Category: 2008

2008, Exhibitions, Originals, USA

Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill. New York, October 2008.

by banksyunofficial

Banksy opened his first exhibition in New York, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill, featuring mainly animatronics. Almost all of the content was used the following year in the Banksy vs. Bristol Museum exhibition. The official Village Pet Store website is still up and running: http://thevillagepetstoreandcharcoalgrill.com/menu.html

In Banksy’s own words:

“New Yorkers don’t care about art, they care about pets. So I’m exhibiting them instead. I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing. I took all the money I made exploiting an animal in my last show and used it to fund a new show about the exploitation of animals. If its art and you can see it from the street, I guess it could still be considered street art.”

Photos: Getty images

2008, Street Art, USA

Street Art Abroad. 2008

by banksyunofficial

Besides the stencils in New Orleans, a handful more pieces were documented in the US in 2008. At least two in the Los Angeles area and a few rats on billboards in New York before the Village Pet Store exhibition in October 2008.

2008, Street Art, USA

Street Art Blitz in New Orleans. August 2008

by banksyunofficial

As reported by Natalie Hanman in the Guardian on 1 September 2008:

Street artist Banksy has taken his trade to the streets of New Orleans, as the city remembers those whose lives were destroyed by hurricane Katrina three years ago – and the country braves itself for another storm in hurricane Gustav, which hit the US Gulf coast this morning.

The graffiti artist’s latest creations of more than a dozen murals – which include depictions of a young boy flying a fridge like a kite and Abraham Lincoln as a homeless man – adorn buildings around the city, according to the New York Times.

A statement released by Banksy reveals that they were created in response to Fred Radtke aka the “Grey Ghost”, an anti-graffiti campaigner who uses grey paint to cover up street art. The statement also said: “Three years after Katrina I wanted to make a statement about the state of the cleanup operation.”

From: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/01/graffiti

Photos: http://www.banksy.co.uk, http://www.nola.com, http://www.uk.complex.com

2008, Exhibitions, Street Art, UK

The Cans Festival. London, May 2008.

by banksyunofficial

Banksy organised The Cans Festival London over the weekend of May 3–5, 2008. The event took place at Leake Street, a tunnel beneath London Waterloo station formerly used by Eurostar. Team Banksy invited approximately 40 street artists from around the world to participate in the exhibition.

Photos: Romany WG and others

A PDF of the official Cans Festival programme can be downloaded here: 

cans-festival-programmeDownload

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As reported by the Guardian on 6 May 2008:

Looking for radical art? Try the South Bank, not Banksy

Banksy’s Cans festival, bringing together 40 of the world’s best stencil artists, can’t compete with the 40-year-old posters in the Hayward Gallery

Dazzling but blunt … Banksy’s Cans festival. Piss Alley, we call it. The Times this weekend dubbed it “London’s hottest venue“. For most, Leake Street has always been Leake Street by name, Leake Street by nature. For Banksy, though, this tunnel road was just the kind of “filth pit” he’d been looking for. Remembering to ask permission from owners Eurostar, he gathered together the world’s best stencil artists to spray paint the tunnel in time for the bank holiday, and lo, the Cans festival was born.

That was one exhibition of street art you could have seen over the weekend. The other was May 68: Street Posters from the Paris Rebellion at the Hayward Gallery’s Project Space.

Despite the poised irreverence and iconoclasm of the Cans festival, it was the posters in the Hayward that – despite all the failed hopes of the ’68 generation, despite the simplicity and even naivety of the images – still grip, still provoke. Truth be told, radical art today is anything but: it may look sharp, but its edge is blunt.

“Gentrify this” was the up-yours slogan greeting the crowds at Banksy’s festival. But gentrification is exactly what these artists had achieved. The closest you came to barricades at this event were the security barriers channelling punters inside. The score was laid down on the festival’s website: after detailing the opening hours (for Piss Alley! – I never thought I’d live to see the day), it sternly warns “After 10pm access is strictly limited … and will get even more so if anyone else tries throwing bottles at security”.

And just in case anyone thinks about making a spontaneous contribution, the website makes clear that artists coming to stencil need to report to reception and be shown where to paint, with a disclaimer explaining that “painting outside the designated area may well result in prosecution”.

But there we have it. For all the brilliance of the stencil artists, the messy, apocalyptic feel of the thing was so in tune with our general sense of the world going to hell in a handcart that it confirmed the status quo rather than challenged it. This was iconoclasm with an unremitting ironic twist. Don’t like religion? Here’s the Pope morphed with Marilyn Monroe in the Seven Year Itch. Wanna take a pop at film icons? Here’s a cat scratching Audrey Hepburn’s eyes out. Apart from some notable exceptions – such as the central tree sculpture sprouting surveillance cameras – it was the backwards-looking creed that was striking.

Whether looking for icons to smash or to praise, it was the past that informed. In the brochure the political icon held aloft is Stuart Christie, the Scottish anarchist who was a member of the Angry Brigade in the 1970s. William Blake is misrepresented as an outsider hounded by the establishment who labelled him mad and buried him in a heretics’ graveyard (Blake was buried by choice in the dissenters’ graveyard at Bunhill Fields, with the standard Church of England service). Truth is, the Cans festival’s rebels without a cause cannot bear to look into the future. They don’t trust it and have more in common with the self-named ancients who gathered around Blake in his later years, bemoaning the modern industrial world and conservatively clutching at a “golden age”.

How different from the Paris posters of ’68 which brim with the possibilities of tomorrow. Whatever the disappointments of the uprisings, these images convey powerful and provocative messages. The outline of a cross drilling into the profile of a head communicates the perceived problem with religion. Irony – that constant bugbear of art today – works very differently here. It is a device to drive the message home, most often in the juxtaposition of text and image. A poster bearing the words “Retour à normale …” has row upon row of identical sheep heading back to the pen. A young face swathed in bandages and secured with a safety pin through the mouth is captioned “Une jeunesse que l’avenir inquiète trop souvent …” (“Youth worries too often about the future”). The future was what young people would make if they would be heard. Today, our radical young artists are jeunesse-ancients, world-weary before their time. To paraphrase Blake, the Cans festival was of the devil’s party without knowing it.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2008/may/06/lookingforradicalarttryth