I was about four years old when I paid my first visit to Bristol Museum. Sadly, it turned out to be a major disappointment. My grandmother took me, having told me that we were going to see Alfred the gorilla, who had retired to the museum after gaining national fame as the star attraction at Bristol Zoo. She had been lucky enough to see Alfred at the zoo, where he would be paraded amongst the public on a collar and chain and delight them with his tricks, such as making and throwing snowballs in the winter. He would sometimes be dressed in human clothes, she told me, and he hated men with beards.

I believe that much was probably true but my grandmother couldn’t resist embellishing the story: Alfred would sit down to lunch with a knife and fork; Alfred would put on a pair of glasses to read the newspaper, that sort of thing. She may also have mentioned in passing that Alfred was now dead and stuffed but that didn’t register with an excited four year old. When we got to the museum I was devastated to find that Alfred did nothing more than squat motionless in a glass case.

The stuffed Alfred is still a popular attraction at the museum to this day, surely bringing back wonderful memories for the old folk who had witnessed his antics at the zoo and equally surely disappointing a new generation of children primed by over-enthusiastic pensioners.

Now I live just ten minutes’ walk from the museum and it’s a place I visit frequently: sometimes to sit in the cafe and drink a decent cup of coffee; sometimes to kill half an hour on a rainy afternoon; sometimes to see the latest temporary exhibition; and just occasionally to spend a couple of hours enjoying a proper look around. Recently a friend of mine was over from Australia on holiday and together with another friend we went for one of those proper looks. But this was no ordinary look around: this time I was nearly as excited at the prospect as the four-year-old me had been at the prospect of seeing Alfred. And this time I wasn’t disappointed.

Getting There, Getting In and Getting Around

The museum is in Queen’s Road, at the top of Park Street in Clifton. Car parking is difficult in this area but there are multi-storey car parks at Trenchard Street and West End, each just a few minutes walk from the museum. The official information leaflet tells you that Temple Meads railway station is a 25 minute walk away, which may be a realistic estimate for an Olympic athlete, but I really wouldn’t advise walking from Temple Meads; I suggest taking a bus or taxi if you arrive by train.

Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery (to give it its official title) is housed in an Edwardian building in the Baroque style in the Clifton district, a gift to the city from the tobacco baron, Sir William Henry Wills. It sits grandly between the university’s towering Wills Memorial Building and Browns restaurant, which occupies another impressive building; this one being in a combination of Bristol Byzantine and Venetian Gothic Revival styles (loosely based on the Doge’s Palace!) and which was itself once home to the museum. They make a stately trio.

The building dates back to 1905 and the arched entrance on Queen’s Road used to span a driveway that once allowed people to step straight from their carriages into the museum without being troubled by rain on wet days. Only a few years ago glass entrance doors and side panels were added to create a new entrance lobby. This allowed a level entrance to be included, avoiding the front steps and at the same time a lift big enough for wheelchairs was installed so the second set of steps could also be avoided. The museum is in a three storey building with lots of steps throughout. There is a lift that goes to all three floors but there are still some areas (including most of the third floor art galleries) that can only be accessed via staircases.

Entry to the museum is free, even when there is a special exhibition on. It’s open from 10 am to 5pm every day but please see my comments about times before the end of August later in the review. Also the City Council have announced that the opening hours are changing in November 2009 but so far they’re keeping tight-lipped about the details so I’d suggest checking their web site.

Banksy

So what was stirring up all this enthusiasm in me for yet another trip to the museum? Since 13th June the museum has been hosting what I’d call an event (rather than a mere exhibition) entitled “Banksy versus Bristol Museum”.

For the benefit of those who are not familiar with Banksy and his work (where have you been, for goodness sake?), I’ll just tell you briefly that he is probably the world’s most famous street artist. Starting out in Bristol in the 1990s as a graffiti artist, he kept his identity secret for the obvious reason that he was sought by council officials and police for alleged acts of vandalism and criminal damage.

As Banksy’s work developed to encompass art forms from stencilling to animatronics, he maintained his anonymity despite a growing acceptance by officialdom that his street works are legitimate pieces of art. He remains what the press would probably call a “shadowy figure” and speculation over his identity has only added to his appeal. It seems to be pretty well established that he was born and educated in Bristol, where his graffiti first appeared, but his work soon started to pop up in London and then in locations all over the world, hence his international fame.

