted over someone had got really pissy about it and that’s an ironic thing – people always complain graffiti is untidy, but if you do something very tight, it pisses them off even more. Shok-1 We noticed when we were in Ireland that sign writing is still like an artform there. Everywhere you go, you see this beautiful hand painted lettering. We got approached by this sign-writer in Limerick while we were painting, he told us that laser-cut lettering had only just started to come over there in the last year… and they paint the pubs. Every English writer must look at the side of pubs; they nearly always have great white walls. Well over there they paint these murals on them or they cut the painting out of wood and put it up there, these incredible hand-painted pieces of artwork. You don’t see that over here. It’s like all those walls that writers are doing in Germany. You don’t get public art jobs like that being given to graffiti people over here, because the country is just too conservative and not open to it. That’s one thing that disappoints me about a lot of graffiti. I mean, there’s all this meaning attached to the fact of where things get placed and the political and sociological meanings, but I kind of get to the point where I wonder if we’re creating all this dialogue to cover up the fact that a lot of it really isn’t saying very much, I mean it does, in fact there’s a story behind every hit, but beyond that… Banksy It’s like the Fume piece over at Royal Oak [25 foot high dub at Paddington mainline]. It’s got to the point now where if you’re going to just write your name, you’re going to have to do it like that to give it a meaning. The funny thing about that piece is that it says loads because it’s huge and the audaciousness of it. Although it says, "Fume" it also says, "fuck you, I can do what I want, where I want, I run this part of London…" Purely because of the size. If it was 5 foot high, it would mean nothing. Shok-1 Another thing I’ve been wondering about your work is that it obviously has this dissident element to it but at the same time it’s also very tongue-in-cheek, so where does it fit? I suppose if someone very conservative saw it then they would think you’re a total anarchist. I don’t know how it’s been received by the graffiti community over here? Banksy I try very hard not to wonder what the graffiti community makes of it. You know the scene, if you want to have a productive life; you’re best off not listening to the average kid with a spraycan in his bag. I think not listening to people is one of the main things you need to make good pictures. Shok-1 I can think of one or two people who’ve had their heads a bit fucked up from listening too much. Banksy I’m aware that I’m your non-graffiti writer’s writer. When I was in Bristol people would say to me, "You’re the only bloke doing graffiti in this town" and I would tell them, no, I can name 25 other people who are up, but because they tag, people just don’t see it. Shok-1 So many people are street bombing now and it’s been going around for so long that the public are desensitised to it I think. It’s like constant background noise, it doesn’t get their attention like it used to. I was really into street bombing for around six years. Then I thought, OK, I’ve been up for years, who gives a shit about seeing my name? So What? I thought, What am I doing now that I haven’t already done? I mean, obviously you do it for other writers to see, but I want more people to pay attention to it than that. Banksy If you want to get up in a major way today, you need to be original rather than prolific, like most things it’s quality over quantity. This "Graffiti Area" stencil is without a doubt the best thing I’ve done, because it’s introducing the X-Factor – a load of shit you have no control over. I put the stencil up and a week later kids have written everywhere all over the wall. I spoke to this Lawyer and he reckoned in his experience that it would be enough of a defence if you were a kid and got picked up by the old bill writing on one of these walls. That would give you enough, ‘reasonable doubt’ to beat the case. The National Highways Agency doesn’t exist and the official crest on it is off a packet of Benson & Hedges. It’s a complete Mickey Mouse thing. Shok-1 But it’s enough for them to say they didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. Banksy And the amazing thing is, if one kid gets off like that, it sets a precedent. That’s what I’m up for now. I’m going to put up 500 of those fuckers and then wait until it ends up in court and see what happens. It’s quite political, because it means you have the right to go out into your community and say how you think it should look, and that you can potentially bypass parliament and change laws. I mean, you could sit there and say that you think it would be better if we allowed more public art in this country. Then you could complain about it. Then you could try and get the council involved. Or you could just put up notices in the middle of the night saying, "You are allowed to paint this wall" and bypass the system. Get a test case and you can potentially get into the statute books. Shok-1 I just read an interview with Dean from Brighton. He’s been using standard graffiti format, just straight letter "Dean" pieces but the difference is that he has really well thought out ideas about where to put them and why. He’s using it to oppose the gentrification going on in Brighton by preventing them from making it into a sanitized, untouched environment. Shok-1 I’ve got a copy of Big Daddy #6 for you here… Banksy Who did this cover? Shok-1 I did. Banksy Bit different for you isn’t it? Shok-1 Well what’s the point of just doing things you know you can do? You have to keep moving on… What’s this stencil made out of card? Banksy Yeah, it was funny the other day, I was putting up that Mona Lisa and this guy keeping lookout was in hysterics because it was really papery card and part of the bazooka kept falling off. He thought I would have cut them out of resin and all kinds of things. A big part of the thing for me is the fact that I’ve only ever used card that was free. I can get a can for 60p, that’s good for 30 stencils and then the cost of a couple of disposable blades and that’s it. It’s really important to me that you can have a huge street campaign that could get you famous in a month if you went nuts, and it would cost you about a tenner, the money factor is what turns me off the gallery circuit, that it costs so much to mount a show. Still, you can have a show that costs you next to nothing, like London, under the bridge. Our deal with that was that we nicked all the materials except for about four pounds worth of black paint. Shok-1 How many people showed up? Banksy On the opening night, about 500 people. We let people know in advance when it was going to happen, told them that they would have to email this address to find out where it was going to be at the last minute because it was all illegal. Six months later Cargo opened their club next to it and the artwork is still up. People have written on it, but the people from the club took a brush and carefully whited all the tags and left the stencils. Shok-1 I see quite a lot of commercially orientated stencils around London. Was that here when you moved in? Banksy Nah. Have you seen the [name removed to avoid undue promotion] ones? They’re everywhere. I saw them in Glasgow and I was lining them out, because they approached me when I first came to London and asked me to do stuff for them for free, even though they’ve got backing. Shok-1 You seem quite solitary in the way you do things… Banksy If there was someone on the same wavelength I would maybe join up and do some things. When I used to do big pieces, I would always do them on my own. One time I went out, I had a friend who was looking out for me. I just started painting a big piece and he goes, "I’ve got a really bad feeling about this". That ruined the whole mission from the word go. I have a project planned with Dane, but I’m going to carry on doing this mostly by myself. Creative Vandalism (out and about with Banksy in London) Squall Magazine Source By Jim Carey May 30, 2002