On the 12th of June I wrote an article about Banksy’s up and coming exhibition Graffiti Artist Banksy’s Summer Show 2009: Banksy vs. Bristol Museum which was published on the opening day of the exhibition. Bristol is an area of the country we have never been to and before the exhibition closed we booked a couple of nights at a hotel in Bristol to go and see the exhibition and take a look at Banksy’s purported home city.

We had read that the exhibition was drawing a lot of visitors and on checking in to the hotel we were told that we may have to queue for up to three hours.

That evening we walked into the city centre which was about ten minutes away, had a quick look around and found somewhere to eat and also the location of the Museum for the next morning.

The Queuing Opportunity

The following morning after an early rise and breakfast in the hotel we walked the mile or so to Bristol Museum. While I took a couple of photos of the posters in front of the museum, my wife said she would go and join the end of the queue.

As I went back to join her I thought that we were early enough, at 8:15 a.m. for the ten o’clock opening time: there were only about forty people waiting in front of the museum – but my wife was not at the back of the queue. I looked further along the street and realised that a gap in the line had been created so as not to block an adjacent café. There at the corner of the street was an attendant in her high-viz jacket with people next to her queuing around the corner of the street. Undaunted but disappointed at the queue being longer than I thought I went around the corner to be met by the following sight

Somebody had spray painted a stencil underneath the street sign: “This is not a queing opportunity” a play on words of an earlier Banksy that appeared on a bridge in London with a view of the Houses of Parliament that read “This is not a viewing opportunity”. (However the lack of attention to detail in the spelling of “queing” showed it to be a fake.)

I walked past the throng of people that snaked backwards and forwards up and down the street to find my way to the back. To my dismay across the street from the “end” of the queue there was another attendant in high-viz jacket with crowds of people behind him disappearing out of sight around a bend in the road in the distance. This had to be the end of the queue? No. At the bend, it carried on to the end of the road. As I reached the end of the road I already knew what to expect: the lines of people carried on around the corner into the next street, where I passed another few hundred people before finally finding my wife at the back of the queue.

Talking to the people around us, we estimated that there were in the region of 2,000 people in the queue ahead of us.

The museum must have opened earlier than planned and we started to move, around about 9:00 a.m.

Our wonderful British weather didn’t let us down as we waited, giving us sunny breaks and torrential downpours. This was too good an opportunity for the street vendors of Bristol to miss, coming around at regular intervals offering bin-liner like waterproof capes and umbrellas for sale.

For hours people were still walking past us to join the now invisible back of the queue, leading my wife to comment that it reminded her of the lyrics from “War of the Worlds”:  “…And still they come.”

Eventually our wait was over and around five hours, from first arriving, we finally got into the exhibition

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The Viewing Opportunity

The exhibition was a mixture of old and new. The centre of the main hall had the receptionist in a burnt out ice-cream van, complete with melted ice-cream, accompanied by one of Banksy’s favourite topics – a riot policeman, animated on a child’s coin operated horse ride. (Note the “Caution: Beware of Children” sign on the back of the van – armed with bottle and knife.)

This central exhibit was flanked by Banksy’s take on classical style sculptures, including “Angel of the North”, “Shopping” and “Homeless”

What amused me was the way he had made use of existing pieces and added to them, such as the lion that appears to have eaten the lion tamer. Or in “Escape from Guantanamo”, where the figure in internee overalls has been placed in an existing exhibit of a box-winged aircraft.

The last time we saw a Guantanamo detainee was when Banksy sneaked him into the enclosure at “The Big Thunder Mountain Railroad Ride” at Disneyland in California. (Banksy Punked Paris Hilton: Cunning Stunts).

Off the central exhibition other rooms housed some of his studio works that we are perhaps more familiar with as well as pieces that appear to be new – even Michael Jackson made an appearance!

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One room had been set aside to display the animatronics exhibits that first appeared in New York in the “Pet shop and Charcoal Grill” exhibition (Urban Graffiti Artist Banksy Opens a Pet Shop)

Having previously only seen the monkey artist, the rabbit preening herself, Tweety, the fish sticks swimming in a fish bowl and the rest of the pieces on video, it was great to see them close up and to be able to move around them and view  these mobile pieces from all angles.

For me, I have to take my hat off to Banksy and the museum staff for the clever way the exhibition was arranged.

To see all of his pieces you had to view the whole of the museum and galleries. As well as the main exhibition area, his work had been placed amongst other exhibits in the building and so trying to find them all became a game of “hunt the Banksy”

The canvases were fairly easy to spot as they were on view alongside other more formal works in the galleries.

(Venus undergoing cosmetic surgery)

(The Flight into Egypt)

(The figure in the last picture above is very reminiscent of a graffiti piece that was spotted in Birmingham Alabama around the time that Banksy “did” New Orleans (Banksy Storms New Orleans: Banksy Vs. the Grey Ghost))

Others that took a little more finding where such pieces as the “caveman” piece tucked away in a glass cabinet, along with the usual Museum exhibits. (This actually belongs to the British Museum since Banksy sneaked it into one of their displays in a previous stunt)

Worth the Queue

Had the exhibition been worth the queuing? Most certainly. To be able to view his work full size rather than on a computer screen or in a book or magazine was well worth it.

And what of the museum and Bristol?

A few days after the exhibition closed thisisbristol.co.uk reported:

“The exhibition, which attracted 4,000 people a day, pumped an estimated £10 million into the city.

Acting head of Bristol museum service Paul Barnett says although staff are exhausted, the exhibition has given the museum a fresh injection of life. He said:

“We would love to retain the buzz of the last three months – I am not sure ‘normal’ will ever be the same here again. It has given us all a renewed imagination about how to fill the spaces he has left. The team has done a brilliant job over the past few days. There have been 100 crates coming in and they are each for an individual piece and have to be checked for damage and packaged very carefully – they are very valuable. Everybody is exhausted and it will take us a few days to get it out of the system. A lot of people are having a break because they have worked non-stop for 12 weeks. Banksy is a one-off but the public have showed how much they love the reinterpretation of this building by a contemporary artist and we can’t ignore that.”

PS

The cream on the cake.

Although the batteries on the camera had long since given up the ghost in the exhibition, as we walked back to the hotel that evening we came across an older well known original piece of Banksy Graffiti on a wall that I managed to capture on the camera on my phone.

For more articles about Banksy by C. Jordan

http://thebanksyblog.blogspot.com/

or on Amazing Art by C. Jordan
The Amazing Epic 3D Street Art of Edgar Mueller  
The Amazing Hand Art of Guido Daniele
Amazing Art: The Dynamic Driftwood Horse Sculptures of Heather Jansch