“There’s more than one thing going on in every picture,” said Tarik, a chef who had seen Banksy’s work in a magazine and decided he had to see it for himself. “There’s a lot of tension in the pictures.”
Tarik gestures at a large painting showing a group of cavemen carrying spears approaching some shopping trolleys. “European artists are a lot more bold and willing to fight,” he says. “The concept of opposing your government is full of bullshit here.”
Banksy himself had displayed a fine sense of bullshit in an interview he gave to Roger Gastman published in the LA Weekly. “Some of the paintings have taken literally days to make,” he confided. “Essentially, it’s about what a horrible place the world is, how unjust and cruel and pointless life is, and ways to avoid thinking about all that. One of the best ways turned out to be sitting in a warehouse making paintings about cruelty, pain and pointlessness.”
Gastman, who edits a magazine called Swindle that features a longer interview with Banksy, thinks that the humor will not be lost on the LA audience. “His work is fun and witty when you see it in the street,” he said. “No matter what serious questions I asked his answers are very reflective of the humor in his work.”
In keeping with his secretive persona — there are no pictures of Banksy and his identity remains in doubt — the artist himself was probably not present at the opening. But that didn’t stop people asking. “Is the artist here,” asked J Mitchell, a singer. “Are you the artist?”
Josh, a computer programmer and stencil artist was impressed by the scale of the work. “He doesn’t do discreet like other stencil artists,” he said. “These are supposed to be here, in a gallery. He does it big, which is what graffiti artists have been doing for a long time.”
But in a town that takes its animal welfare very seriously, some took exception to the presence of the elephant. On entering, visitors were presented with a flyer reading: “There’s an elephant in the room. There’s a problem we never talk about. The fact is that life isn’t getting any fairer. 1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water... . Every day hundreds of people are made to physically be sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?”
Some of the money from the show will have come from the numbered prints on sale for US$500 each on the glitzy opening night. The rest will have come from the current market for his work, with Banksy’s pictures selling for upwards of US$75,000, according to his London agent Steve Lazarides.
Tai, the 38-year-old painted pachyderm was scrubbed down on Sunday on the orders of the Los Angeles department of animal services.
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