as submitted to the NY Times Lifestyle section
The Queens Banksy Chase
On
the morning of Oct 15th, 2013 my wife Genevieve sent me a text, letting
me know that Banksy was in the midst of doing a residency in New York
city and that I should check it out. I googled and found out that Banksy
was half way through a 31 day long self-imposed residency in NYC for
the month of October. Every day of October Banksy was putting up a new
piece somewhere in one of the five Boroughs. It was a project epic in
scope, even for Banksy.
The
day before Genevieve tipped me off, Banksy had made international news
for the 14th piece of the residency, a prank he pulled off in Central
Park. He set up a stand, among all the other stands, selling his prints
for cheap, which were subsequently ignored by droves of tourists. Nobody
knew they were originals, worth tens of thousands of dollars each. It
was wryly funny and critical of the capitalistic culture of value, two
qualities I'd come to expect from Banksy.
I
was curious about where the 15th piece was going to be that day, so I
began to google deeper. I found out that one had been done just that
morning at 68th Street and 38th Avenue in Jackson Heights. It was within
walking distance! I sprang into action immediately. I did the hundred
and one things needed to get the girls ready to go out the door, got
them both in the double stroller and rolled.
The
girls are Lucia and Sofia, then ages 3 and 4. Little did they care
about going to see a fresh Banksy, but they were always happy to go for a
ride. I pushed the stroller up 39th Avenue to Roosevelt, then up
Roosevelt to 68th. Roosevelt is directly under the 7 Train for
approximately 75 blocks, which creates a very long tunnel effect. My
neighbor Stephen Nickson calls Roosevelt Avenue a tunnel of diversity,
as hundreds of businesses of all different cultural backgrounds line the
blocks under the tracks. This was the avenue we walked down for 18
blocks that morning in order to witness a a brand new Banksy piece.
We
were still new to these environs. We had just moved from Boulder
Colorado to Queens NY. After ten years in Boulder, NYC is quite a
change, almost like living in another country. The skies are bigger in
Colorado, and so are the vistas. The smells, sights and sounds are
radically different. The people are much less ethnically diverse in
Colorado, and they also operate on a much lower vibrational level,
baritone, even bass. In New York most people are working tenor or
soprano levels. New Yorkers walk about twice as fast as people from
Colorado. It's exhilarating, but exhausting. But you build up the
stamina, just like in Colorado you build your lungs to acclimate to the
altitude.
The
downside is no joke though. A NYC dentist told us that teeth grinding
is common problem here. Stress is a killer. You have to learn to manage
it. Time goes by quicker here, so you have to find ways to slow it down.
Otherwise you will age much faster.
On
the other hand, contrary to expectations, we found the people in New
York to be more neighborly than those in Colorado. We knew more
neighbors in the first two weeks of moving into our apartment in Queens
than we did after ten years of living in Boulder. The density of people
here creates countless small communities, entirely based upon proximity
and need.
I
quickly began to appreciate what Queens and NYC had to offer. Just
prior to the Banksy residency I had been reading Jonathem Lethem's
fresh-off-the-press novel, "Dissident Gardens," about Sunnyside Queens
in the 1940s through to the 1970s, from back when it was a communist
cell through to the folk, beatnik and hippy years. I was also taking
walks and bike rides everyday, exploring even the graveyards. You could
say I was steeping myself in Queens.
Three
days prior to Genevieve's Banksy tip, on October 12th, I had gone with
several of the gardeners I had met from the Sunny Gardens Community
Garden, located behind our communal Sunnyside Gardens Park, to see
Lethem read from "Dissident Gardens" at the Sunnyside Community Center.
(That's a lot of community in once sentence.) After the reading I told
the gardeners that they were the real Dissident Gardens, which got a
good laugh. But it was true. Lethem was using Sunnyside Gardens in his
novel as a kind of metaphor of defeat; the open backyards of the ideal
planned community were now fenced in, the dream was long gone. But
that's fiction for you. The truth is more complicated; far from gone,
the socialist dream is still alive and growing in Sunnyside Gardens and
the amazing park to which it was attached.
So
now here we were, walking up Roosevelt with a stroller, as if dropped
in a Lethem novel set in real time, about to see this fresh masterpiece
from Banksy, in the middle of his already legendary month long residency
in NYC. There was a palpable sense of history to the whole thing.
I
pushed the stroller off of Roosevelt and up 68th. There was a little
bodega on the corner of 38th Avenue and 68th and we could see some
people crowded around the back, staring at the rear wall. Bingo! There
it was, still fresh, still unmarred. It immediately shone with that
mysterious aura of great art.
An
hour later this art would be tagged by local hooligans. This was a
recurring problem for fans of Banksy, because in the local tagger's eyes
Banksy was stepping on territory. The local taggers were defending
their so-called turf, which seemed petty to me, in light of Banksy's
gift, but, on the other hand, it added an exciting element to the sport
of the hunt, because it made it that much sweeter to get try to see the
piece and get a good shot of it before it could be trashed.
We
just made it in time, this time, but it was a close one. An hour later
and this piece would be tagged by Topic, then Team Robbo and finally
Problem Child. Problem Child! The local punk taggers add something
indelible to a Banksy piece in the process of destroying it.
Over
the next 2 weeks of the residency we would witness more fresh pieces
just in the nick of time before they were destroyed, and three of those
times we arrived even as they were being destroyed. It was a race
between my stroller/subway skills with my toddlers in tow and the punk
taggers. And victories were sweet.
The
text of that first piece we saw on October 15 in Queens reads, “What we
do in life echoes in Eternity." Next to the words there was the life
size stencil of a man who is scrubbing the graffiti off the wall,
erasing the word "Eternity."