Over the last few years Banksy pieces have fetched increasingly high prices at auction, including the sale of one work at Bonhams in 2007 for nearly £300,000.

To say that the Banksy event in Bristol has been popular would be something of an understatement. We arrived at the museum at 9.45 on a Friday morning at the end of June and joined the queue. Fortunately we only had had to wait for about 25 minutes to get in but the queues have lengthened since then and when I returned on a weekday at the end of July I had to queue for over 2 hours. At the weekend you can expect to wait for at least 3 hours to get in. My advice is to get there well before 10 on a weekday morning and go with someone else so you can take it in turns to leave the queue to buy yourself a coffee or use the toilet in one of the nearby cafes.

Museum Vandalised!

The museum’s entrance lobby, normally bare and empty, has been carpeted with fake grass and the side glass wall obscured by a painted backdrop of a stone circle bathed in orange light to showcase Banksy’s “Stonehenge” piece, a collection of graffiti-covered toilet cubicles that were originally on display at Glastonbury Festival. One cubicle sits horizontally across the roofs of two others in the style of the ancient monument with a menacing black bird perched on top.

Carrying on through the doors into the front hall, the transformation of this space, so familiar to me, is disorientating and exhilarating. The big central information desk has disappeared, replaced by a burnt-out, graffiti-covered ice cream van, complete with ice cream melting from the giant cone atop its roof and the traditional, tinny ice cream van music playing in the background.

Next to the van is a children’s coin-in-the-slot rocking horse being ridden by a life-size figure in full police riot gear, rocking gently back and forth. Is this shocking, creepy or just plain comical? All three for me, I think. Like most of Banksy’s work, it has me wondering whether humour underlies social comment or vice versa. Banksy would probably think I was a bit of a twat for saying that.

The classical marble statues around the edges of the room were not quite as classical as they first appeared to be. A winged angel has taken off her high heels and put down her fast food container to take a swig from her can of lager, fag in hand. The whole thing is in perfect alabaster white.

The lion statue appears to have just eaten a lion tamer. A Buddha-like figure has acquired a neck brace and sling. An upturned paint pot sits on the head of another figure, spilling a slick of pink paint down the statue’s front. All is chaos; the museum has been vandalised and despite the number of times I’ve stood in this hall I find myself not quite sure whether some of the exhibits have just been tampered with or whether they were here before at all.

One of my favourite exhibits in the front hall is the Bristol Boxkite biplane hanging from the ceiling, largely because it emphasises the vastness of the space in this room. The plane is actually a full-size flyable replica, which was used in the film “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines” and has been a permanent exhibit for many years. Banksy has adorned it with a pilot in an orange jumpsuit, his hands bound and a cigarette in his mouth, and named it “Escape from Guantanamo”.

To keep the queue moving, museum staff encourage the crowds to pass through the front hall fairly quickly, assuring them that they can return to this area later on in their visit. We are ushered into the Temporary Exhibition Gallery next. This gallery is always one of the highlights of the museum for me, housing a wide variety of exhibitions throughout the year. Recent ones have included Chinese and African themed exhibitions and there is regularly a large display of paintings on tour from the National Gallery in London, bringing the opportunity to see old masters and other great works of art without having to travel to London. Another favourite is the annual display of stunning photographs from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

This time the temporary gallery was given over entirely to works by Banksy. I won’t attempt to list or describe them all as this review would become impossibly long (and I’d like to leave some surprises for people planning to visit) but they include a huge painting of the chamber of the House of Commons populated by chimps (perfectly timed following the recent expenses scandal) at one end of the room and a mock-up of Banksy’s chaotic studio at the other. In between are a number of vandalised or “subverted” paintings in traditional gold frames as well as some previously-shown Banksy paintings and installations, together with a large number of completely new pieces on display for the first time. The ceiling has been draped with foliage in netting to give the place a jungle (or urban jungle) feel.

Some of the pieces in here made me smile (such as the riot police skipping hand-in-hand through a meadow); some made me wince (like the overweight western couple being pulled in a rickshaw by a tiny, emaciated African boy as they smilingly take pictures of him with their mobile phone); and some made me laugh out loud (such as the gold framed portrait of an elegant lady with ridiculous false nose, moustache and glasses).

Next up was the rear hall, usually home to a seating area outside the museum’s café and a children’s play area. Now it was dimly lit and filled with cages housing Banksy’s animatronics pieces with a background of animal noises to emphasise the zoo/jungle atmosphere. Again, I won’t attempt to describe everything in here but the pieces I particularly liked included Tweety Pie; the cute cartoon bird presented on a perch as it might be in its dotage, with grey, featherless skin and tired old eyes. “Please be aware”, says the brochure, “this animal may bite, and dislikes children.”

