December 22: Exit Through the Gift Shop

I love bubble writing. I like how the letters are all puffed up and squished together in tight spaces. In grade school, it was cool to be able to write your name in the style, but now the only time I ever see it is when it's spray painted on a freeway overpass or in the back alleyways of an abandoned brick factory building. To me, graffiti has never been anything more than bubble writing on crack because I can't tell what it's trying to say. I can occasionally make out the letter "E" or maybe an "S," but full words? No clue.

A few months ago, I overheard a co-worker talking about a new documentary that he had seen called, Exit Through the Gift Shop. I didn't think much of it because A. he wasn't talking to me and B. because the subject of street art didn't spark my interest given my extreme disgust for graffiti. A few weeks ago, I was on the Netflix website browsing the recently added titles to their Instant Streaming library and I stumbled across the documentary. Again, I didn't really pay much attention to it. Instead, I jumped to conclusions by assuming it was terrible based solely on the fact that it was already available for streaming. It wasn't until one of the main film critics of Entertainment Weekly declared the documentary as one of the top ten films of 2010 in last week's issue that I really took notice.

The film follows a French man with an obsession of filming his entire life with a hand held camcorder until he stumbles upon the underground world of street art. Before he knows it, he is allowed to film the one man that refuses to identify himself beyond the moniker of Banksy. After seeing the success that Banksy has with his art, he decides to adopt the name Mr. Brainwash and begins his own line of street art.

The documentary is directed by Banksy himself and it's incredibly enlightening and informative on a world that I didn't even know existed. I had no idea how involved these "artists" were with their work and some of the pieces are amazingly detailed and well-done. It brings into question, though,what is art and what is vandalism?

I suppose on the whole, it's all a form of vandalism, but it's so far from the old styles of bubble writing that calling it graffiti feels odd and wrong. For the most part, the art is displayed at night to avoid authority figures, but it's more than tagging a billboard with a name. After posting his work all over Britain and then the world, Banksy held a show that made it possible for the genre to explode into an extremely profitable art form.

Each artist uses his own technique to personalize each piece. Invader uses tiled 8-bit recreations of characters from the popular arcade Space Invaders and Shepard Fairy uses a negative photograph-type style to turn subjects into his pieces of art; in fact, he's responsible for those Andre the Giant "Obey" pieces posted everywhere and he had a major role in the Barack Obama Hope posters. Banksy is more of a stenciled artist to give his pieces a realistic look.

Documentaries aren't for everyone, but if you want to explore the world of street art and the amount of dedication put forth in it, I highly recommend Exit Through the Gift Shop. It's a quick hour and a half that will leave audiences in awe of the power of a can of spray paint.