With my two grown up kids out at work on the Saturday and my wife spending the day with her mates I decided that I could go and visit the exhibition of Lee Miller’s work at the Tate Britain, and also the Banksy Limitless at Sussex Mansions, South Kensington.
While I was out I also booked a ticket to the Frameless Immersive Experience at Marble Arch and also captured parts of the protest against the banning of protests in Trafalgar Square. It was a busy day and I didnt get into any trouble.
M1 Stay
The Friday afternoon I finished work and contemplated going to bed by 9’ish as I would need to be up for 5am to enable me to get to the Banksy exhibition at 10am, as that was the only ticket I could get. 5am rise would allow me to get ready and get on the road for 5:30am, followed by a three hour drive from Shrewsbury to Stanmore Tube Station, then an hour on the tube to get to South Kensington.
My son suggested that I could travel down that night and sleep in the car or find a cheap hotel in the city. I have slept in the car at Stanmore on a two day adventure before but wanted a hotel this time, so I looked around the Stanmore area and settled on a Ramada hotel off the M1 between J4 and J3. I headed off at 5pm and got to the hotel after 8pm, checked in and went to my room.
I watched a documentary about Cold War Steve, before stopping it and then seeing that Highlander was just starting, I had to watch it all. I was ok as I needed to be up at around 7ish for a short drive to Stanmore and then tube into South Kensington. At Stanmore I found a couple of round mirrors that I seemed to find a few of throughout the day and this started me off with a bit of a warm up.
Alighting from the Tube at South Kensington I headed towards Old Brompton Road and Sussex Mansions but was a bit premature, so I had a wander around the well-to-do neighbourhood. I think it was a wealthy area as there was a Ferrari Dealership and a Lamborghini dealer too. I found a few scenes to capture and a small farmers market in Bute Street before heading back to the exhibition where a queue had built up.
Fully Limited
Banksy Limitless was an exhibition based on the works of Banksy, the famous street artist from Bristol, but it was bloody awful! On a previous trip to Bristol, my wife and I had seen a couple of his works, stillin place on the walls and it was grreat to see them. Here though in this exhibition space it felt wrong.
I had got a good deal on entry as I have a Student Art Pass, so paid the extra five quid for the Underground Immersive Experience but it was crap and not worth a £1 extra. Upon going down the stairs into the immersive experience there was a pair of Puma Trainers in a glass case that had been designed for Banksy’s Turf War exhibition, an exhibition that WAS endorsed by Banksy himself, unlike this cheap knock off.
The rest of the immersive experience was a couple of paintings that looked like Banksy might have done them, and a rubbish reconstruction of the Grim Reaper in a Dodgem, that was a poor counterfeit of the real dodgem that appeared at Dismaland, another of Banksy’s official exhibitions. The “Dodgem” which I think was actually the bottom part of a mobility scooter, was not moving and the reaper in the seat looked like a £3.50 halloween decoration from B&M. Going through a door labelled Atelier it led me into a small room with a reconstruction of a bedroom and a figure sitting over his desk cutting out stencils, whilst in front of it was a screen that could be seen through and also projected upon. The video seemed to be a story about Banksy including some of the artists famous quotes. It was not dynamic at all, not engaging and very disappointing.
As I was leaving the Immersive Underground Experience, passing the now moving skeleton in a mobility scooter, I noticed another door like the previous room, opened it up and it was just full of junk and materials used to pull together an exhibition. When I popped out up the stairs into the main entrance I asked the steward, if the immersive experience consisted of the room with the dodgem and the video room and he said yes. I stated that I was checking in case I’d missed something of value, sadly though he confirmed I was right and that there was naff all else to see down there.
Collections
From here it was a walk down a timeline of Banksy’s career and some of his most celebrated works, that led us to a cinema room, a projector showing some of his works and news clips all narrated and captioned by a seemingly useless AI large language model or someone just bodging it together.
