Banksy Strikes Again
by Zoe Strimpel
Wed, 31 Oct 2007 at 5:03 PM
updated Wed, 31 Oct 2007 at 5:24 PM
And so today, amid the media storm, to visit the new work by the fly-by-night graffiti artist Banksy, on Pollard Row, a quiet street in London's Bethnal Green. Locals reported spotting the famously elusive "guerrilla" artist Sunday morning when the work went up, and one bystander's picture of a stooping man in a hoodie and jeans has been all over the papers. But the genius of the Banksy persona is that nobody ever knows anything for sure.
Standing before the painting, which covers one side of the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club (historical community center meets trendy burlesque club), a small crowd speculated. "Whoever did this ..." began a cub reporter from the country's meanest, best-read weekend paper, the Mail on Sunday, who had been sent out from his newsroom to "find Banksy." He was stopped short. "What do you mean, 'whoever'? It's Banksy," the crowd chorused. "Well, we don't know that for sure," he said. He was from the Mail, though, so we listened. Just then a local television producer appeared and said that he had once glimpsed Banksy when filming his roomful-of-rats exhibit years ago for a Canadian TV channel. "Was it this guy?" the cub reporter asked, pointing to the picture in the Evening Standard. "No. He was bigger, heavier."
And so on to Pellicci's teashop across the road. "Sure! I saw Banksy on Sunday, doing the painting," the proprietor told us. "There was also another guy hiding behind the fence opposite," he continued, "taking pictures of everyone's reaction." Us: "What did he look like?" Mr. Pellicci: "He was a larger guy." And so, the plot thickens. Might Banksy have sent his cohorts to do the dirty work and lingered behind watching it all — the ultimate prankster?
Possibly, but the work looked like Banksy's. It takes up the double yellow line on the street and paints it up the wall into a big double-lined, yellow flower. In the bottom left corner is a stooping figure that looks remarkably like the man in all the pictures.
It is both pretty and expert; the predominantly Bangladeshi kids filing out of the local school stopped and looked, only for a moment. One boy, about 13 years old, noted, "It has nice shading, that."
But a woman with a camera, who was interviewing people, said she thought it was unfair that the council would have to clean it up, ultimately. She saw vandalism rather than a unique blend of prettiness and mischief. At any rate, because most of the work is on the private property of Working Men's Club, who apparently agreed to it, the authorities may not be able to remove all of it after all. Here's hoping they don't.
Pollard Row, London, E2 6NB
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