Weston-Super-Mare: The Pleasures of English Seaside Towns Part 3 of 3

So we come to the last English seaside town; Weston-Super-Mare. This is a town just outside the mouth of the Severn Estuary, an estuary with one of the highest tides in the world. So when the sea goes out, you are faced with a sea of mud (Weston-Super-Mud); it's not the mouth of the Severn so much as the spot just below the Severn where the drool of the river dribbles out into the sea.

But it's kind of beautiful in a run-down sort of way, and that is what attracted Banksy to build his Dismaland there. That and the fact that he used to go there as a kid to face the kinds of disappointments you experience in every English seaside town. But even more so at Weston. It's seaside with extra disappointment, where you take pleasure in the lack of consolations available to alleviate the pain of the rain, the wind and the mud.

For our final English seaside adventure (see Number 1: West Kirby and Number 2: Blackpool here) we bought our tickets for Dismaland. At £5 they were £3.50 cheaper than it cost us to see 12 Canalettos at the Holbourne Museum and almost a full £10 cheaper than seeing a major  show at Tate Modern or the like. So bargain there.

And we started queuing. The queues were massive but once you got in the fun started with the security installation/performance piece. My daughter was cordoned off from the rest of the queue and had to wait 5 minutes till she had 'calmed down' before she was let in.

Once through the door, we saw the ramshackle castle, a shabby range of stalls and a bunch of morose looking helpers. These are performers too and they're great, all dead-eyed and grim, slotting you right into that off-key theme park mode. If you've never been to a theme park before, never taken some kind of pleasure in either their thrills or absurdity, then I guess it's all a bit puzzling. But I loved them.

The best attendants for us were the ones on the fishing stall. Here the idea is you catch a duck from the oily-looking water (complete with oil-slicked pelican) and you win a prize that is beyond crap. Except the sarcastic attendants would move your rod, throw things at the duck, tell you what you're doing wrong and generally look miserable and pissed off. It was great, and recognisably connects to that role playing element of pretending to have fun and then actually having fun that you get in a regular theme park. And the hooks were bigger than the eyes they were supposed to hook into.

There were little installations and deck chairs from which you could watch short films which were sharp and funny (watch Santiago Grasso/Patricia Plaza's El Empleo here and Teddy has an Operation here). Before going, I found that one of the irritating things about Dismaland was the idea that he was making it deliberately bad so that he was covered whichever way it turned out. Good he wins, bad he wins. But it wasn't bad at all and in places it was quite brilliant.

So we watched and as we watched the sun went down, the blue sky darkened and the lights came on and Dismaland became beautiful.

So the park came beautiful, and it became alive, it clicked into that night time funfair vibe. Banksy might pretend that this is all dismal (and the dismal is referring more to how dismal England is as to the dismalness of theme parks), but it looked great lit up and it was meant to

And because it was evening and there was no rain, most everyone was cheerful. The everyone was pretty mixed; this wasn't your usual art crowd, there was little silent chin-stroking going on and there wasn't too much self-consciousness . Dismaland felt like fun and it was fun, especially if you understand what the point of it is. It was enjoyable just to be there, even if it meant standing in a queue  (not in the rain).

So we queued for the castle to see the dead princess and have our picture taken. This is the main event (if you want one) of Dismaland and it's all to do with photography and how we live it. We looked at the crashed carriage, we took pictures of it (the whole site is a massive photo opportunity) and then we had our own picture taken and queued up to buy a copy of us in front of the carriage.

The placing selling the prints was staffed by sarcasm who wouldn't necessarily sell you a print even if you could find it; the computers they had weren't really designed to make it easy to spot your tiny figures in a mass of other tiny-figure peopled pictures. "Don't bother. You want a picture, go outside and come in again," the elbowing crowds were told.

But we got our picture; of us standing in front of a crashed carriage with a dead princess hanging out who was Diana, no matter what they say. Except of course it wasn't Diana, in the same way a camel is not a horse. Very different. We are all rubber-necking voyeurs at the end of the day.

Yes, it's predictable, but the thing is Dismaland has somehow got an audience (and a diverse audience as far as art goes) for his predictability. He's successful! He's accessible! He gets a big audience! He's easy to understand! People like him! How dare he!