The fish fingers swimming in a goldfish bowl are hilarious. And I heard a middle-aged woman, staring aghast at the moving sausages in glass cases, say that she could never face eating a sausage again in her life.

The front and rear halls and the Temporary Exhibition Gallery contain almost nothing but Banksy pieces during this event and on both my visits a lot of people seemed not to be venturing much beyond those three rooms. That’s a shame because it’s when you begin to explore the rest of the museum that the real fun begins; Banksy’s works, you see, have infiltrated all parts of the museum and in order to see them all it’s necessary to look pretty closely in every last nook and cranny.

Rest of the Ground Floor

There are three more galleries on the ground floor. The British Wildlife gallery consists mainly of stuffed birds and mammals in glass cases and concentrates on wildlife found in the south west of England. There is also a small aquarium section with live fish in small tanks. Some attempt has been made to present the wildlife in the context of its natural habitat, with varying degrees of success. The most effective example of this for me is the seal, set in a seaside cave. We see the seal looking out from the mouth of the cave at the sea, as if we are actually in the cave, behind the animal. I found this more engaging than the tabletop relief map of the local area, for example. This is a stab at interactivity, with buttons next to descriptions of points of interest: press the button and a light comes on at the relevant place on the map. Even children (or perhaps especially children) would find this a bit lame in the 21st century, I think.

If you look carefully (and I won’t tell you exactly where) you’ll find one of Banksy’s trademark rats in the British Wildlife gallery; this one being the guerrilla version, complete with shades and backpack. Very cute he is too.

On the opposite side of the front hall is the Egypt Gallery, a fairly new addition to the museum. I remember that as a child the skeletal remains of an ancient Egyptian in a small chest held a grim fascination for me but I have no other memories of the museum’s Egypt displays. The new gallery is a much slicker affair, based around the themes of belief, life, death and the afterlife. Tools and other objects from everyday life are on display, along with statues, mummies and hieroglyphics. What makes this gallery special is the presentation though. Clever use of the fairly limited available space has you winding round the room’s exhibits, creating the illusion of a bigger gallery; the lighting is atmospheric, the explanatory signs are genuinely interesting and informative; and there are visual display units with touch screens providing a deeper insight into the artefacts and their background.

One of the Egyptian statues has recently acquired a large label, reducing its price from £75 to £39.99.

Adjacent to the Egypt gallery is the Assyrian Reliefs gallery. The reliefs are huge stone carvings of figures, originally decorations on the palace walls in the ancient city of Nimrud (now in modern-day Iraq), dating from around 900-800 BC. The lighting in here is sympathetically low key and backlit panels tell the story of how the reliefs were excavated in the 19th century to be housed in the British Museum, before their combined weight of 14 tons (they are bonded onto slate backing slabs) was shifted to Bristol in 1905. They make an impressive display and, as with the Egyptian exhibits, I think the way the reliefs are presented is a credit to the museum.

Sharing this space during the Banksy event is “Jerusalem”, a scale model of the city, which, according to the museum guide, was carved from native olive trees by a Bethlehem craftsman named Tawfiq Salsaa entirely from memory. It was apparently bought by Banksy, who has added “284 toy soldiers and one terrorist” to the piece. I take it that this story is true, in which case this is a stunning achievement by the original artist. On my visit many people were trying to spot the terrorist amongst the toy soldiers but as the room is dimly lit and nobody knew what to look for anyway, it was a pretty futile exercise. I heard one of the museum staff saying that the terrorist is wearing red but I still couldn’t find him.

The shop, café and toilets are also on the ground floor. Unsurprisingly, the toilets are hardly modern but they always look clean and well maintained. The shop is very much what you would expect of a museum shop, selling books and postcards related to the museum exhibits; toys, ornaments and various museum-branded souvenirs. Bristol Blue Glass is a good bet if you’re looking for a gift on a local theme.

The café sells a fair selection of hot and cold food and drinks at reasonable prices, making great play of its ethical credentials with “homemade, fair-trade and organic” fare. Highchairs and a children’s menu are available. There is normally a pleasant seating area outside the café, in the rear hall, for the use of its customers and a few metres away is a play area for younger children, so it would be easy for parents to keep an eye on them. Both the play area and the seating have been removed to make way for exhibits for the duration of the Banksy event, however. There are also a large number of cafes, restaurants and pubs within a stone’s throw of the museum if the museum’s own café doesn’t appeal to you.

