“We learn to be invisible,…” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Banksy his art and its place in culture, art history is best considered through analysis and the effect of the work rather than glib journalistic commentary. There is intended meaning behind much of the work.
Banksy Reindeers is an example of his abstract inventiveness. The bench in the location becomes an implied Santa sleigh by the additional presence of the reindeer. The rest of the visual narrative is completed by the homeless occupants of the bench.
Consider that the homeless (in this instance, men) are often unshaven, often having many bags of belongings with them. The artist has created a seamless social counter narrative which is beyond even the superficial observed likeness of older homeless men to the Santa character.
Santa is thought of as always being welcome in homes as a visitor.
Santa is loved and wished upon, children look forward to seeing him.
Santa is a traveller and great navigator of the outdoors and whole world.
When all aspects are taken into account the projected effect in its simplicity, how it is obtained is nothing short of brilliant.
Create Escape.
The unseen participant is the history of the building. As with “reindeers” the canvas is fundamentally important to the context of the work. The building in this case is the former Reading prison. This work was created after the prison ceased to be an operating penal facility which closed in 2014.
It would be difficult to adorn a graffiti on an operational prison as any activity on the outside wall could obviously be construed and an attempt to breach the perimeter. Possibly the artist read about the closure and history of it, then it became a viable target.
Banksy seems to be making a comment about the freeing nature of the creative drive, in light of the fact Oscar Wilde was held at this prison for two years. An opportunity to champion a great wit such as Wilde and his homosexuality would have great appeal to Banksy.
The suggestion with the typewriter as tool for escape, true freedom is in the ability of one to employ their wit.
Cave painting removal. / Piggy Back Paint Grab.
These two might be considered together typifying or indicating the human impetus to create art as a primal essential element of life. Again in this instance as with so many the cave work is informed by the immediate environment it is created in which is a tunnel in an urban area. This particular tunnel is apparently a designated graffiti area.
As such it should be considered that banksy may have been addressing his fellow street artists directly as well as general onlookers.
A place where graffiti is guaranteed not to be removed is the ideal venue to comment on ‘graffiti removal’ generally. As with so many other works there is also an aspect of role reversal in the motif. The ‘worker’ in the mural is actually shown to be the vandal in this case, destroying an ancient artifact of historical relevance.
The implication being it is only time that dictates the removal of a public artistic expression as either civic duty or actual vandalism.
One of Banksy’s successes has been his ability to expose the hypocrisy in local councils who prosecute and remove one graffiti yet protects a Banksy with plexiglass for future sale or preservation.
Whilst it was not removed it lasted only four months before it was gone over by other artists. The Piggy Back Paint Grab emphasizes that legal prohibition of art is not an inhibitor to the creative impulse, even possibly a facilitator of it.
The Rage Flower Thrower. This could possibly qualify as a self portrait. The violent revolutionary act of bringing beauty into the world.
Historically the explosion of abstract movements in the arts can be traced directly back to the advent of photography. In the late 1800’s.
[Impressionism, Dada-sm, Cubism.]
When it became possible to capture reality in a photo image it makes perfect sense that at this point the value of distortion, reconceptualisation and imaginative invention would increase. As such the value of a photograph in the 1800’s began to ratio the value of the surreal and the subconscious
When we imagine a tree in our mind we cannot count the leaves or branches easily yet we can easily summon the image. A photograph cannot reproduce this effect in a way that Claude Monet can. Or Picasso & Dali on how the inner imagination is a contorted world of emotion.
A photograph can directly bring beauty into the world ‘The Rage Flower Thrower’ depicts art as a violent defensive attack. The surrealism is upfront. The beauty is in the intention of the action rather than the prettiness of the brushstroke which is why this can serve as a self portrait of an artist who uses stencil as a primary method of bringing forth his message into the world.
Girl with a Balloon / Love in the bin.
The question of where Banksy is in the ‘art world’ or his place in significance among artists, his political acumen is established albeit in the popular culture.
His weight as a genuine social revolutionary is not.
