Still riding off the tails of his latest project in Derry, the elusive provocateur took a rare break from painting the town red to paint our ears with interview answers.
He responds politely to our queries regarding the artistic pantheon of his prolific career and more controversial pieces, but his eyes bely where his true enthusiasms lay, darting towards an antique mahogany shelf. The contents of said shelf, which proudly suns itself by the bay windows of his Greenwich brownstone? An astounding collection of classic board games.
“Vintage,” he grumbles to us. “None of that Hasbro shit. All authentic Milton Bradley.”
Paying half a mind to our question regarding ‘the inherent monetization of artwork by NFT-sympathetic artists and the seeming inescapability of artistic patronage by corporate control,’ the surreptitious street artist begins to rise from his well-worn Eames chair.
“Oh yeah, that shit sucks man.”
He lunges for the largest box from the top of the shelf, and holds it towards us in a suggestive manner. The bright colours dotting the box mimic the primary colours of his attire. Subversive as always, our enigmatic interviewee asks us a question of his own: “Wanna play Twister?”
Before an answer can leave our lips, gently, like a father laying his child to rest, he spreads the polka-dotted mat on his hardwood floor. For the first time since we entered his home, the mysterious dark humorist smiles. “Right foot red,” he informs us, before putting his own foot on the red circle closest to us.
With all fifteen of our right toes firmly planted on red, he requests another spin. Realising we have omitted the requisite referee, Davide asks if he should exit the game to handle the spinning, “No it’s quite alright, house rules, everyone’s in, players spin!”
We perform an exchange: he hands us the spinner, we deliver yet another question. A perfect quid pro quo.
H. In a column for The Guardian from 2006, Charlie Brooker said your “work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots.” What do you think of that?
B. I think that was quite mean and it hurt my feelings, did you spin yet?
D. Right hand yellow.
B. Right hand yellow? Okay, hnnnngh. But yeah, I don’t think it was nice for Charlie to say that at all.
D. These bright colours remind me of when you painted an elephant for your 2006 exhibition, “Barely Legal”. You were able to obtain a permit, but you still were under fire– mostly from animal rights groups– for animal abuse.
B. I don’t remember that.
He rips the spinner from Davide’s left hand and twirls it.
B. Right hand green!
H. Do you feel that the usage of a live elephant to portray the ‘elephant in the room’ metaphor– regarding poverty– was effective? Some said it felt hypocritical.
B. I don’t know, I’ve done so much for rats and their image. Have you seen my stuff with the rats? They’ve got drills. Nothing about what I’ve done for rats says “animal-hater” to me.
H. Right. Left foot… blue?
B. Yay, my favourite colour!
D. Interesting, your emphatic usage of red, white, and black had me under a very different impression.
B. It’s the boy colour? The B in “Banksy” stands for Blue.
D. Hm. Does it also stand for ‘British’?
B. What?
H. What he means to ask is, are you really British?
B. Yes.
D. Interesting.
A silence falls over our Twister game. It is obvious that he is far more eager to get his hands on circles than to address our puerile questions. While we are both concentrated on the exact placement of our appendages, our incognito influencer is relaxed. Anyone else would have been hindered by the sweat trickling between their fingers,but he seems to be floating. Decades of playing nighttime games of cat-and-rat, nocturnal spray painting while evading law enforcement, seem to have chiselled stamina and endurance into the anonymous anarchist’s well defined body.
We spin together: Left hand yellow.
D. Would you… hnng… say that Twister has honed your artistic assets in any way? Or vice versa?
Excitement brightens our artist’s face. The sun pours in through the window and reflects upon his features, as if it too, is ready to enlighten.
B. Finally! I feel I’ve learned a lot of lessons from Twister. My art, which is this sort of rebellion of the lower classes, is informed by years of playing this game. The constant struggle to stay upright despite physical stressors, and structural entanglement. That’s how it is being poor, innit. You ever seen a rat king? Seeing that shit in the hardy streets of Bristol, seeing some blokes playing Twister… reminds you of how the poor are always tied up in this constant scramble to survive. We’re all just rats with our tails tangled. And sometimes we have drills. That’s why they call it the rat race.
H. Wow.
B. You know this shit used to be called Kings Footsie? That’s what Milton Bradley wanted to call it but they didn’t call it that.
He’s cut off before the next spin, the ornate front door clicking open to reveal a tall, willowy brunette with one slender arm tucked around a brown paper bag. Three baguettes peek out the top of the bag, the aroma of fresh baked bread clearly affects the virtuoso vandal’s resolve, but nevertheless, he stays resolute–he’s a master at his game of choice.
Their sensual greetings suggest she is his girlfriend, or at the very least, a lover of some sort. “Adrienne makes the finest jambon beurre, you must try them sometime,” he tells us dreamily. The artist, now with a mind evenly divided between Twister and sandwich, clearly has no more time for our questions.
“Nothing makes me hungrier than a good game of Twister.”
We ask if he considers the game we played a ‘good’ game of Twister, but he is reluctant to say yes, maintaining he has “very high standards for this kind of thing.”