Banksy's documentary Exit through the Gift Shop a collaboration with Thierry Guetta, was a film I very much looked forward to. I was keen to see who the enigmatic man was. What surprised me most was the film was not about Banksy, but about Thierry Guetta. But as I later discovered, it revealed a lot about Banksy and the world we live in, through Thierry Guetta's journey.
Thiery aka Mister Brainwash (MBW) shot to fame as a street artist after taking on Banksy's challenge to drop his film project and to become a street artist instead. This is where the story began. Perhaps Thierry was Banksy's artwork which spun out of control and took on a life form of its own. I say this in a loving not cynical way. I liked Banksy and I liked the suggestion that he was the black reaper at work, determining the fate of a mortal.
The film took an interesting turn when the camera was turned on Thierry. Till that point, I was a bit disappointed with the conventional narrative structure. A bit of observational footage intercut with interviews, narrated by a well known actor. And generally at that point I felt the pace was too quick, not allowing me to engage enough with the featured artists and their work. But to my surprise about 3/3 in, a turn took place and I was able to enjoy the documentary. I found out more about Banksy in that last third.
It seemed to me at first that Thierry's fate as a street artist was orchestrated by Banksy. There was an element of suspense built into the film as I waited for Thierry to fall to his artistic death decided by Banksy. But that moment didn't happen. For example when Thierry asked Banksy for a quote to help him promote his show, I expected Banksy to react less amenably. But nothing like that happened and thankfully there were no exhibits of clichéed artistic behaviour.
This said a lot about Banksy. Maybe this documentary was about Banksy in a roundabout way after all. As a side comment, I also found some of the narrative detail revealing. For example, I enjoyed getting a tiny glimpse into the personal world of Banksy through a close-up shot of his hand holding a bunch of £10 forged bills he'd printed, where I noticed the ring on his finger. Whether intentional or not, it was a little window into his personal life.
I also found Banksy's views on Thierry's success interesting, which said more about the society that we live in than they did about Thierry: "I don’t know what it means Thierry's huge success and arrival in the art world. I mean maybe Thierry was a genius all along. Maybe he got a bit lucky. Maybe it means art is a bit of a joke." It also revealed Banksy's down-to-earth side, a fact I enjoyed discovering about him.
The current obsession with celebrity and instant fame as widely seen in popular culture, was best captured by Shepard Fairey, an established graffiti artist who underlined the irony of it all: "The whole phenomeon of Thierry's obsession with street art, becoming a street artist, a lot of suckers buying into his show and him selling a lot of expensive art very quickly...it’s anthropologically sociologically...it’s a fascinating thing to observe and maybe there’s somethings to be learnt from it."
Perhaps Exit through the Gift Shop was more of an experiment of today's popular culture. It revealed that Thierry was essentially a marketing phenomenon. Only time will judge his quality as an artist, a point Thierry raised himself, but till then I feel it was a case where the artist was the art.
No comments:
Post a Comment