Rat with Black Square: BANKSY vs Kazimir Malevich 1913 – 2018

An exhibition of paintings and prints by NOT NOT BANKSY.

Presented on the 100thanniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s 13th Black Square

Blasé, 55 Wallis Road, Hackney Wick, London E9 5LH

14th– 17thDecember 2018

Opening Party: Friday 14thDec 7pm – Late

PART 1: Some theoretical observations on the so-called Urban Art Revolution:

Deformalist critic and Post-Art Historian Harold Rosenbloom has linked the aestheticism of the early 21stCentury’s so-called Urban Art Revolutionwith the collapse of liberal democracy and the Brexit/Trump revolutions; citing the art movement’s populist attitudes and derogatory attacks on the complex cultural coding of established art-world norms as making them receptive to a reductive, polemic and highly profitable new meta-reality.

Many of the so-called Urban Artists engaged in public projects that agitated for ‘success over substance’ and mocked representatives of the toppled art elite. The new army of artists, led by the so-called NOT NOT BANKSY of the highly provocative all action no content, double negative de-radicalised neo-Nothingist post-anti-art anti-art agitator activist group known as (the so called) Ni**er L**er™®, adopted hitherto fashion-controlled modish styles, now outlawed and subjected to the framework of collectively approved miss-perception, and de-marketed through digital and non-digital media. With these new forms of production, anti-production and anti-nonproduction, the imposition of one’s augmented reality ‘ABC’ was turned into the proposition of an egalitarian popular aesthetics that had a high potential for mimicry, mockery, regurgitation and fakery that could erase reference to both the past and future for ever. The goal was not to provide a counter-revolutionary layer over the old world but to destroy it altogether then refuse to build a new one; thus, propelling post-art anti-artists to create new neo-nihilistic counter-productive visions of a dying planet being pissed-on from afar by a dysfunctional bloated white-man dressed in a dirty rat suit, forever (and pointlessly) painting a monumental black square of empty nothingness under the gaze of a cute bunny. Forming a puerile universal language of nonsensical and barely funny one-liner visual gags, this created an effective method to disseminate the (ir)revolutionary non-art agenda and double negative anti-elite neo-elitist sentiments to form a new meta-meaning of universal neo-non-nothingness.

Please Note: All works in this exhibition are fakes or fakes of fakes. Nothing is real. It is all an illusion. Everything is For Sale.

EXHIBITION EDITION:

Rat with Black Square + Pink Bunny with Black Square + Black Square with Black Square by Banksy NOT NOT

Editions of 200, numbered & signed by the true artists on the back

£50 each

£125 for the set.

PART 2: By way of explanation, a short history

When Banksy met Russian artist Kazimir Malevich in 1913 he jokingly gave him a painting of a black square as a friendly dig at the earnest radical’s minimal Suprematist paintings. In 1915 Malevich copied Banksy’s joke painting and his Black Squares* went on to be the most radical revolutionary works of art ever made. Banksy was gutted. Until then he had been an ardent champion of figurative painting with a penchant for bucolic landscape scenes, believing observation of nature to be the cornerstone of art, but that all changed over-night. Following the success of Malevich’s Black Square he turned his own hand to abstraction under various pseudonyms (Piet Mondrain and Mark Rothkok being a couple of the more notable ones), until – realising the pointlessness of it all – he finally gave up painting altogether in 1970, faked his death and went on to become a successful rare breeds pig farmer in Somerset. It was only when his old friend Blek le Rat managed to track him down in the early 1990’s, and got him to help him with some stencil graffiti, that Banksy once again got the fire in his belly and realised that this new art form was his true calling. The rest, as they say, is history. Banksy became the most important cultural innovator’s and influencer of the early 21stcentury, with many poor imitators, copyists and outright fakers taking to the streets and galleries of the world under the banner of so-called Urban Art. The most important of these inadequate copyist fakers being NOT BANKSY and his smart-arse neo-Nothingist successor NOT NOT BANKSY**.

Here, in this exhibition, NOT NOT BANKSY pays homage to their hero and his finest unknown masterpiece THE BLACK SQUARE.

* Between 1915 and 1918, Kazimir Malevichpainted 13 versionsof the Black Squarebefore they were banned by the revolutionary government for being “meaningless bollocks”. It is universally agreed that his 13th Black Square painting was his best.

**NOT NOT BANKSY is not NOT BANKSY as NOT BANKSY is dead. These prints are a homage to BANKSY/MALEVICHnot NOT BANKSY by the artist(s) known as NOT NOT BANKSY who continues the great work of NOT BANKSY and not BANKSY. Some people think it is NOT known if BANKSY was ever involved in the NOT BANKSY project, or if NOT BANKSY is NOT DEAD and in fact is NOT NOT BANKSY. The latter is unknowable but we do know, categorically, that BANKSY was NOT involved in any creation or idea formed by NOT BANKSY, THE CONTINUITY NOT BANKSY, and certainly not NOT NOT BANKSY.