Montage-it: Banksy

My photomontage documents the changing surroundings around a building designed as a gallery and studio for Banksy. My goal with the montages was to make them artworks within themselves, recording the buildings surroundings, within which the building resides unobtrusively. I also strived to give an insight into Banksy as an artist. Banksy is a postmodern street artist from Bristol and has done works of art, if satirical graffiti may be called art, all over the world. As an internationally famous vandal, Banksy’s true identity is anonymous. His works are often satirical, crude, and as a whole illegal. In a way I found myself satirizing a master of satire within my photomontage and the design of the building itself. I unveiled the anonymous Banksy as a relaxed, observant, well-dressed, young man, who is present in each photomontage. I designed his studio, after much experimentation with postmodern designs, as a simple box, with partitions based on a diagonal grid floor plan. In two opposite corners are a toilet and storage area, and in the other two, an entrance to a spiral staircase enclosed with glass leading to the studio on the upper floor, and the main entrance to the gallery space on the lower floor. The gallery space was unique by the fact that it consists of hallways of large load bearing concrete planes of up to 4 metres high, based along the grid. It is these planes that Banksy paints his artworks on, where they then may be repainted over at a later stage. In essence they become a continuously reusable canvas. The exterior of the building may also become such a surface. The high ceiling is low as the audience enters via a narrow slit in the corner of the building, then rises, leading their eyes upwards to the vast concrete surfaces where the artworks are painted. On the upper floor, this lowered ceiling allows for a viewing platform where the artist may descend from his working space and view his admirers below. By designing, a somewhat unspectacularly modern building I have made Banksy a studio that is pragmatic, yet not suiting the style of artist he is, postmodern. Perhaps it may be said that it has a certain old fashioned, yet not sculptural, Gehryesque feel to it. Furthermore, in each montage depicting the building I wanted to add certain modern quirks within the early 1900’s environment that the building is in. Only close observation by the audience will reveal what the incongruity some of the montages are. I also made several allusions that only those who know Banksy will understand. The elephant for example is an allusion to an exhibition of street artists in which Banksy painted an elephant and let it wander his gallery. Also the Mona Lisa is an appropriation by Banksy which he hung up in the Louvre. The children surrounding it were taken from an original image of a group of school children adoring the actual Mona Lisa. Banksy often pokes fun at the over surveillance that we are under, and I made a conscious effort to allow that to shine through in the montages. I also wanted to present Banksy as a “real artist.” Banksy states that “everyone has the right to self expression,” and that everyone is an artist, or rather no one is an artist. I feel that by presenting Banksy as a stereotypical artist I’ve achieved this aim. I felt that I couldn’t fully explore my own design and its client with only three montages, so I developed five, three exteriors ranging from morning to midday to night, and two interiors, one in the morning one at night. As a whole, I wanted my montages and building to be austere, yet clever, while subtly poking fun at the artist who works within the building. Final montages: This poster is a summation of the Montage-it module for ARCH1142.