CRAP FLOWERS

Catalogue Note

Crap Flowers was created for Banksy vs Bristol Museum, Banksy’s landmark intervention at Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery, which opened on 13 June 2009. The exhibition transformed the museum through more than one hundred works, installations and alterations to its existing displays, deliberately collapsing distinctions between street art, institutional culture and the traditional museum collection. Contemporary accounts describe 78 works as new, and the exhibition ultimately attracted more than 300,000 visitors.

Presented in an elaborate gilt frame, the work adopts the deliberately crude, childlike figures that recur periodically throughout Banksy’s practice. Two adults stand surrounded by groups of almost identical children. One asks, “Who are all these people?” The other replies: “Oh they’re not people – he’s just crap at drawing flowers.” What initially appears to be a crowd is therefore transformed by the punchline into an inept bouquet.

The Joke Is About Art

The work operates as a particularly economical piece of institutional satire. Banksy places something resembling an amateur doodle inside the visual apparatus of traditional fine art: a large, ornate museum frame. The joke depends upon the discrepancy. The frame tells the viewer to look seriously; the drawing obstinately refuses seriousness.

Yet the self-deprecation is deceptive. Banksy had long cultivated jokes about conventional artistic skill. In a 2002 interview with The Observer, he recalled abandoning conventional graffiti techniques in favor of stencils.

“All artists are prepared to suffer for their art, but why are so few prepared to learn to draw?”

Crap Flowers turns the same argument back upon Banksy himself: technical virtuosity is deliberately displaced by the effectiveness of the idea.

A Recurring Banksy Character

The apparently primitive stick figures also have a longer history within Banksy’s vocabulary. They appear in works from the 2000s and subsequently re-emerge in other contexts; documentation of the Bristol exhibition specifically identifies the “crap at drawing flowers” work among their appearances.

The image has since circulated under both Crap at Drawing Flowers and Who Are All These People? and has appeared in later exhibitions of Banksy works, including the unauthorized Banksy: Genius or Vandal? presentations.

Within Banksy vs Bristol Museum, however, its meaning was particularly sharp. Surrounded by objects preserved because museums have declared them culturally significant, Banksy offered an intentionally ridiculous drawing in an imposing gold frame. The underlying question is characteristically Banksian: if an institution hangs something on its wall and surrounds it with the conventions of importance, at what point does the joke become art?