In that respect, Banksy is a bit like the Jamie Oliver of the street art world. He's massively influential, people understand him, he's effective, and he's direct and simple, True, Jamie Oliver is a bit annoying at times, he's everywhere, he's far too rich, and he likes having it both ways. Just like Banksy.

But Oliver's heart's in the right place (Oliver has just started a new anti-sugar campaign) , his recipes work and if you try them you're not going to spend three hours wandering round town looking for the right ingredients (sorry Yottam - I never did find those pomegranate molasses and nigella seeds. And I live in Bath!).

And that was that, except for the galleries and the political corner, both of which I enjoyed up to a point, but believe me the gallery is not the best part of Dismaland.

So that is Dismaland; a performance, a participation, a screening, an installation, a photo-opportunity, an art gallery all wrapped up in the conventions of the funfair and the English seaside holiday, Dismaland takes on the disappointments of the English seaside holiday, and makes them entertaining and fun. 

And quite brilliant. 

I wonder if it would be quite the same in the driving rain though.

James Chip Thomas, JR and Banksy

The public art above (the bottom two photos are by Gary O’Brien) are by James Chip Thomas.
Thomas pastes up the giant  pictures on  a Navajo reservation where he works as a doctor. The pictures are nostalgic but also tragic and the few that he has made so far seem to integrate perfectly with the dilapidated aridity of their surroundings. It would be interesting to know exactly why he photographs what he does, and his rationale for siting the works.

I think Thomas was inspired by the giant portraits of JR, but though I admire the energy and ambition of JR, I am never quite convinced by either the pictures he makes, the sites he chooses and the combination of the two. Still, his work makes an impact. 

For more information on Chip Thomas, see Erika Schulz.

To see more of Chip Thomas’ photos, visit his flickr page.

Oh, and here's a little bit of Banksy while we're at it.

Banksy on the Israeli Wall

More graffiti/street art here. 

And this comes via Prison Photography again.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Seen the film now and everything in the previous post is kind of completely false - but still true at the same time. I loved the film, and it's all in good faith, but with a few things left unsaid.

Towards the end of the film somebody asked, What is the joke, who is it being played on, is there a joke? Indeed. If there wasn't a joke, why was I laughing. Isn't it all a joke? Banksy - still a Bristol-ish boy at heart.

Banksy and Brainwash

I haven't seen Banksy's film, Exit Through the Gift Shop yet (I babysat so others could see it) but that won't stop a blog post on the film and it's main character, Mr Brainwash - a mad film maker and graffiti obsessive who suddenly starts making his own work and becomes a massive success..

There are all kinds of manipulations at work here, so not seeing the film is probably an advantage in trying to untie the threads of deceit Banksy weaves. He seems to want to encourage the idea that Mr Brainwash, aka Thierry Guetta (perhaps) is at least partially a figment of the Banksy imagination, an idea he has foisted on the art world and fed on the internet through evasion and ambiguity.

Issues of identity, authority, authorship, ownership, marketing, finance, celebrity, information, the internet, idleness and hype are apparent in the work of Banksy and Mr Brainwash. Is Brainwash real (is Banksy real), did he create the work (we know, or we are supposed to understand that Mr Brainwash's work is created by a band of screen-print art-monkeys), how much is Banksy involved, is he Banksy.

The work is uh-yes-and-no to all of them. We don't know, we have no way of knowing, but perhaps that doesn't matter, because Banksy has us all jumping through hoops trying to know. All this guessing is part of his grand Duchampian thought experiment - in which case the work might have value. But what if it's not - then does it have value? What is the work anyway? Is it the Brainwash prints or the totality of which they are part? I don't know. Do you?

The very idea that we are thinking about these questions, possibly gives Brainwash value and makes it part of our discussion and understanding of art, where it comes from and its value; and the nature of value. I don't think the Brainwash prints should have any financial value, but they do have a philosophical one as part of the grand Banksy project. Or even not as part of a grand Banksy project. Smoke and mirrors wrapped in a  name that disguises nothing. Brainwash? Come on?

There is little  information on the internet about either Mr Brainwash or Thierry Guetta - the best thing is this interview in the Times. Here are some excerpts.

