By the Waterfront

...or playing with Photoshop

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.

Looking at You, Looking at Banksy

Although the Banksy exhibition had taken over the whole museum, there was only one small room crowded both with his paintings, and people looking at the paintings. The hoardes of people gathering around exhibits and very Britishly politely waiting and shuffling forwards to peer at them was quite incredible, the only time I’ve seen anything comparable was when the Terracotta Warrior exhibition was on at the British Museum. I no doubt got in a lot of people’s way, as I found looking at people looking at the art quite fascinating.

I had to turn my flash on my camera off though, Bristol isn’t really infested with people whose faces are melting.

This was my world, go check out some others.

Tomorrow I will have a selection of my favourite of his photographical works. Finally, I hear you say!

Queuing For Banksy

Last Monday, my friend and I went to the Bristol Museum vs Banksy exhibition. We had assured ourselves that the queue, on a chilly Monday morning, would not be too long. Unfortunately, we were suffering from the same mass delusion as the other few hundred people waiting to get in.

And being July in England, men wore T-Shirts, women flimsy dresses and cropped cardigans, as we shivered under a cloudy sky and sporadic showers. Apart from the small smug minority who’d come prepared for a Biblical deluge, complete with knee length pac-a-macs, sou’westers, umbrellas, and in some cases, a lunch box of home made sandwiches and snacks, suggesting that perhaps reports of the queuing time had been over exaggerated.


It wasn’t that bad – about a 45 minute wait, but obviously, we managed to be in front of a possibly the most caustically irritating people there. They were a late thirtysomething couple, divorcees with children, who were at that awkward stage where you’re having sex but not yet a fully established couple.

And I know that they’re having sex because apparently the woman didn’t realise that if you’re talking in quite a loud voice people standing a foot in front of you can hear everything you’re saying, or, more likely, she did know and was indulging the kind of attention seeking ploy that is tedious in a teenager but mortally embarrassing after the age of 25. My mind recoiled from the images conjured in it, like a foot from an ill placed slug.

The guy repeatedly remarked about how she’d told him there wouldn’t be a queue, in a way that was, on the surface, a joke but you could tell underneath he was pissed off and didn’t want to be there and was only doing because he still felt the need to impress her and that in three months time it’d come up in an argument, ‘what about that time you made me stand in the rain for 45 minutes to get into that bloody art exhibition.’

She, however, appeared to be experiencing a queue for the first time. As behoves an English queue outside a museum, everyone was very well behaved, needing no telling to keep to one side of the street or not to cut in or jostle. This did not stop her trying to peer on tip toes towards the front of the line, wondering where the line went (I had to restrain myself from turning round and telling her presumably the entrance after she said this five times in twenty minutes), whether people were cutting in, whether this was the right queue (no, this is the queue for people who don’t want to see the ground breaking art exhibition and instead want to peer at fossils in the museum vaults), why were people all bunched up ahead (where the queue was snaked around the museum entrance), whether the entrance was on that side or this of portico.

By the time we’d got to entrance I’m not sure if I was glad or sad that you can’t carry firearms here.
A twenty something man also attracted my attention because he was wearing a university society T-Shirt, which in the UK is normally a sign of being remarkably socially inept, and had an aura of being extremely peculiar. The kind of person who isn’t aware that his fellow students don’t avoid him because he’s different per se, but because his different in a way that suggests it’s only a matter of time before he’s arrested for flashing people or having dodgy pornography.

I felt justified in my initial judgement when I happened to find myself looking at the same painting. ‘Dogging!’ he loudly and lovingly exclaimed, actually, actually rubbing his hands together like a cartoon Dickensian villain, with a fervour that was enough to make me move rather swiftly to the other end of the gallery and leave him with a remarkably large amount of uninvaded personal space.

(If you don’t know what dogging is, and can’t work it out from the picture, don’t google it.)

More Banksy, and less sarcastic commentary, tomorrow.