Finally...The Exhibition

The exhibition was roughly split up into four areas: the room of Banksy’s paintings, a room of installations with an animal rights theme (no photos of this as the low light, flash restriction and moving objects did not lend itself to decent snappage), the lobby, filled with the burnt out ice cream truck in yesterdays post and statues, and then the upper galleries of the museum which were sporadically littered with added objects and subverted paintings.

Although I was vaguely aware of Banksy, and his hilarious ability to highlight the petty and self righteous bureaucracy of various agencies, I hadn’t really paid much attention to him, and would never have visited the exhibition if it my friend hadn’t suggested it.

Now, I’m a confirmed fan. His works attract your attention and make you laugh, which I think is valuable in itself. When did laughter become a totally unacceptable response to art? I remember the filthy looks me and (the same) friend got in the National Portrait Gallery when we came across a portrait of Sir Francis Drake, trussed into a salmon pink, frilly get up, and the dissonance between what that image says to us in the 21st century, that basically he looks like a bit of a pansy who is probably going to get a good kicking, and the reality of him being a chancer and a pirate, engaged in the dangerous activity of poetically-politically courting Elizabeth was just too much, and we dissolved into laughter.

But after that, little thoughts come unbidden into your mind, little thoughts about big things. He seems to manage, with an appearance of effortlessness, what a lot of modern artists fail to do, with a great deal of self indulgent pomp and waffling and postmodernist justification.

This image was one of my favourites, although perhaps a tad depressing to have as a print in the living room.

These are two of the subverted paintings that were inserted into the art gallery section. Some of them seemed a bit samey, or had a hint of done by numbers about them, but I loved these two, Agency Worker and Flight Into Egypt.

I liked the sudden, shocking reminder of Agency Worker that the anonymous peasants in bucolic English pastorals, for some reason Contable in particular was brought to mind, were not only real humans, but often, far from living in a rural idyll, had to survive shoddy living and working conditions, considerable insecurity and the threat of destitution. How often though, are these people almost invisible to us when we looks at pastoral paintings.