Spray Mount

Last night, delightful evening with M- and her new friends H- and P- to the South Bank. I had heard about this Banksy exhibition that was on - there was a line about it on the BBC website - but I probably wouldn’t have bothered going down had she not suggested it. I have been sceptical about Banksy, but more of that later.
The holiday was the first time in a long while that we have seen a real degree of sun in this country, and the chance to walk about in light clothes and enjoy sitting outside. The South Bank is a great place for people watching, and while we were waiting for P- to turn up. Dressing up was happening again. Home-made fashions were out and about.
‘It all looks very 70s tonight,’ I said.
‘It’s a very 70s time in fashion now,’ M- said.
A little girl in brilliant pink shoes won approval, but the contingent of neo-punks with scalp tattoos got the thumbs down.
‘Ill-advised retro,’ I said.
‘That’s not retro,’ M- said, ‘that’s ret-wrong!’
A man strode past in a brown suede baseball jacket, a fixed stare on his face, a brown beard and fuzz of hair, looking a little like Michael Landon in I Was A Teenage Werewolf but more like...
‘Carlos the Jackal,’ I said. ‘He looks like he can’t move his head separate from his body.’
‘He gets the prize for nutter of the day,’ M- said.
Top marks to a girl in a fabulous, layered Kansas Dorothy dress, a green-haired girl carrying a large Garfield doll (all right, that was a majority decision) and another who had every shade of blue atop her stiletto heels, but the walk to make it work.
‘She could wear anything with that walk,’ M- said.
A man dressed almost exactly like Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man did not go down so well with our jury.
‘There is a New York magazine that does this as a feature,’ I said.
‘Vice Dos and Don’ts,’ H- said. ‘I know it.’
‘Did you know you can get Dos and Don’ts action figures now?’ I asked. ‘Only in the States, though.’
By the time P- arrived, the crowd to see the Banksy exhibition had dwindled down a little, but was still amazingly long. The show was in an archway under the old Eurostar terminal, but the queue was corralled into a tight snake. I was unsurprised to find The Retwrongs and Demolition Man in the line with us, but also a startling Pete Doherty look-alike. Fatter than the real one, as H- pointed out at once, but he had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to resemble his idle idol.
I was impressed by the first piece - a row of Campbell’s Tomato Soup cans with aerosol tops on them, although our fellow visitors were perplexed by the significance.
But the art in general? Weeeell. Remember the ‘Tea Break’ cartoons the Daily Mirror used to run next to the Old Codgers column? They always had a man on a desert island, a secretary confused by some new office gizmo, a belligerent mother-in-law or a drink-driving husband. Well, to me a lot of Britart is like those cartoons. Too much of it is like a visual joke. You look at it and you go, “tee hee”, and move on.
Sarah Lucas fits that bill, in my books. See this fried breakfast? See it? Yeah? It’s a breakfast, right? All greasy sausages and eggs? Well look at it upside down and, you know... doesn’t it look a bit like a set of female genitalia! How we laughed! But once you’ve got the joke, what more has it to say?
Now, the thing I have about Banksy is the same kind of thing I have with Britart in general. I get the joke... now what? A great many of the graffiti works were parodies of familiar paintings, copies of iD and Face covers from the 1980s or visual jokes of some description or other. But, in the end, I was impressed with the exhibition. It won me over. I had expected just an archway lockup spray-painted to amuse, but this was an entire street and Banksy and his pals had turned the whole stretch into a vast installation, complete with cars - crashed and submerged into the asphalt - a piano, an artificial beach, and an ice-cream van. They’d put a gigatonne of effort into this and it was an on-going project. There were still people spray-painting the next section as we watched. What will happen to it? Hard to say, but there are images from the exhibition well taken by a visitor and posted on their blog for you to look at until H- gets his up (he had a very professional lens on his camera, so I’m expecting fine things from him).