Urban Art Association

How to get a piece up anywhere in east LDN (Tips), by thebleedingedge on Jun 11, 2008 8:41:48 GMT 1, Thought I would impart some wisdom on those who don't know the game well enough to do this. Obviously since Banksy, a lot of people are aware of the high visibility jacket trick, which is a good one if you know what you're doing, but the smell and sound of spray paint is enough to arouse suspision in certain areas so you need to try a different approach. There are loads of these techniques, but this one is rather easy for anyone to adopt.

This trick is all based around social engineering so you do need to have a small amount of blagging skills, but if not you can still get away with it assuming you set it up correctly.

Alright, to start you will need to have scouted a location (don't be a tit and hit private property). Once you have a location, normally you would do a little research to be able to get a name of the owner and a mobile number but I'm going to give you a nice generic method that allows you to avoid all that nonsense.

Just a little background info before we continue, Blank Expression ( www.blankexpression.org/ ) is an organisation that secures walls for high profile artists to hit legally, they were the guys who secured the site for the cans festival and the location of the last Banksy piece (I am told). Very often they will provide pre-rendered walls in graffiti hot spots (ie. a wall with real illegal pieces on them, like that Dave the Chimp vs MCity wall) to artists so that they can get an image up without the need to run the risk of breaking the law (yeah I don't get it either). Ever since the cans festival the link between this organization and Banksy has become common knowledge (which is good for us), and it's not hard to research through google (again, very good for us). You can confirm this by checking www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22blank+expression%22+banksy&btnG=Search&meta=

Blank Expression seems to be run by Annette Russel, so I'll use her for this example but you can apply these techniques to anyone in that or a similar organisations or even the owner of the building. The first thing you would need to do is acquire her phone number, to do that you simply email her, very often people are silly enough to include all their contact details as part of their email signature, which means all she has to do is reply to your message. Failing that, you can always use google, in this case we will be doing just that. So you google her name and you would find various profiles and things where a phone number probably won't exist, but in the cases of a professional portfolio sort of website, you're almost always guaranteed to find one, in this case I did: www.annetterussell.co.uk/

Once you have her number, you will need to figure out when you are going to hit your location. If you were planning on hitting it on a Tuesday night, then you need to attempt to phone Annette on the Tuesday night before at the same approximate time, you aren't calling to speak to her, you are calling to make sure her phone is off and that she mentions her name in her voicemail, business lines are almost always good for this as they will usually have an answering machine or voicemail service outside of office hours. If you can't get that far, you will need to go get a pay as you go sim and get a friend to leave a voicemail pretending to be the person in question (even if you have done the voicemail thing, keep the original number, it is important).

The next bit of homework is you need to create a permission slip, it's simply a typed out statement with a letter head saying "I _____ (annete) of ______ (blank expression) representing ______ (owner) of ____ (owner organisation) grant permission to ______ (you) on ____ (date) to create an aerosol art mural for the purpose of guerilla marketing."
The format of the letter is important because you are going to "spill" paint on the bottom bits where your name would appear without covering the top bits where their names are, make sure you didn't write your name with ink that bleeds through paint.

Now you go hit your wall, but take a ladder with you and some paint trays, even if you don't need them, cumbersome tools that would prevent you from taking off in a hurry. Now go paint your wall as relaxed as you like, when cops roll up on you (and they probably will at some point) you need to act nervous, but not nervous that you have done something wrong, nervous that you are a unstreet savvy artist type who just wants to cooperate because you are in fear of their authority (they get off on that). First thing you would do is stroll to the police car and very relaxed just say "alright mate?" they will then ask if you have permission to be doing this, you will of course say yes and they will ask to see some sort of permission slip, you go back to where your ladder, trays and paint are and find the crumpled slip amongst the mess (with paint spilled over half of it... oops), take that back to them and act a bit frantic when you realize the paint is obscuring some of the words.

The usual practise for police is to call the owner if no permission slip is presented, or in our case if one is presented with certain details missing. You have to remember that the police are seeing you slightly frantic over just being stopped by them in fear that you might get nicked wrongly and they also noticed that you have a ladder and paint trays scattered around your work area, so they are already certain you are not a hardcore criminal type and they know you weren't planning on running. The seed has been planted in their minds that you are legit but they just need to "verify" at least one fact before they leave you alone. At this point they will ask for a phone number, do not offer the phone number until they ask for it (you're frantic remember, when they ask for it say "oooh yeah" and do an oscar winning sigh of relief). At this point they have read the organisations name and your contact at that organisation, when they ring the number, they get someone claiming to be your contact at the organisation on voicemail (the secret is to lie as little as possible, so if you can try use the real persons number, but if you can't just fake it). After that they leave you alone, and it all seems fine and dandy. Once they leave, they almost always try do a little research on their own internet capable mobiles or ring someone sitting at a computer, so the facts you would have provided to them need to be easily researchable, in this case the facts are that an organisation exists that has something to do with Banksy that is managed by a person called Annette and this organisation secures walls for legal knocks. Once they confirm those things, they decide you are completely legit and don't come back, if they can't then they do that old cop trick or circling round and rolling up on you from behind.