EXISTENCILISM

Courtesy of an old post from Skookum Talk comes the following link to a website that devotes a large part of its bandwidth to the subversive art of stencil graffitti. However much I can admire someone who can stencil a lifelike image of Alice Cooper or Audrey Hepburn on a slab of concrete, like Skooks, my real preference is for the politically subverting stencil; an image that can raise a wry chuckle by way of making a political point. The image above is one such politically directed stencil and allows me the opportunity to go into one of my 'We Could Have Been A Contender' style rambles.

A couple of years back, after finishing a twilight shift at a factory I was temping at - when I should have really been studying the footnotes of the Grundrisse in the original German - I opted instead to veg out in front of the TV and watch a bit of late night telly. Flicking the remote control over to Channel Four I chanced upon one of those 'Alt-TV' programmes that Channel Four likes to make, and I usually like to snore through, but on this occasion I was intrigued by a feature on the graffitti artist Banksy, an "Urban Stencilist,"* who at that time was just starting to make a name for himself through his imaginative and subversive graffiti that he was peppering the London landscape with on the sly.

Having one of those all too rare momentary glimpses of political optimism - I think being knackered weakened my usual resolve of cynicism and despair - I decided to try and track 'Banksy' down and ask if he would be interested in doing one of his political subversive stencils on a wall in South West London that in times gone past has been variously described as: "Karl Marx's bunker"; "The House of Lost Election Deposits"; and "You mean that bricked up dirty bookshop on Clapham High Street? It sells political magazines as well? That's perverse."

I realised that this was a bit of a step up from the usual business of contacting someone on behalf of the Socialist Party for a political favour when, after finding his contact address on his website, and giving him my spiel via email, I received an email from an associate of his a couple of days later informing me that Banksy would be getting back to me on the matter of my request once he returned from an exhibition he was doing in New York. "Getting back to me" meant that he had my mobile number, and whilst he was totting up on his air miles and duty free, I would be standing on an assembly line that: ". . . under no circumstances should someone leave this line whilst it is in operation, and stop the flow of production . . . " waiting for a phone call from him and which resulted in it not going down too well with my line supervisor when I twice steamed off the line in my best impersonation of Billy Whizz when my phone rang only to find that the first time it was a wrong number, and the second time it was a comrade ringing up to ask if I could remember what name the Alliance for Workers Liberty went under before they became Socialist Organiser. He had got into a political argument in the pub the other night and there was a pint riding on it.

A few weeks passed and hearing nothing back from him, I thought no more about the matter and got down to the serious business of contemplating those life inponderables that always keep me awake at night: What happened to Texan Bars? What . . . erm, that's it - it's a recurring thought of mine. Then one day the phone rang - of course, you knew that was going to happen - and at the other end of the line was this thick west country accent that owed more to a Laurie Lee novel than to the Late Review, and it was Banksy telling me that he had been by the office, had a read of the literature in the window and it had given him some graffitti ideas that would look the biz' on the wall, and that he was really keen on the idea of doing the mural. I was enthusiastic but initially a wee bit cautious in my reply, explaining that I would have to first run the idea by our administrative committee to get the green light on him being able to do it [had I not mentioned that this flight of fancy of mine had come totally leftfield and I had yet to mention it to the other comrades? I can be like that sometimes] but I was sure that they would be up for the idea, and started getting ahead of myself by sounding off to him: "Yeah, if you are happy with the arrangement, you could do a new image every six months or so. Think of the tens of thouands of people who go by the building either on foot or in transport every day?"**

After committing the script of Tony Hancock's 12 Angry Men to memory, and studying the body language of Spencer Tracey in Inherit The Wind, I deployed my best advocacy skills and made a convincing case for the admin committee giving the green light to the idea of Banksy doing a suitably *cough* anti-capitalist mural on the front wall of the Head Office. It must have been a particularly strong argument that I put forward that balmy Saturday in late October 'cos the last thing I heard was this wee snippet of dialogue from two colleagues both to me and themselves:

"Darren, jutting out your bottom lip and bursting into tears with the words 'But I've already told him he can do it' is not becoming in a grown man. If you promise to come down from the roof, we will let him do the mural, but if we aren't happy with the end result we will be painting over it with your brains."

"Comrade Chair, in that eventuality, I don't think that there will be enough material to cover up a tenth of the mural. Therefore, I propose that we also get in a five litre tin of dulux emulsion as back up."***

So how come when I had got my way by employing the best Socratic method of argument in getting the go ahead for the mural for our Office, there isn't a Bansky special on Clapham High Street with attendant camera happy Japanese tourists posing in front of it alongside a life size paper mache model of Karl Marx made out of old back issues of the Socialist Standard? Well, in the best fashion of the SPGB of losing a revolution, and finding a lost election deposit to replace it with, we blew it. It's not a good idea to try and lay down too many ground rules with these creative types, and after we had second thoughts about the method by which he would go about doing the mural, he obviously thought it was more trouble than it was worth, and didn't get back to us. He's a difficult man to get hold of at the best of times, never being photographed without first obscuring his face, and it now means that I have more chance of bumping into Beth Orton after she slapped that restraining order on me than getting Bansky to have second thoughts about doing that mural.

What's happened to Banksy since our parting of the ways? Well, aside from blowing the best gig he could have ever got (with a few back issues of the Socialist Standard thrown in for good measure), he has - amongst other things - since designed the cover of this Blur album ; been part of a major Greenpeace sticker campaign; got so many big write ups in the Guardian and elsewhere in the Mediarati that I keep half expecting to pick up a copy of Hello magazine someday and see a 12 page feature on 'Banksy does interior design for Europe's Minor Royalty'; and the last time I read about him in the media was only last month after he done a bit "culture jamming" in and around the museums of New York.

And that mural he was thinking of doing for Clapham High Street? I saw it a few months later in Kings Cross spray painted on the steel shutters of a Sex Shop that had been shut down as part of the regeneration of Kings Cross. And the bricked up building in Clapham still gets knocks on the door from middle aged men in dirty macs asking for the November 2003 issue of Spick and Span.

Does that qualify as irony?

* No, I don't know what it means either.

** In obscure lefty terms this is a well known phenomenon, otherwise known as "This time next year, we will be Morrisonians" syndrome. Mark Steel recounted in his wonderfully funny political memoir Reasons To Be Cheerful that he suffered from the same delusional syndrome when he first became politicised and thought that by handing out a do it yourself propaganda leaflet outside his local job centre in Swanage that the ripple effect of his revolutionary prose would make Petrograd 1917 and Paris 1968 pale into comparison with the revolutionary upheaval in Penge 1981.

*** Motion carried 6-1, with two abstentions.