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   December 2010
Published by Artists of Utah
Page 6    

Film Review: Salt Lake

A Love/Hate Relationship
Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop


I hate art, the art world, and everything that comes of it.

Wait, no. I love it. I couldn't live without it. Images, and their subsequent appreciation, are what give my life color.

This is going to be rough.

Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop is an incredibly relevant, coherent epilogue to the recent street-art explosion. It is inspiring and cringe-worthy in all the right places.

The story's about Banksy, really it is. He pops in at the beginning, and, while disguised, his mannerisms and modes of speech are spot-on with the images he's become so famous for. It would be nice to have Banksy narrate any documentary, wry and subversive and witty the whole time. But the bulk of the film hinges around and introduces the life-story of an insane man, Thierry Guetta. Somehow, in a boggling implausibility, this goofy Frenchman transplanted to LA falls squarely in the center of the birth of street art as we know it. Even more implausibly, he is allowed to film, ad-nausem and with no real focus or direction, the lives of the artists -- people who have operated anonymously under fear of self-destruction for years. Luckily for everyone involved, Thierry films compulsively, like an addict, and never touches his tapes. By and large, before this film, they never saw the light of day.

What unfolds is a beautiful, playful origin story. The biggest names of a movement that inspired a generation of creative miscreants are shown young and in action, simply mobbing the streets with their art before anyone cared about it. A short list of the top billers includes Space Invader, Shepard Fairey, Buffmonster, and Neckface. Everyone, even Banksy, shows their roots in nonchalant brazen tactics that awe and inspire. Footage from Banksy's incredible feats on the Israeli-Palestinian Wall and in the Tate gallery are preceded by lucky/adventuresome clips of Space Invader's first trip to LA. The art and the actions people took to create it are fresh, and you're boggled by the quantity and caliber of the artists recorded. Guetta as a filmmaker, however, is astonishingly silly, essentially an insane tourist/dad/inspector clouseau amalgamation who would never be suspected as the holder of vaults of uncensored graff images. He just ... Keeps. Rolling. Endless pans, snap zooms, wandering focuses, it's total home movie stuff, but the subject happens to be the holiest of holies for anyone who grew up stenciling, wheat-pasting, and crouching down to look at whimsical images in the street. By being unprofessional and more than a little crazy, Guetta was there for it all.

What Banksy undertook to make it happen is possibly the most ambitious logging and capturing process of all time. He selected the best from a lifetime of footage -- crates upon crates, ROOMS of DV tapes -- and edited them into a killer story. I loved the gaudy, reverential unfolding of Banksy as a mystery creature, the film's narrator and music trumping him up, the rarest form of celebrity. In an early climatic scene, Guetta finally gets to film Banksy at work, and if you care about this stuff it actually is astonishing. Banksy preparing to go out bombing in LA has the feel of a sacred rite, seeing the cut negatives of his all-too-iconic images early on is ... remarkable.

As Banksy's fame peaks and his works begin to sell for staggering figures the story shifts to focus entirely on Guetta, who becomes the doomed mascot of the commercial takeover of street art. It starts simply: Guetta, who is crazy, takes a stab at editing his mountains of footage, at Banksy's behest. The resulting film (if Exit Through the Gift Shop's portrayal of it is to be believed) is not unlike a Nine Inch Nails music video: flashy, adrenaline-filled, and incoherently unwatchable. Banksy watches this movie, and does what most well-meaning friends do in the face of over-ambitious crap. They take a deep breath, say "It's ... Good," and suggest the artist take a vacation. Banksy takes over the footage, and Guetta tries doing some art.

Henceforth, story goes incredibly sour. Guetta, like any poor creative soul, has confidence in his ideas and strives to put out some art. But unlike most any other artist, he doesn't give it *any* forethought. He just does it. At around the time that Fairey and Banksy are international art superstars, Guetta gets together some talented people and starts churning out the most derivative, predictable mishmash of images pop-art and graphic art could ever produce.