A walk down a corridor with prints and paintings as well as some collectable items from Dismaland and other exhibitions before it was into the main gallery for yet more disappointment. It appears that the curators of this exhibition have got together a small collection of limited edition prints which are impressive, and then filled in the rest of the walls with knock off canvases seemingly printed at Max Spielman based on screenshots from the web. There were some large scale sprayings on the walls but these aren’t Banksy works, although they look similar and it reminded me of the feeling I had visiting the Space Shuttle on USS Intrepid in New York City, only to find out that this had never been to space.
There were recreations of some of the WALLED OFF HOTEL , a play on the Waldorf Hotel, but built in Bethlehem to highlight the issues in the region. Some of the exhibits in here were obviously recreations of the real thing, and were not that great. Interspersed with the original prints were more knock off items and I found myself getting more frustrated. Here and there were obvious mistakes too, a print of the USS Enterprise with the flight deck crew holding aloft an APPLAUSE sign, was accompanied by a card noting how George W Bush was holding aloft a card. Another showed a disney like cartoon bird with a grenade in its beak, but the caption stated it was Tweety Pie. Another work Tank Man was based ont eh man in Tiananmen Square who held up the column of tanks, in this work he was holding a golf sale sign. The caption said the Tanks had been replaced by a sign. In my opinion someone had lazily asked an AI tool to summarise each of the pictures with a basic description and perhaps an interpretation, but it read like absolute garbage. No wonder that Banksy wasn’t endorsing this.
Before leaving this gallery space there was also a recreation of the picture frame that included a shredder, which partially shredded the Banksy work Girl With Balloon in the auction house. The recreation was pants, there were bits of wire, metal, clockworks and other junk that looked nothing like a working shredder. People were having the photo taken with it, I think in the belief that this was exactly was in the original. More disappointment.
Now into a larger hall where there were some prints on the walls and then other recreations hanging from the rafters as well as a shoddy xerox of the Telephone Box that had been murdered with a pick axe. It was not the original at all but to all intents and purposes it was being portrayed as such. The feeling of being ripped off was growing further.
I have neglected to mention the “Zoo” area too, there was a section in the gallery grandly labelled as the “Zoo” and inside it was a copy of a wall painting of a gorilla and some cardboard monkeys hanging in an open lift (elevator). I walked away from this feeling completely baffled and feeling like it was the equivalent of the old Willy Wonka event in Glasgow that went viral for the wrong reasons.
On the way back to the exit, via the gift shop of course, was a reflective room that played a video on repeat that was equally as dire as the earlier one downstairs. The whole thing felt like a crap clickbaity youtube or instagram video of “The Top 30 Banksy Works You Never Saw” narrated by a bug laden corrupted AI voice who was reading a phone directory rather than concentrating on the job.
Then it was into the gift shop, and I normally buy something from gift shops, either a t shirt or a post card but here the t-shirts were £30 with the Banksy:Limitless logo on or rip offs of his works, again I could have bought something similar on the side of the promenade in Blackpool so I decided to leave it. I wanted to give no more money to this organisation and then I left quietly.
On the way out I noticed that the t-shirt production was up and running in the windows either side of the door where guests could spray a t shirt using a stencil similar to those Banksy might use, but I doubt any of the stencils were real Banksy ones and the t-shirts just not worth the money. People were queued up to do it though so I can’t fault the organisers.
Review
My review score has lowered since thinking back to the experience, on Instagram I said it was a 5/10 but I think it’s amore realistic as a 3/10. I wasn’t the only one who thinks this, I can find some others on review on the web but my favourite review was just outside the building by a dog, as can be seen below.
Maybe the street artist Banksy, should have his work presented on a wall or in a specially curated experience like Dismaland, but not in this way in a South Kensington building. I did go and see a street art exhibition in Piccadilly this year and it felt far more authentic than what I saw on this day.
The next post will deal with the next part of the day, the protest in Trafalgar Square, join me there to have a read what occurred.
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