I have been obsessed with Exit Through the Gift Shop. While its initial draw came from Thierry Guetta's footage, priceless documents of the street art scene, it is the status of Banksy's montage that became the probing question refusing to let go. When Mr. Brainwash makes its apparition, 57 minutes into the 1h26 long film, I was struck with perhaps my favourite feeling, that of entering a complex network of coincidences. Looking up from my computer screen, I could see a poster, brought back from New York by my girlfriend depicting the Beatles in Kiss makeup.
In the bottom left corner, a signature, "Mr Brainwash." This memento of an exhibit had been given to her on the spot. Entering the warehouse where the exposition took place, she had taken a liking diametrically opposite to Banksy and Fairey's snide dismissal, perhaps due to the recognition of the referrals of Mr. Brainwash's artwork: Andy Warhol meets street art.
While derivative (what art isn't?) the experience of a Banksy show broadened to reach a larger audiences didn't strike her; after all, our individual experiences are rarely on par with an informed and contextual standpoint. She got to ponder the worth of mass produced art, in a post-Warhol era, and was introduced to the vocabulary of street art in a more expansive way than, say, finding oneself in front of a commissioned Fairey mural while wandering Manhattan's downtown streets.
The question of authenticity, valued above all else in the art collector's world, is left up to wealthy auctioneers' decision, while the authenticity of her own enjoyment, and that of a truly pleasant moment spent with her father and sister, shouldn't have to come under scrutiny. Sure A-listers and those lucky enough to be around when Banksy's Barely Legal was up might have the comparative sentiment of being fed rehashed ideas, but those wandering into Mr. Brainwash's "show" experience a diffused glow of its influences.
Both Exit Through the Gift Shop and another important documentary of 2010, Catfish, have come under scrutiny as possible "fakes." Wikipedia tells us that both Morgan Spurlock and Zack Galifianakis expressed their belief that the events in Catfish were staged, as if the skepticism of the famous is somehow more important. Instead of resolving anything with his expert status, Spurlock, having faced the same accusations, adds another layer of complexity to the discourse around the documentary's factuality. General claims of mistrust in both documentaries' portrayed reality abound on the web, in comment boards and on blogs. The doubt in the coincidences that make up the narrative structure of Catfish, doubt in the fact that a person living such a dramatic story is sharing a studio with two filmmakers for example, is easy enough to understand, but the the reasons for the incredulity in front of Banksy's films are more complex. The film, in a certain way, is about pretensions of authenticity and the printing of facsimiles, joined by the visual proof that Banksy is a notorious prankster. Some point to the pictures of The Laughing Cavalier behind Guetta during his last interviews, others to the similitudes between Guetta's work and Banksy's, predicting that Banksy is playing with the monetary worth of his own production by passing it off as another's (a ridiculed other).
In this era of wariness, scripted "reality" is a genre of its own and is central to music channels' (why them?) schedules. Its also become a technical "genre" with sitcoms shedding the canned laughs and espousing the hand-held camera. Survivor has been around so long that we can no longer call reality TV a new phenomenon. Mockumentaries have been around for half a century, yet perhaps documentaries are now being swallowed up by meddlers mucking up the continuum between the "real" and fiction on film. Years of critical theory has taught us that all representations have are, in a certain way, constructed fiction, through montage and perspective, but the "realness" of documentaries continues to act as a classifying criterion.
The documentary as an object in the world has wrought doubt about Mr. Brainwash's existence. Its narrative casts doubt on his authenticity. In a way, Mr. Brainwash is the perfect poster-boy for fiction's problematic relationship with the real. He is a reminder that one can never be absolutely sure that he's in the know, that he's at the heart of the joke, at the head of the pyramid scheme of mockery. Or that Descartes' deceiving God lurks in the apprehension of the everyday. Some spectators, watching the documentary for the first time and knowing little about its background story, will question the veracity of the portrayed facts, making initial experiences with Exit Through the Gift Shop as ambiguous as those conjured by Mr. Brainwash's exhibits.
In recent news, Thierry Guetta has been sued by Glen E. Friedman for infringing on his copyrighted pictures of Run DMC. In a way, its a perfect ending to the questions of his existence. Forced by the law to appear in court, Guetta will have to prove the authenticity of his fair use. Will this formal convocation fixate his status or just add more to the story?
I, for one, welcome these dubious overtones.
Or do I?
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