And don't get me wrong here, I get contemporary art. I understand that most successful artists have people working under them, and I know that most images we see (especially in art that finds its roots in popular culture) are derivative of something. But Guetta's work is worse than that. It's like Warhol, but without any twist. It's absolute, barefaced, emptiness. It's shameless borrowing. Further, it's made off the backs of people who work hard at what they do, and the rewards go to the boss. Mr. Brainwash, Guetta's newly minted pseudo-subversive pseudonym, jumps straight into Warhol/Hirst-style factory work, employing talented artists and essentially profiting on their work. Not to mention every image he's touched is a copycat, a vapid mockery of the movement that tolerated him. In short, it's the perfect 21st-century art world commodity. The beauty of the film is that in the face of this horrible, horrible stuff, the market goes for it. Collectors, gallery-goers, newspapers, everyone raves over the hype Guetta creates, and he cashes out, to the tune of $1 million on his first show.

In the wake of it I feel sick. Banksy steps back on stage, a bit sheepishly, with a "sorry about that," and the film closes. But Banksy couldn't have made a better 'exit.' Right as his fame and value rises to a peak, he shows us what a sham that value system is. If the next big thing after Banksy is a bumbling LA jerk who is rewarded for not paying his dues and making crap, what's the big deal with being a 'big thing?' As Banksy sneaks out a side door, we're left mocking the serious Groucho Marx mask that he leaves in his place: Thierry Guetta, the unfortunate doppelganger to Banksy's success and career as an artist. Ultimately the film serves as Banksy's cautionary tale: Love art, love street art, enjoy it for what it is and be inspired by it. But beware putting extraordinary cultural and monetary value on something that wasn't made to sell. There is an end result to that path, and it's Mr. Brainwash. "They say Art is dead, but here it is!" says a diva-esque LA girl at Guetta's opening, all facsimile with her base make-up and movie-star glasses. Damn right sweetheart, that's art, right there in front of you. Try to get out before it starts to stink.




Hints 'n' Tips
Getting the Right Angle
Understanding Angles and Their Consequent Values in the Landscape


Understanding angles and the values they create is a must for landscape painters, as well as painters of any subject.

To understand angles we have to first discuss "planes," which in painting generally means a somewhat imaginary flat surface based on reality that simplifies the undulations of forms in the subject. Planes determine the angle at which those forms receive light. Planes have a dual meaning in landscape, (referring also to foreground, middle ground and distance), but for our purposes we will discuss the "angled plane."

Some planes are perpendicular to a light source and therefore receive light directly, which tends to make those planes light in value. Other planes receive light at an angle to the light source. These planes receive light only indirectly and thus are darker than the plane that receives light straight on. How light or dark these planes are will vary depending on the steepness of the angle to the source of light. With this in mind, when an artist thinks about how light or dark to paint a particular feature in nature, it is important for him or her to understand the direction of light in relation to its plane.

The concept of the angled plane is discussed in a very detailed manner in the third chapter of John Carlson's famous book, Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting. Carlson's chapter "Angles and their Consequent Values" illustrates the concept of planes and angles as they relate to the landscape, but the underlying knowledge has universal application. With regard to the landscape itself, Carlson describes four basic planes: 1) The flat lying plane of the ground 2) The upright plane of the trees 3) The slanting plane of the mountains and 4) The sky, which is the source of light. In landscape, we know this to be either the sun or the sky or both.

Jacson Valley by John Hughes, 30 x 50

Using this information a painter now has a context, or working rubric with which to approach his or her understanding of general values to use in the painting. "Angles and their Consequent Values" basically says this: 1) the flat lying plane of the ground receives the most light so it is the lightest plane aside from 4) - the light source itself (which Carlson describes as a separate plane). 2) The upright plane of the trees receive the least amount of light and therefore is the darkest of the ground elements followed by the 3) slanting plane of the hills or mountains which receives more light than the trees and less light than the flat plane.

Carlson’s angles and their consequent values can be reduced to one simple principle – “The more perpendicular a plane is to the source of light, the lighter the plane will appear in relation to other planes whose angles vary in relation to that same light.”

Certainly local color and value will play a part in the form’s lightness or darkness (as in the case of a yellow tree in autumn), as well as how high or low the sun is in the sky on a particular day. Please note that all rules have exceptions, but as Carlson points out even with the exceptions the principles involved in chapter three will hold up as long as the artist has assimilated the underlying truths.

For a full understanding, I suggest that anyone wanting to know more, pick up a copy of Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting at your local art store. You will be glad you did.


Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting

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