I have often found, throughout my life, in the stickiest situations, that art has come to my rescue. Real art in the right place is uplifting, a mirror to the world and a comment on the times. Good art can illuminate, sharpen our perceptions and take the edges off all at the same time.
So it was with great delight that earlier this year, on the drive back from my mother’s, I noticed a wonderful piece of very funny street art. In an unremarkable street in Cheltenham on the side of a crumbling, whitewashed building, someone had painted several spies, listening in to the conversation, on the wall behind a telephone booth. Cheltenham is the UK’s nerve centre in some ways, there is a big government listening post in a building there. Or, to be more exact there is the publicised GCHQ government listening post. Where the real one is, is anyone’s guess.
GCHQ could have employed and also not employed my mother quite nicely. She stops talking when she is asleep, otherwise not. The incessant chatter is something you eventually learn to blank out as white noise but few who have not had espionage training realise that she can talk and listen at the same time. If you say anything revealing at all, without having apparently registered it, she will produce it at the most unsuitable time in the future and use it to trip you up. According to my ‘Every Survivor’s book of Psychology for Girls’ she is a covert manipulator.
So I found the wall art round the telephone booth highly appropriate to my situation, considering how much time I spend on the phone to my mother when I’m not there. Every time we drove past I cursed myself for the lack of a camera, right past Easter and into the summer.
Then someone declared the wall art a genuine Banksy and Banksy, through his agent said it was a genuine Banksy and then all hell broke loose.
It became impossible to see the wall through the hoards of people taking photographs every time we drove past it. Somebody said they had bought it, someone else said it was worth a million and residents were up in arms and mounted a 24 hour guard in case someone came and whipped off the end of the building without them noticing. Someone said the building was listed, though personally I thought it was more listing than listed. Then, before the idiot Jane had managed to photograph it (I don’t know why not, everyone and his wife, including The Times had photographed it) a hoarding went up and the Banksy disappeared from view.
Now, every time we drove away from my mother’s I cursed my inefficiency as a journalist, a photographer and a general supporter of art in general, generally. Each time we drove home past the Banksy there was a big white van parked outside it, in front of the hoarding and people on bicycles and on foot talking about the art. A few weeks in and the hoarding itself had been decorated, with a picture of Banksy, doing it, and the opinions of residents, focus groups and concerned individuals. As art stimulating public opinion it was wildly successful. We never passed by at any time of late afternoon or evening when there was not a big white van and tons of art critics in front of the blocked-off Banksy.
Until yesterday.
I had asked my other half if he would stop so I could photograph the Banksy and even took my camera to do it. He said there was no point, all you could see was the van and the people and there was no where to park and grumble grumble grumble but he agreed.
And for lo! When we drove past yesterday, the van and all of the people had gone and the wind was blowing at the hoarding.
I approached the Banksy from the side
As you can see it is on the side of a terraced house in a very ordinary street.
You can see locals have been expressing themselves, as they have on the front
where the person putting up the hoarding has been obliged to leave access to what is still a public telephone box. In the box, looking to the left, the hoarding placed against the wall is still firmly in place, flat against the wall,
nothing can be seen. But to the right, when the wind blows, the hoarding waves and there is………………..
a little, hidden slice of a spy with a tape recorder and
his friend kneeling with a boom microphone and
they’ve got it all on film ( and so have I) and
we’d better be quiet about it. Ssh! spies are everywhere (especially at my mother’s) watch what you say! Don’t blog it or read about it or mention it to anyone – people are listening and watching
even behind hoardings where you think they are not.
Remain wooden, betray no emotion! But remember (shhh) you saw it here, not first but last, when it was hidden from everyone but me (and you). I have charged you nothing at all for looking at this million pound bit of art, next time you see it it will be in some gallery somewhere out of context, probably out of the town, definitely, I hope preserved because it is looking a bit like art left out in a street in Britain for some reason and they will almost certainly make you pay through the nose to see it.
But here just you and me can share the secret Bansky and by so doing we become part of the art. Just you me and
……………..ssh, ears everywhere!
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JaneLaverick.com – art for people.