Banksy reveals only so much of himself in controversial documentary
EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (Banksy, 2010)
JCC in Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th St.
Tuesday, February 21, $11, 7:30
646-505-5708
www.jccmanhattan.org/film?page=cat-content&progid=25238
www.banksyfilm.com
In 1999, L.A.-based French shopkeeper and amateur videographer Thierry Guetta discovered that he was related to street artist Invader and began filming his cousin putting up his tile works. Guetta, who did not know much about art, soon found himself immersed in the underground graffiti scene. On adventures with such famed street artists as Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Ron English, and Borf, Guetta took thousands of hours of much-sought-after video. The amateur videographer was determined to meet Banksy, the anarchic satirist who has been confounding authorities around the world with his striking, politically sensitive works perpetrated right under their noses, from England to New Orleans to the West Bank. Guetta finally gets his wish and begins filming the seemingly unfilmable as Banksy, whose identity has been a source of controversy for more than a decade, allows Guetta to follow him on the streets and invites him into his studio. But as he states at the beginning of his brilliant documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy—who hides his face from the camera in new interviews and blurs it in older footage—turns the tables on Guetta, making him the subject of this wildly entertaining film.
Guetta is a hysterical character, a hairy man with a thick accent who plays the jester in Banksy’s insightful comedy of errors. Billed as “the world’s first Street Art disaster movie,” Exit, which is narrated by Welsh actor Rhys Ifans (Danny Deckchair) and features a soundtrack by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow sandwiched in between Richard Hawley’s declaratory “Tonight the Streets Are Ours,” is all the more exciting and intriguing because the audience doesn’t know what is actually true and what might be staged; although the film could be one hundred percent real and utterly authentic, significant parts of it could also be completely made up. Who’s to say that’s even Banksy underneath the black hood, talking about Guetta, who absurdly rechristens himself Mr. Brainwash? It could very well be Banksy’s F for Fake from start to finish. No matter. Exit Through the Gift Shop is riotously funny, regardless of how you feel about street art, Banksy, and especially the art market itself (as the title so wryly implies). Exit Through the Gift Shop is screening on February 21 at 7:30 at the JCC in Manhattan in conjunction with the exhibit: “Community Portrait: A Gabriel Specter Installation.”
In the late 1970s, Andrea Callard helped found a collective of artists that would come to be known as Colab, or Collaborative Projects, Inc. Among her fellow officers in the group were Coleen Fitzgibbons, Tom Otterness, and Ulli Rimkus. “Through a juicy and conflicted multi-year period of identity and structural definition,” she explains on her website, “there was experimentation in and rich discussion of accessible content, political forces, technology, equity, corporate versus union models, and material resources.” From February 13 to 19, the Maysles Institute will look back at Callard’s career by presenting the world premiere of her first feature-length film, Talking Landscape: Early Media Work, 1974-1984, which examines all those things and more in its eighty minutes. More a greatest-hits package than a narrative nonfiction film, Talking Landscape consists of several of Callard’s low-budget, low-tech Super 8 shorts, narrated in her steady deadpan, beginning with 11 thru 12, in which Callard humorously discusses “inspiration, information, transportation, the National Geographic, the Yellow Pages, and taxi cabs” while standing at an ironing board, trying to hail a cab out on the street, and walking on her hands in the ocean. In Notes on Ailanthus, she details the history of the tree that “grows abundantly in all the empty spaces around New York.” In Sound Windows, she has fun with her apartment windows. In Walking Outside, she sings a blues song while walking through green fields. Talking Landscape also includes a trio of slide shows of site-specific installations Callard was involved in. Commuting from Point to Point combines images shot in Paris, Italy, and New York with phrases lifted from books; for example a shot of cigarettes put out in a bowl of dirt on a newspaper is accompanied by the words “only time gets lost,” while a photo of the Spanish Steps features the phrase “worn by millions of feet.” The Customs House is a document of the 1979 Creative Time group show “Custom and Culture 2,” held inside the dilapidated Customs House by Bowling Green, now home to the National Museum of the American Indian. And finally, The Times Square Show takes viewers on a tour of the seminal art show held in June 1980, which sought to investigate “the need to communicate in a larger world”; the Colab exhibition comprised works by Keith Haring, Lee Quinones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, John Ahearn, Kiki Smith, Otterness, Callard, and others held in the then-still-seedy neighborhood. Throughout the film, Callard displays a wry sense of humor in these brief experimental works that were part of a major shift in the New York City art scene. Talking Landscape is being screened as part of the Maysles Institute’s continuing “Documentary in Bloom” series, curated by Livia Bloom, who will moderate Q&As with Callard following the February 16 and 19 showings.
