Banksy - Is It Art Vandalism or Just Plain Cheeky?

Banksy - Is It Art Vandalism or Just Plain Cheeky?

Over recent years, Banksy has proved himself to be an ingenious & dexterous culture-jammer; adept at hacking the art-world & re-writing its rules to suit his own ends.  He once closed a tunnel in London while he & some friends whitewashed the walls.  They were disguised as workmen, complete with decorator’s overalls.  Banksy then applied his own distinctive black stencils to the newly-cleaned surface.  “We called our friends, bought some beer & staged a gallery show” he says with a chuckle.  Previously, Banksy had caused a stir when he sneaked four works into four different New York City museums.  They were The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The American Museum of Natural History & the Brooklyn Museum.  All this was done in a single day.  Such audacious feats have earned him global media-attention & the kind of rewards more conventional artists would die for; including an offer from Nike to work on an ad campaign (he refused) & an invitation to do a public painting for the 2004 Liverpool festival (he accepted).  The British Museum has since added Early Man Goes to Market to its’ permanent collection.

UK residents have come to expect daring stunts from Banksy, who uses a pseudonym to avoid arrest for past escapades.  But critics see him as nothing more than an over-hyped vandal.  Peter Gibson, a spokesperson for the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, says that graffiti has become epidemic.  “How would he (Banksy) feel if someone sprayed graffiti all over his house?” he says.  Banksy of course refuses to rise to the bait; preferring to see his work as merely “cheeky”.  There is some truth in this, given that the pieces all have a strong element of humour that manages to make a point without losing the humorous perspective.  The piece Banksy smuggled into New York’s Museum of Modern Art was a painting of a cheap British brand of tomato soup, in a blatant send-up of Andy Warhol’s iconic can of Campbells.  But such arsenic-tipped wit has a purpose; by hijacking the established system of art-exhibition, Banksy is drawing attention to its shortcomings.  “Art is the last of the great cartels” he contends.  “A handful of people make it, a handful buy it & a handful show it.  But the millions of people who go & look at it have no say”.  Most of Banksy’s work is not found in any such setting.  “I don’t do proper gallery shows”, he says.  “I have a much more direct communication with the public”.

However many of his designs appear on Banksy t-shirts & clothing.

 Banksy had begun his career in Bristol aged 14, as a standard spray-paint vandal before switching to the now- famous stencil-style that is his trademark.  “I wasn’t very good at free-hand graffiti” he says.  “I was too slow”.  Soon Banksy was to make a name for himself with wry images such as of schoolgirls cradling atom bombs, British policemen snogging & the Mona Lisa shouldering a rocket-launcher.  The acuity of these images stand in stark contrast to the usual all-but-readable graffiti scrawlings.  Banksy compares such obscure graffiti with modern art.  “Most graffiti is like modern art, isn’t it?” he says.  “People are, like, what does it mean?”

Banksy’s messages are far more accessible.  He once painted a thought-bubble on the wall of the elephant-pen at the London Zoo:

“I want out.  This place is too cold.  Keeper smells.  Boring, boring, boring”. 

The inherent difficulties of such a job earned Banksy much respect among the graffiti community but, more than this, it caught the public imagination; a public more than happy to empathise with the elephants.

It has become clear that Banksy has a thing for animals.  In much of his work they serve as thinly-veiled stand-ins for human beings.  Rats, that other species struggling to survive in our dirty, dangerous cities, tend to show up a lot.  Armed with radio-transmitters, personal flying devices & even paint-brushes.  They seem to be waging a covert war against some unidentified authority.  One image depicts a rat swept-up in the melody of its own violin-playing.  It seems to be trying to carve a bit of art out of a bleak, sterile environment.  This is pretty much Banksy’s mission too.  “I always wanted to be a fireman, to do something good for the world” he says.  He’s also said that he wants to “Show that money hasn’t crushed the humanity out of everything”. 

The distinctive iconography emerged in 2000, when Banksy introduced his stencilling-method so as to be able to work quickly.  He went on to merge his stencilled-works with live installations.  The 2003 exhibition, Turf War, involved him painting on the bodies of live pigs.  At his Crude Oils exhibition in London, 2005, he released 200 live rats into the gallery.

Banksy has also taken up the plight of the Palestinians, with his painting on the Palestinian side of the West Bank.  It depicts children playing on a forlorn patch of earth beside a painted-on hole in the wall through which can be seen a paradise-like tropical beach scene.  Banksy remains committed to such street-art, declaring that life in a city in which graffiti was legal would be “like a party where everyone was invited”.

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