Banksy destroyed his art? Yawn. It’s been done before. And done better
Sure, Banksy shredded his art, but The KLF made a bigger statement long before Calum Marsh
In the earliest hours of August 23rd, 1994, in an abandoned boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, former members of the English pop band The KLF, stand in front of a burning wooden drum, steadily feeding bundles of £50 notes into the fire. They draw stacks of shrink-wrapped cash from a pair of suitcases by their side. A bottle of scotch is passed back and forth. It is cold and damp. They take their time. When the last flames are extinguished, at nearly 3 a.m., the duo look dumbly at the ashes, taking in what they’ve done.
They have just destroyed one-million pounds of their own money — over $2,500,000 CAD, after inflation. It is destroyed un-televised and unpublicized and with only one eye witness, a reporter from The Observer. They call the destruction a work of art.
The ghost of the Jura conflagration haunted Sotheby’s auction house in London last week. It was there that the street artist Banksy — the clandestine punkish Briton famed for his smirking, makes-you-think graffiti and middlebrow gotcha stunts — triggered the instantaneous self-destruction of one of his paintings the moment the gavel dropped on a millionpound bid. A mechanism concealed in the bottom of the painting’s frame was apparently activated by a guest of the auction after the completion of the sale; the work was run through a paper shredder and slid out in pieces beneath the frame. “We have been Banksy’ed,” Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art Alex Branczik said at a news conference later. “We have not experienced this situation in the past, where a painting is spontaneously shredded upon achieving a record for the artist.”
For anyone who remembers Drummond and Cauty’s headline-baiting efforts to disrupt and aggravate the art world in the early 1990s, Banksy’s carefully orchestrated Sotheby’s annihilation can hardly help but seem redundant. No one in this case really lost anything: by most accounts, the buyer will want to retain ownership of the newly shredded painting, which by virtue of this caper will only prove more famous, and thus more valuable.
Drummond and Cauty would have loathed such an amicable outcome. What they sought to do with their controversial K Foundation — the name of the body under whose aegis Drummond and Cauty operated for several years — was lay bare hypocrisy in modern art. They endeavored to do so not by focusing on art but by focusing on money. Shred a painting and you scandalize art. But mess with people’s money? That is radical.
The K Foundation began as a kind of retirement project for two musicians uninterested in their own extraordinary success. As The KLF, Drummond and Cauty released an album, The White Room, which produced four No. 1 hit singles in succession, including the electro hip-hop classic “3 AM Eternal.” At a televised awards ceremony in early 1992 — right after they had emerged as the best-selling singles band of the year — The KLF were honoured with a prize for Best British Band; in response, on stage, they announced they were quitting, and afterward dumped the rotting carcass of a dead sheep on the front steps of the auditorium. They were repulsed by their fame. Instead of enjoying it, they took the millions of dollars they were earning in royalties and concert cheques and elected to invest in something more appealing. So long, music. Hello, art.
Advertisements for the K Foundation started appearing in newspapers and magazines around the United Kingdom. They advertised nothing. “The K Foundation are almost in a position to reveal the fruits of their labours,” one full-page ad in The Guardian’s weekend edition read in 1993. Another, equally prominent and expensive, promoted a new KLF single that would be available only “once world peace has been firmly established.”
They then struck out at the art world direct. When the Tate Britain unveiled the four nominees for the 1994 Turner Prize, the award for the year’s best artist, the K Foundation unveiled four nominees for their own prize, for the year’s worst artist. The nominees were the same. The Turner Prize awards its winner £20,000. The K Foundation prize would award £40,000. Naturally, Turner Prize winner Rachel Whiteread won both. She accepted the latter, reluctantly. Perhaps Drummond and Cauty only did it because they knew anyone would.
One coup down. Now it was time to produce original art.
Their only work — a series of installations revealed to the press and offered to the Tate after the Turner Prize stunt — bears the title “Money: A Major Body of Cash.” It consists of real cash in varying amounts fixed to slabs of plaster board. The boards were to be auctioned at half the face value of the money used in their construction: one installation, with 10 pounds glued to it, could be acquired for five quid; another, assembled from a million pounds, had a price tag of £500,000. It sounds quite idiotic. But the artists themselves suggested a rather clever twist: “Over the years the face value will be eroded by inflation, while the artistic value will rise and rise,” the catalogue explained sensibly. “Deconstruct the work now and you double your money. Hang it on a wall and watch the face value erode, the market value fluctuate, and the artistic value soar. The choice is yours.”
No one got the chance. In the process of negotiating a permanent home for the series — the Tate summarily rejected their offer to feature the exhibition, rebuffing the artists that their ploy had been done before and done better — Drummond and Cauty elected to just burn the million pounds instead.
If the object of the installation was in effect to lay waste to their fortune in order to demonstrate the allegiance of the art world to financial interests and the thin line between artistic and material value, why not skip the middle man to prove what they already knew, and just illustrate the almost holy sanctity of money an easier way? To make a mockery of England’s most venerated cultural institutions by forcing them to acknowledge the centrality of cash to the experience of buying and selling art would be on the nose. Burn it all instead. So they did. They burned a million pounds.
Public reaction was not shocked in quite the way it was when the Banksy painting was eradicated. Indeed, the overwhelming popular sentiment was outrage and contempt. People felt what Drummond and Cauty had done was not merely irresponsible, but immoral, subject to condemnation for the wanton, unconscionable waste. Even The Observer’s original article about the burning — the only eye-witness account that it had been carried off — ended with a bullet-form list of what a million pounds could provide for the needy, including 565 full-time state nursery places and 55 kidney transplants. Of course, getting people to think seriously about the responsibility of having money and the moral imperative of the rich could be described as exactly the point of this “artistic experience.” And cash is squandered on things less essential than nursery care or organ transplants by virtually everyone with money every day.
The curators of the Tate were correct that what the K Foundation sought to do with their art was not exactly new. They were working in the tradition of the Dadaists and other art radicals whose entire raison d’etre was to confront and disturb the art complacent. What distinguishes Drummond and Cauty from an artist like Banksy, though, and what makes the K Foundation’s burning more radical than the shredded sale, is that they put their money where their mouth is. They put something real, something material, on the line.
Interesting, too, is the timing. After the blaze, Drummond and Cauty signed a contractual moratorium on discussing it for 23 years. That was on November 23rd, 1993 — 23 years ago next month. Whatever their reasons, and whether for good or for bad, they may soon tell us more about this incredible, irreplicable work of art.
THEY PUT SOMETHING REAL, SOMETHING MATERIAL, ON THE LINE.