The monetary value of what he does creates such wealth as to potentially invalidate the kind of credibility Van Gogh could claim as a financial struggler. However Van Gogh might be prepared to stand up for Banksy or at least suggest ‘listen ‘ear a minute’.
In an obvious demonstration of revultion for ‘wealthy private art collector’ status he fitted a picture frame with a shredder that shredded a one million dollar work of his at the moment it was auctioned. The auctioneer then doubled the price for it claiming it a ‘new work’ produced instantaneously through the shredding process. This positions Banksy as a kind of arthouse King Midas.
His intention to humiliate the auction process only added value to it. A very contradictory situation. It doesn’t attract sympathy for the cause against greed and wealth with an artist incapable of destroying the monetary value of his own work. It can make him seem like a poser and profiteer, when all the time his feelings and intentions are genuine.
Wit and satire do not surreptitiously occur to those who do not have some level of grounding in the perceptions of their targets.
If the value of the art is its intellectual content emphasized by its local environment, Banksy’s Cheddar Gorge satire might qualify for some of the claims of his harsher critics. Low brow, juvenile and contradictory to some of his environmental stances.
The term global warming now widely abandoned for the preferred ‘climate change’ as the data is in flux and so is banksy’s street credibility….. where there is no street.
Canal Cred or Cheddar Cred.
Gorge Cred ?..
Flying Balloon Girl.
This stencil also like many other Banksy’s has its meaning indicated by the immediate environment. Where else could a young person taking flight have such powerful meaning other than the wall dividing Palestine from Israel ?
15 years after its application magician David Blaine would embody the spirit with his ascension stunt. Producing moments of instant inspiration, stimulation and disarming curiosity are career commonalities for Blaine, street magician and Banksy, street artist.
Although the origin of the child taking flight with balloons predates the Banksy painting whether Blaine’s stunt was in part inspired by Banksy’s invocation of the image is unknown.
David Blaine is of Jewish / Israeli extraction.
This piece actually titled ‘Waiting in vain’. The flowers the man is holding in the image are shedding, possibly signifying seasons. Autumnal leaves. The fall. Quite likely a direct effigy of the words of the Bob Marley song Waiting In Vain. ‘Winter is here, and I’m still waiting there’. Marley’s success achieved the rare combination of political revolutionary and human love uprising, convincingly. Something Banksy seems both ambitious and destined to achieve.
Also the shutter canvas perhaps invocative of love in-storage or archived. i.e. Waiting.
Another meaningless ad. / blank walls are criminal.
Along with the Cheddar gorge satire ‘ Blank walls are criminal’ might be challenged in some environments. Sao Paolo brazil’s largest city and the world’s 4th largest city by population boasting a population of 22 million people. In September 2006 the mayor passed the ‘clean city bill’ which outlawed the use of public display advertising. Within a year 15000 billboards were taken down. Ads on buses removed. A survey conducted in 2011 showed 70% found the ban to be beneficial. Sao Paolo is not the only location in the world to have done this.
Street art, graffiti, parkour and other such cultural phenomena are often rooted in a strong spirt of a reclaiming of public spaces.
Especially in the case of graffiti art what kind of work could Banksy produce that would be appropriate in Sao Paolo ? This kind of environment would suit a brilliant fine artist who could produce a finely detailed mural. No doubt Banksy would be capable of producing something that would still make sense here.
It would make for an interesting challenge.
Keep your Coins I want Change.
If one of the reasons to engage in creativity is the positive effect on the creative person, one of the core functions of art is to beautify the world. Adding beauty to the world is a fundamental act of change.
When Michael Angelo painted the fresco on the Altar wall of the Sistine chapel it caused controversy and outraged the church establishment. If change can be characterised as a disruption the recognised great artists of the classical era were frequently disruptive activists. In the case of Michael Angelo’s fresco he was actually censored. Another artist called Daniele Da Volterra was hired to add clothes to the naked figures Michael Angelo had painted.