"If the film was intended as a satire on the superficiality of the contemporary art scene, the satire was going over the heads of the buyers forking out $50,000 to $200,000 a canvas. “It doesn’t matter if he is good or bad,” one said. “He has the right connections, and that’s why I am buying. Plus, I like him.”
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“People want to know: am I real? Am I joking? Am I Banksy? Is it a whole joke by Banksy? But the more they see me the more it becomes real to them. It would ’ave to be a big, big joke. Who would do it? Who would ’ire all these people?”
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He’s quite open about the fact that he doesn’t construct the work himself. “There might be 20 people in my bus but I am the driver,” he says. “I am the one who say ‘stop’. I am the one who say ‘I don’t like it’. I am the one who say ‘the face is not right’. I am the one who say ‘I want this like that’.” When the work is done he embeds dollar bills and sometimes drops of his own blood into the work to authenticate them. “For the people in me who believe I do it 100 per cent,” he says, pointing to a wall of portraits down which a can of paint has been slopped. “You see this? I did this yesterday. Drop some paint down that wall. I felt like the painting was nothing, so dropping some paint it become something, something artistic, something street . . .”

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If the whole stunt was intended as a joke about art and authenticity — a twist on the old “a monkey could do it” line — it appears to have far exceeded its maker’s intentions. Shrouded in shadow, Banky ends the documentary wondering if he did the right thing launching Mr Brainwash on the world. “Andy Warhol was replicating images to show they were meaningless,” he says. “And now, thanks to Mr Brainwash, they’re definitely meaningless.”

Ultimately if the art world really is so supercial, Banksy and should get on with doing something better with his life. Instead Banksy states the bleeding obvious, telling us things we know already or should know already. Which is what Richard Hamilton did, what all the best artists do.

So in the end, you do see Mr Brainwash and think, I could do that. And you get onto photoshop and mess with the curves and hue. And end up with something a monkey really could do. As you can see from my efforts above, Mr Brainwash has nothing to fear. But if I spend another 10 minutes and work out how to use that mask thingy.....

The Grand Canyon as a gated community

In Sunday's Independent, Michael Brooks looks at how Nobel Prize winners have been mocked on the way to their great discoveries. The new vaccine that reduces the risk of HIV infection was mocked by competitors in the field, ( "Everything I've seen about the Thai trial suggests that it doesn't have a prayer."), Crick and Watson's (and somebody elses's?) work on the structure DNA was scoffed at, Black Holes and Continental Drift were just fantasies until they stopped being fantasies and became new universal truths.

"Given that, you might wonder how science ever progresses. But that is the beauty of the system: unstoppable curiosity, coupled with a sheer bloody-mindedness and rhino-thick skin, can overcome the resistance. The stories of many Nobel laureates are of ridicule and persecution worn down by dogged persistence; the road to Stockholm is lined with jeering colleagues."

The same kind of thing happens in politics - any idea that brings something new, especially if it progressive in some way, is mocked at. In Britain, the idea of universal primary education was fought by many in the church and business, making child labour illegal was a violation of the rights of free enterprise, free health care, pensions and the minimum wage were argued to be counter-productive to the interests of wider society. The Race Relations Acts, The Clean Air Act, Laws against domestic violence, the Sexual Relations Act were all fought against as being some kind of invasion of privacy and limitation of our right to bully and batter and abuse.

Which brings me on to Rupert Cornwell on America's National Parks, a creation of government that is universally approved of. Cornwell asks, "...what might have happened to some truly famous places is no laughing matter. The idea of the national parks, in the words of their most famous presidential advocate, Teddy Roosevelt, was that such special places "should be preserved for all the people and not confined to the rich". As it was, back in the 1870s, before New York set up a state park in the area, you had to pay a private huckster for a decent view of the Niagara Falls. The same fate might have befallen Yosemite. As for the Grand Canyon, Burns speculates, it would probably be run by a gated community."

Vietnam reinvented

Both Eddie Adams and Nick Ut's Vietnam pictures are reinvented all over the place - the first image above I found stencilled under a bridge on the banks of the Avon in Bath, and the same theme has been used all over the place (in Brian Haw's parliament protest for example, but not in Mark Wallinger's installation ).


Banksy did his Ronald and Mickey take on the Nick Ut, and Manit Sriwanichpoom reshot it for his This Bloodless War series (which he showed in little happenings that took place on the streets of Bangkok) , a commentary on Thai Consumption which followed on from his Pink Man series.

Sriwanichpoom is doing black and white anthropological portraits of his neighbours now which you can find (along with the Pink Man/Bloodless War work on the link above). There's also a short interview here.