My friends and I fancied a coffee and noticed that next to the café there was a new room with a sign reading “Another Café”. As this hadn’t been there before the Banksy event I assumed that it was a Banksy installation, especially as it contained a huge wooden crate marked “Fragile” with a string of red balloons attached to it. However, they actually did sell coffee (and other drinks and snacks) there, so we sat and drank our coffees at a table near the enormous crate, half expecting something to burst out of it at any minute. It didn’t.

Upstairs

Upstairs there are two small galleries on the theme of prehistoric animals. The Sea Dragons display is on the mezzanine floor, one of the areas that the lift doesn’t reach, and features marine fossils and other remains related to the sea. This and the Dinosaurs Gallery on the first floor seem to appeal a lot to children; I noticed some of them were quite excited by the bigger exhibits, particularly the colossal dinosaur leg, which is almost the height of the room and has you imagining what an awe-inspiring sight the complete animal must have been. There is an area here with desks, paper and crayons provided for dinosaur-crazy children to create some beasts of their own too.

There is another mezzanine floor up here, this one in the form of a gallery lined with old maps of Bristol. Frankly, this is only likely to hold much appeal to those people with a strong interest in maps, Bristol, or preferably both. This is another area that is only accessible by way of a staircase but if that doesn’t pose a problem it’s worth taking a walk around the gallery, even if the maps don’t grab your interest, as it affords a good view of the cavernous front hall below and a closer view of the Boxkite aeroplane. I found this a good spot from which to take some photographs of the biplane and also the Banksy ice cream van installation down on the ground floor. I should mention at this point that flash photography is not allowed in the museum, so remember to disable the flash on your camera if you want to avoid the embarrassment of being treated like a naughty child by security staff.

The old gypsy caravan on the first floor is an exhibit I remember seeing as a child and it remains a firm favourite. It’s the kind that was pulled by a horse and steps up to the entrance allow you to look inside at the authentic furnishing and decoration. Banksy has added a couple of modern embellishments but I won’t spoil the joke for people planning to visit before September.

The World Wildlife and British Wildlife (yes, another one) sections up here have stuffed animals on display in glass cases, as you might expect. Alfred the gorilla is here, of course, together with many rare animals and endangered species. There are also some examples of extinct creatures, such as the impressive skeleton of the giant Irish deer (this may have been in the adjacent Geology section, come to think of it) and a model of a dodo. I’m not a great lover of stuffed animals but I did like the tiger, which is set amongst some sparse vegetation in a superbly lifelike pre-attack pose, its muscular body flat to the ground and its huge teeth exposed in full snarl.

In the Geology and Minerals section the Bristol Diamond sounded very promising but it turned out to be a kind of quartz crystal found at St Vincent’s Rocks in Clifton rather than a real diamond. There are minerals from all over the world here, some of them dazzlingly glittery, but it was a pity that there were twenty or more examples in each of the glass cases, as I found my eyes were darting from one to another without really appreciating them properly. I know space is at a premium in this museum but I thought there might have been a better way to present these pieces so as to show off their individual beauty.

Before we leave the first floor I’ll just mention the display of stalagmites and stalactites, to which Banksy has made a very naughty addition, the exact nature of which I’ll leave you to guess.

Top Floor

I mentioned earlier that the museum is officially the City Museum and Art Gallery and it is up here on the top floor that most of the art gallery part is to be found. There were noticeably fewer people on the second floor than on the lower floors; perhaps all those stairs put them off. Actually, you can take the lift to the rear section of this floor, which houses pottery, ceramics, glass and the Eastern Art gallery. There is also a room containing the museum’s silver collection (plates, jugs, teapots and the like in glass cases), where the walls are lined with paintings by the Bristol School of Artists, some of these offering a reminder of how rural and pastoral the Bristol area was a century or two ago. To be honest, I can’t work up much enthusiasm for looking at silver plates; I feel I may just as well be looking at a pile of somebody else’s money. And, lo and behold, sitting in one of the glass cabinets is an attaché case full of Banksy’s “Di-faced” £10 notes, with the face of Princess Diana in place of the Queen’s and “Banksy of England” across the top of each one.

