The Family Times

“Your free guide to the Jam Band Scene”

Writing on the Wall:

Banksy and Brandalism in the U.K.

By G. C. Cristo

Do you appreciate the visual arts, but not the stuffy museums and even stuffier crowds? Do you believe that consumers have the same fundamental rights as corporations when it comes to our environment? Are your ideas or opinions underrepresented—if represented at all—by the media and advertisers? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, please see Banksy.

Unfortunately, I cannot direct you to the man or woman responsible for the profoundly subversive street art that has appeared throughout the world above Banksy’s signature, because the artist has taken great care not to reveal his or her identity. Banksy travels clandestinely throughout the world, you see, leaving undeniable indictments against society written, drawn, or painted upon the walls. In Banksy’s latest collection of work, Wall and Piece (published anonymously via an agent), bits of text accompany the art, which shed some light on the artist’s motivations:

“The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back.”

Banksy’s art can be seen as just such an attempt at reclaiming the landscape of our world, which the artist believes has been painted over by billboards, high-rise buildings and smokestacks. Not exactly an anarchist, Banksy offers a solution to the problems he poses by contending that consumers have the same rights as commerce and industry when it comes to dictating our environment. The artist suggests that through “Brandalism”—or the defacing of corporate advertisements, logos and symbols—humans can, at the very least, regain visual control of their environment, and Banksy urges readers to do just that:

“Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether to see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It’s yours to take, re-arrange, and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.”

While most of the artist’s works operate on themes of anti-capitalism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-war, others can be seen as satirizing social norms and customs. Many of Banksy’s works are just plain funny and provide levity in situations where gravity and stern seriousness are the norm. In response to the modern and intrusive practice of surveillance in our society, Banksy points a security camera at a wall upon which he has just stenciled the question “What are you looking at?”

The artist has gone to several famous scenic places in the world, such as Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, and strategically stenciled in the words “This is not a photo opportunity” in conspicuous places where people would stand while taking photos. Explaining the rationale behind this in Wall and Piece, Banksy writes, “Tourism is not a spectator sport.” Ironically, as many people are now beginning to pose around these stencils as they do the surrounding scenery.

Although much of Banksy’s work can be found in England, the artist has not been limited to Europe, and one might happen upon a Banksy in the most distant and unlikely locales throughout the world, such as Palestine. As the artist explains in Wall and Piece:

“In 2002 the Israeli government began building a wall separating the occupied territories from Israel, much of it illegal under international law. It is controlled by a series of checkpoints and observation towers, stands three times the height of the Berlin Wall and will eventually run for over 700km—the distance from London to Zurich. Palestine is now the world’s largest open-air prison and the ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti artists.”

So in 2005 Banksy set out to decorate the walls of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, where people are now corralled like livestock. Most of the artist’s work is openly critical of the wall itself, operating to illustrate the absurdity and inhumanity of such a barrier. In one scene, Banksy makes the wall appear to have been broken open by children from the other side, and a photographically accurate virtual paradise appears to be just beyond the reach of viewers. Other areas seem to offer a glimpse of hope to the people left on the outside of the wall, like the stencil of a young girl midway up a portion of the wall who is floating over by holding a handful of balloons.

In a similar vein, Banksy broke into the Barcelona Zoo one night and spoke out on behalf of its inhabitants. In the elephant enclosure Banksy coated the walls in tick marks, representing the number of days the elephants had been cruelly imprisoned for the sake of spectators. Next, he gave an orangutan a placard that zoo spectators found it holding the next morning, which read, “Help me. Nobody will let me go home.” Upon returning to the zoo the following day as a patron, Banksy was disappointed to find that much of his work had already been washed away or covered by zoo workers, writing “It’s frustrating when the only people with good photos of your work are the police department.”

What is perhaps most interesting about Banksy, however, may be that the artist refuses to copyright any works, and encourages fans to do what they will with them. In the “Shop” section of Banksy’s website (www.banksy.co.uk), the artist writes that “Everything in the shop is free, simply download the file and process the artwork as per the serving suggestion.” Obviously Banksy’s approach to the distribution of art defies the modern convention of artist’s hocking their wares at the highest price possible and then hunting down copyright violators like they are diseased animals, rather than patrons of the art.

From Banksy’s comments in Wall and Piece regarding the modern establishment of Art (with a capital “A”), we begin to understand the artist’s desire to once again make art the cultural collateral of the masses, rather than only the select few who are wealthy enough to actually participate in the trade:

“The Art we look at is made by only a select few. [They] create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.”

In response to this fact, Banksy has taken the liberty of hanging “fake” works in major museums throughout the world without asking permission, placing cards with hilarious tongue-in-cheek explanations of the work beside or below it, and then waiting and watching to see how long it takes the public and museum curators to discover it. Ironically, it took sophisticated patrons of the British Museum in London eight days to realize that Paleolithic humans did not push shopping carts, as Banksy depicted them in an amusing mock-up of the art of stone-aged man that the artist slyly placed upon the museum’s walls. It is also worth noting that due to the artist’s notoriety this “joke” exhibit has become part of the British Museum’s permanent collection.

The artist took another jab at the modern art establishment and its largely arbitrary standards when he hung a painting of a soup can—a la Warhol—upon the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The difference between his and Warhol’s version was that Banksy’s can of soup did not depict the same famous Campbell’s brand as Warhol’s, but instead a generic brand (“Tesco”). Would Banksy’s generic version be considered art in the same way as Warhol’s brand-named counterpart? That it lasted six days suggests that most could not tell the difference. In Wall and Piece, the artist writes humorously of the incident:

“After sticking up the picture I took five minutes to watch what happened next. A sea of people walked up, stared and moved on, looking confused and slightly cheated. I felt like a true modern artist.”

These acts have not gone unnoticed by those who consider Banksy to be the lowest form of street criminal. The London authorities have agreed to treat any of Banksy’s work as acts of vandalism and to quickly clean them off of walls. Many residents of the city are unhappy with the ruling, however, as homes and businesses with the artist’s work upon them have begun being auctioned off at hefty prices as “murals with buildings attached.” One such instance recently saw the owner of a casino boat threatening to sue the harbormaster when he took the liberty of removing a work of Banksy’s from the side of the boat. The artist writes that he later returned to the ship and painted it again, “in the hope I could lure the harbormaster out for a full custodial sentence this time.”

This same sense of humor in reaction to the absurd is what makes Banksy’s art so relevant and appealing. Like all comedy, it is balanced and offset by a tragic reality. Banksy captions a painting of a starving Ethiopian child wearing a Burger King hat with the words, “Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.” Even if the message is lost in such a work and it only makes people stop and laugh for a moment, the artist still succeeds in reminding us that there are things worth looking up at from the sidewalk.