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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection since it was acquired directly from the artist in 2011, Dorothy I Don’t Think … crackles with Banksy’s deadpan conceptual wit. Rare for its inclusion of the artist's signature on both the front and reverse, the work depicts Dorothy—played by Judy Garland—and her dog Toto from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Below runs the phrase ‘I don’t think we’re on canvas anymore’: a pun on Dorothy’s iconic line ‘I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore’. Canvas, indeed, has vanished: instead the image is spray-painted on a slab of lino floor, underscored by a series of red dots. An earlier version of the work was included in Banksy’s infamous exhibition Banksy versus Bristol Museum (2009), in which he replaced the contents of the museum’s collection with his own works. In this iteration, which became the poster image for the show, the picture appeared on a sheet of paper suspended freely from the centre of an empty frame.
Banksy’s dismissal of the canvas—the sacred site of painting—is bound up with his long-standing attack on art’s institutions and histories. He came to prominence at the turn of the millennium as a graffiti artist, fuelled by a belief that art should live on the streets, and among the people. In 2002, he began a series of pranks upon museums, inserting his own irreverent creations into their hallowed halls. Over the following years he would vandalise canvases he found in car boot sales, and produce his own versions of famous paintings. His exhibition in Bristol was, in many ways, the culmination of these early initiatives. Underpinning them all was a common conviction: that the meaning of art did not reside in the fibres of the painted canvas. Instead, it lived and breathed in its interaction with the world around it. Just as Dorothy had exposed the Wizard of Oz as a fraud, so too did Banksy seek to dispel the smoke and mirrors of art’s false promises.
Spray paint and stencils had been Banksy’s signature medium since he was a teenager. They were the weapons of his guerrilla warfare, allowing him to work quickly and without detection by the authorities. By 2011, Banksy’s graffiti had delivered powerful social, cultural and political messages across the world, haunting sites from London’s Southbank to the West Bank barrier wall. While the present work makes reference to this practice, it also enters into subversive dialogue with the ghosts of art history. Dorothy’s face, with her tinted eyeshadow and lipstick, echoes Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor—and, indeed, of Garland herself. The dry humour of the work’s text conjures the Joke paintings of Richard Prince, while its use of lino flooring evokes Jean-Michel Basquiat’s use of doors and other urban detritus as supports. For Dorothy and Toto, there was ‘no place like home’. Here, Banksy delights in wrenching art from its comfort zone, thrusting it against its will into the spaces of everyday life.
Banksy’s dismissal of the canvas—the sacred site of painting—is bound up with his long-standing attack on art’s institutions and histories. He came to prominence at the turn of the millennium as a graffiti artist, fuelled by a belief that art should live on the streets, and among the people. In 2002, he began a series of pranks upon museums, inserting his own irreverent creations into their hallowed halls. Over the following years he would vandalise canvases he found in car boot sales, and produce his own versions of famous paintings. His exhibition in Bristol was, in many ways, the culmination of these early initiatives. Underpinning them all was a common conviction: that the meaning of art did not reside in the fibres of the painted canvas. Instead, it lived and breathed in its interaction with the world around it. Just as Dorothy had exposed the Wizard of Oz as a fraud, so too did Banksy seek to dispel the smoke and mirrors of art’s false promises.
Spray paint and stencils had been Banksy’s signature medium since he was a teenager. They were the weapons of his guerrilla warfare, allowing him to work quickly and without detection by the authorities. By 2011, Banksy’s graffiti had delivered powerful social, cultural and political messages across the world, haunting sites from London’s Southbank to the West Bank barrier wall. While the present work makes reference to this practice, it also enters into subversive dialogue with the ghosts of art history. Dorothy’s face, with her tinted eyeshadow and lipstick, echoes Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor—and, indeed, of Garland herself. The dry humour of the work’s text conjures the Joke paintings of Richard Prince, while its use of lino flooring evokes Jean-Michel Basquiat’s use of doors and other urban detritus as supports. For Dorothy and Toto, there was ‘no place like home’. Here, Banksy delights in wrenching art from its comfort zone, thrusting it against its will into the spaces of everyday life.