Most of the exhibits in the Eastern Art room appeared to be Chinese, amongst them a fine Ming Dynasty wine jar carved with a scene of the eight immortal Daoist saints, each with a special power like some ancient super-hero. It’s a mere 500 years old, whereas in another case sits a beautifully decorated Chinese storage pot that, almost incredibly, is nearly 5000 years old. As a Japanophile, I’m a bit disappointed that there’s relatively little from Japan here but it’s some consolation that the collection of Chinese glass is one of the best outside Asia.

The front part of the top floor is another of those areas that can only be reached via a staircase. There is a small number of sculptures but most of this section comprises five rooms devoted to paintings, grouped into French Art, European Art, British Art up to 1830, Victorian Art and Modern British Art. I’m not going to pretend that these collections are up to National Gallery standards but there are some (arguably lesser) works by famous artists, including Renoir, Pissaro and Sisley.

I’m not particularly keen on religious paintings but in the 15th century Madonna and Child with Angels by Verrocchio the Madonna has an honest, earthy quality that I liked. Interspersed with the permanent collection of paintings are subverted works by Banksy, so that, for example, a few feet from Crespi’s Flight into Egypt is Banksy’s “budget version”, depicting an idyllic rural landscape where a workman is pasting up a poster on a hoarding advertising Easyjet flights to Cairo. I particularly liked the three Banksy paintings where the subject matter has spilled right out of the frame too. I’ve included a photo of one of these.

My favourite part of the top floor is the Modern British Art section, where there are a number of pieces by artists from Bristol or with a Bristol connection. There are a couple of Beryl Cook’s comical paintings, including one set in Bristol’s Old Duke jazz pub (she lived in Bristol for a few years and used to sit inconspicuously in local pubs, drawing inspiration from some of the more colourful customers) and in sharp contrast, although it shares a simplicity of line, Terence Hillier’s surreal oil painting, The Inner Pool, shows St Mary Redcliffe Church reflected in the glassy stillness of the harbour.

I think that the beautiful Delabole Bristol Slate Circle by the Bristol artist Richard Long, who won the Turner Prize in 1989, is all the more effective here because the shape and arrangement of the pieces of slate seems almost to mimic the woodblock flooring on which it sits. And nearby, one of the famous “spot paintings” by Damien Hirst, another Bristolian, can be seen during the current event in its “improved” version, courtesy of a certain anonymous artist with the help of a little rodent friend in decorator’s overalls.

Final Tips

Bristol Museum is frankly a bit of a maze to get around and that is part of its appeal for me but it’s easy to find yourself going round in circles sometimes. If you like to be organized and use your time efficiently it’s worth picking up an information leaflet near the entrance. This has a plan of the three floors with details of each of the 19 galleries and it shows clearly which areas can only be accessed by way of a staircase. During the Banksy event there is a second leaflet available with Banksy’s take on the floor plan (for example, the area marked “Pottery and Ceramics” on the official plan has become “Boring Old Plates” in the Banksy version (and I have to say I have some sympathy with this)) and photographs of some of the Banksy exhibits, making this a nice souvenir.

The Banksy event lasts until 31st August and despite its phenomenal popularity the City Council are unable to extend it beyond that date. The museum closes at 5 pm and last entry is at 4.30 pm but on Wednesday 26th, Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th August closing time is 8 pm with last entry at 7.30 pm. The queues to get in seem to be getting ever longer and when I looked on Saturday lunchtime the queue was by far the longest I’ve seen; I would estimate that the people at the end of the queue were going to have a 4 to 5 hour wait ahead of them.

If you intend to take a good look around all the galleries I would recommend allowing at least two hours in the museum and possibly a little longer during the current event. The way that Banksy Versus Bristol Museum is laid out encourages visitors to search for the Banksy pieces amongst all the other exhibits (and children seem to love this game) so my advice is to allow plenty of time to see everything.

I have tried to make this review a guide to the museum in general, not just for the Banksy event, and I wholeheartedly recommend a visit for both adults and children at any time. Everyone is sure to find at least something that appeals to them and you never know, you might even enjoy the boring old plates. And of course it’s free; a distinct advantage in these days of recession.

However, I enjoyed the theatricality of the Banksy event immensely and in my view there has never been a better time to see the museum. And is it really worth queuing for three hours plus? Yes. If you get the chance to go before the end of August, grab it.

Links:

www.bristol.gov.uk/museums

www.banksy.co.uk

© 2009 David (Mitsudan on Ciao)