Hand painted commissions such as Frescos are still created (infrequently) by artists to decorate the insides of buildings modernly. It is the perfect symbol of social activist art to paint the outsides of buildings. It suggests the artist couldn’t get in, is not an insider.
What would Michael Angelo have done in the advent of photography ?
art noun (EXPRESSION) Art: the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings: – Cambridge Dictionary
Art: “Anything you can get away with” – Terrence Trent D’arby
In 1917 Marcel Du Champ displayed a urinal as an art exhibit labeled “fountain” in the early 1900’s this would have been at the very least precocious and absurd. Yet in 2013 Thames water announced plans in London to use recycled sewage in tap water.
The Chinese have a proverb that if you stand by the river long enough you will see the body of your enemy float by.
Perhaps there is some wisdom about how if you piss in the river long enough absurdity becomes reality.
Thirsty work.
Banksy may or may not be a natural inheritor of Marcel Du Champ’s Dadaism. Dali, Picasso or Michael Angelo. Banksy is a prophetic, prolific meme artist. A satirist and iconoclast with a faux anonymity a hang over from when anyone would have legally objected to him enriching them with a work.
The faux anonymity also plays into the legendary masked hero such as portrayed in the movie V for vendetta the V appearing as graffiti in the graphic emphasizes anti-establishmentarism.
Ultimately what separates an artist from being a painter or musician is their relevance of their work to the period of time in which they live. The wealthiest artist ever to exist is Damien Hurst who interestingly comes from Bristol the same city as banksy. Hurst who proceeded to fame earlier than banksy also purchased original banksy artwork.
Brian Sewell Art critic for the evening standard called Hurst’s shark in formaldehyde art installation ‘an exaggerated version of a stuffed pike above a pub door’.
A more Oscar Wilde like remark on the aquatic coffin might be ‘This hearse is a bit fishy’ .
Although Sewell sounds like Oscar Wilde might sound a posh snob, we would be more likely to accept a rebuttal from Oscar Wilde due to his sufferance and reputation as a flamboyant non conformist.
Whereas Damien Hurst’s work can seem at times like he is taking the piss out of the artworld [as they capitulate to his brilliance]
Banksy seems more as if he is objecting to the established order generally not merely as an intern to the artworld.
Banksy’s emergence from Bristol as its music scene flourished with subdued moody noir Avant Massive Attack & Tricky is a mirror of Andy Warhol’s emergence from a scene boasting Lou Reed Both Warhol and Banksy were personally involved in friendships with the musical artists emerging from their provinces.
The timeframe between the mid 1990’s and early 2000’s Also sees the rise to media prominence of comedian Russell Brand whose developing anti establishment activism has also attracted the cynicism of other contemporary popular media personalities.
‘He couldn’t overturn a table of drinks’ – Noel Gallagher on his friend Russell Brand’s allusions to becoming a revolutionary.
Russell Brand installed his podcast behind a paywall and no notable social revolutionary in history charged people to hear them speak.
If like Nelson Mandela or the fictional count of Monte Christo, great suffering had preceded wealth and success for aspiring pop culture revolutionaries like Banksy and Brand they would likely be more acceptable to the socialist intelligentsia.
Mandela is not thought of as a disingenuos guy merely because he achieved great wealth and power, although much lesser known is that Nelson Mandela was a freemason.
His house arrest which followed his long prison sentence and preceded his rise to head of state in South Africa was likely a period in which the ‘handover’ of power from apartheid Boer types could be done with assurances in place.
From a fellow brother mason.
What is more a threat to pop revolutionaries such as Brand and Banksy are the ever twisting counter narratives. Documentary film maker Michael Moore’s ‘Planet of the Humans’ describes the corporate take over and subjugated environmental movement.
In a time of billionaire social engineers such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Besos, Tesla’s Elon Musk having such a tremendous effect on humanity perhaps the inclination to sneer at millionaire Revolutionaries is not in the best interests of the common man.
An if nothing else, you can take that to the bank.
Michael Angelo dreaming of heavenly highness and Banksy’s dumpster dreamer
