Exit Through the Gift Shop
ACMI Melbourne, 17/06/2010
Status: Behind by 18.4 films
I’m a fan of Banksy - and of street art in general - and assumed this documentary would be about the movement, and the fundamental shift that comes from moving from underground to (for want of a better word) mainstream art that Sotheby’s auctions for a lot of money.
I was very very wrong. Rather than a straight-up history of a movement and some of its key players, it turned out to be something more left-field, more strange, and ultimately less satisfying.
Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman living in LA with delusions of being a filmmaker, follows his cousin (street artist Invader) and Shepard Fairey (he of the Andre the Giant “Obey” icon and the image for Obama’s presidential campaign) around for a number of years collecting thousands of hours of tape that doesn’t improve in quality over time, despite the volume. Banksy encourages Guetta to make a documentary with this footage about the founding and spirit of the street art movement (which, because of its nature goes largely undocumented) and Guetta makes an unwatchable film. Banksy then encourages Guetta to go home and put on a show of his own work and the film takes a significant and unexpected turn when Guetta - as Mr Brainwash, an artist with no history - puts on a massive-scale commercial show and sells millions of dollars of obviously derivative street/pop art.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is pretty clearly not a documentary at all, but a fiction supported by found footage, real people and a true story. And that’s kind of okay. If the whole point of pop art (and to some extent street art) is to blur and redraw lines between art and not-art, then Exit Through the Gift Shop does the same job very well. As a film, though, it’s an odd experience: interesting enough to sit through its running time (despite the preponderance of poor quality hand held footage, Rhys Ifan’s completely over-the-top voice over narration and Banksy’s clearly scripted and staid delivery of his to-camera bits) but unsettling afterwards. When the feeling of how contrived the whole thing was really started to sink in, I wondered exactly why they went to so much effort to make a point that is never clearly articulated. Perhaps Banksy is somehow legitimize his move from underground artist to Sotheby’s-represented mainstream-appreciated phenomenon by taking the piss out of it? Maybe. The one thing I am sure of is that Banksy is taking the piss out of someone… and I can’t rule out that it’s you and me.