The
quote is from Russel Crowe's Maximus in the movie Gladiator, and it is a
variation from the original by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and
philosopher, which is commonly translated as, “What we do now echoes in
eternity.” For Banksy, to take a pop culture quote from a cheesy
Hollywood movie (one that happens to be both terrible and great) which
is in turn a quote, an echo, from hardcore western world Roman history,
is a mark of his style. In that way he is in the tradition of the pop
artist, marrying the highbrow to the low, and consequently, the elite to
the common, the rich to the poor.
At
first the piece struck me as a simultaneous celebration of both the
work of the artist, which somehow pushes out into eternity, and a
critique of the critics who deface art. But as with most Banksy pieces
the meaning of the work was even more layered and resonant than it first
appeared.
This
was a temporary piece of street art that was paradoxically about
longevity, and that's why I loved the picture I was able to take of the
girls standing in front of it, caught in that fleeting eternal moment.
Somehow the girls looked as if they belonged in that scene too. The
colors of their clothes even matched. I had extemporaneously captured a
moment of their youth that spoke to eternity. It struck me that just by
being alive the girls were erasing the foreverness of eternity, that our
lives themselves, by being finite, were, paradoxically, small erasures
of timelessness.
But
it also occurred to me just then that, not unlike figurative art, the
girls are a literal embodiment of something that I have done in life
that will echo toward eternity, i.e. having children. I liked being able
to frame this thought in such a perfect way. Later we framed the shot
of the girls and gave it to my father as a gift. My girls are, after
all, also an eternal echo of something he did in his life, echoes of an
echo.
But
there was another surprise twist to this artwork that unveiled itself
only recently. A few weeks ago some Australian friends were staying with
us. They saw the picture of the girls in front of the tag and
recognized the font in which Banksy had chosen to write "Eternity."
They
told us the story behind it. It turns out that Arthur Malcolm Stace,
otherwise known as Mr. Eternity, was an Australian eccentric and
soldier, a reformed alcoholic and thief who converted to Christianity
and spread his message by writing the word "Eternity" in copperplate
font with chalk on footpaths in and around Sydney for about 35 years,
from 1932 to 1967. (The first tagger?) Later on Wikipedia I found out
that in an interview Stace said, "Eternity went ringing through my brain
and suddenly I began crying and felt a powerful call from the Lord to
write Eternity." Stace was illiterate and could hardly write his own
name legibly, but, he said, "the word 'Eternity' came out smoothly, in a
beautiful copperplate script. I couldn't understand it, and I still
can't."
He
was breaking Sydney's laws, of course, and he narrowly avoided arrest
about twenty-four times. Each time he was caught, he responded with,
"But I had permission from a higher source."
It
is estimated that Stace wrote the word around 500,000 times. Only one
survives, found years later, poetically, in a bell tower above Sydney's
Post Office. One out of half a million! But now there was another one,
in Queens, as if from beyond the grave, an exact copy of the divinely
inspired original script. Banksy is literally echoing Eternity.
Echoes
are everywhere. Banksy's work echoes Stace's, i.e. "Permission from a
higher source." The story of Mr. Eternity provides a rich allegory to
this piece, but is so subtly presented as to be nearly hidden. It's for
Banksy himself, first, an homage to his forebearer, Mr. Eternity, but
it's for the rest of us too, an Easter Egg to be discovered later.
This
quality of Banksy's work can also be seen in the way his overnight
graffiti art stick-ups around the five boroughs that month became like
hidden treasures to be stumbled upon and discovered by the the residents
of the city. Whole neighborhoods were caught up in the fun. And on that
morning a Jackson Heights bodega owner found himself in possession of a
piece of art that was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if he
could only find a way to remove it from the building and sell it.
I
turned the stroller around and pushed the girls back home. I remember
that the fall breeze was brisk, but the sun was bright and lit up a
thousand interesting faces on Roosevelt Ave. (Queens' faces are some of
the most interesting faces on earth. Da Vinci would have a field day
here.) It was an auspicious first day of the Chase. And the moment is
still echoing now, will be for a long time, maybe even on into my
children's children. Every day, for the rest of October, there awaited a
new adventure from Banksy, which would take us on an incredible
treasure hunt throughout the other 4 boroughs of NYC.
The
last piece of the month, on October 31st, was also in Queens, and also
within walking distance. We got there just in time to spy it across
highway 495. It was Banksy's signature on the side of a building. At
first it looked just like it was done in an old school Queens-style
bubble letter tag, super simple and understated. But as you looked a
little closer you could see that the letters were 3-D. They were
balloons made in the shape of a bubble font, as if the bubble font had
bubbled out, popped out into the shape it originally mimicked. It was a
reverse tromp-leoil. This was Banksy both paying homage to the locals
and one-upping them at the same time. It was also a clever way to sign
the entire month long "residency," his love letter to the city.
I
took a shot of the girls sitting on the overpass guard rail, the
bubble-letter Banksy signature hovering between them in the distance,
and then we looked for a way to cross the highway to get a closer look.
By the time we made it across the highway and found the building the
piece was already gone! In that short 5 minutes some kids had put up a
ladder and pulled it down. Meanwhile the NYPD had arrived on the scene
and caught up to the kids before they could take off with the partially
deflated letters. There were several bystanders watching the show,
mostly fellow Banksy chasers, some of which I had come to know in the
last few weeks. The cops let the kids go, but they put the bubble-letter
Banksy in the back of a police van. Presumably they still have it now.
It's worth a fortune.
