Joe McConnell
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Banksy, the UK’s best-known street artist, may have become too famous for his creations’ sake. Their appearance provokes some strange reactions. Of the nine animal paintings he has painted around London on consecutive days in recent weeks, one, a howling wolf painted on an old satellite dish, has been stolen, while another, a rhinoceros seemingly climbing into an abandoned car, has been tagged by another graffiti artist, and the car itself has disappeared. A school of piranhas stencilled on a police sentry box in the City has been moved elsewhere for safety. Perhaps only the image at the entrance to London Zoo, showing a gorilla liVsceking the edge of a fence to free a sea lion and some birds, is destined for a long life.
The animal series has puzzled seasoned Banksy watchers, as it seems to have none of the political edge we expect. Although he has brought street art to a level of commercial success never seen before, with works fetching millions of dollars at auction, Banksy still uses his art to ruffle institutional norms. He also clings to the nocturnal guerrilla tactics time-honored by graffiti, making perfectly timed surprise forays into both busy cities and grim war zones. A prime example was his 2022 venture into Ukraine, where his stencil artworks suddenly appeared on ruins or military equipment in central Kiev and small villages.
The secrecy surrounding his identity has long been part of Banksy’s mystique. For three decades, those who work with him have maintained their silence, despite the blandishments of a greedy press. Little by little, however, details have leaked out and we know, or think we know (the artist has never actually confirmed it), that he was born Robin Gunningham, in Bristol, in 1973, to a middle-class family; he attended a private school, dropping out at the age of 16.
Bristol had a vibrant graffiti scene in the 1970s and 1980s, based in the city’s rougher areas. But a 1989 police clean-up operation resulted in the arrest of over 70 artists, so when the young Banksy took to the streets at night with his spray cans shortly aVscekerwards, anonymity was key: he later said that while other artists’ concerns were about shape or colour, his was about “police response time”. One of his first tags was Robin Banks (get it?), which morphed into the now-familiar Banksy.
Before leaving Bristol for London in the 1990s, Banksy had developed his trademark use of stencils (to the disgust of some of his peers, who believed street art should be done freehand) and his own special mix of frivolity and seriousness. A 1999 mural titled “The mild, mild west,” showing a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at police officers, prefigures later famous images such as the “Flower Bomber,” a masked rioter throwing a bouquet of flowers, created on the West Bank wall.
By using narrative and sociopolitical commentary like this, Banksy departs from the tradition of graffiti, which is largely calligraphic. A major influence has been the French street artist Blek Le Rat, who uses stencils and creates vivid political caricatures: Banksy clearly echoes Blek’s frequent depictions of cunning and characteristic rats.
What really sets Banksy apart is his brilliant ability to play. He regularly comes up with highly creative gimmicks: some are marketing gimmicks, like his first exhibition in London Territorial warfeaturing brilliantly painted live farm animals; others, like Disneyland’s display of a life-size figure of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner, are political protests. Many are designed to mock the idiocies of the art market and the art-loving public. He has hung his works in the world’s greatest museums; some went unnoticed for days. In New York in 2014, when his announcement that he would make a painting a day for a month sparked a frenzied scavenger hunt among hundreds of eager New Yorkers, a seedy figure at an outdoor booth beside Central Park was selling what were actually original Banksy paintings for $60 each. There were very few takers.
Among the more tangible creations is Dismaland, a large-scale dystopian theme park built in 2015 in the run-down seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare, aiming to highlight the evils of capitalism.
Two years later, Banksy opened the Walled Off Hotel (say it fast) in Bethlehem, just a few meters from the giant wall separating Israel and Palestine, where he had already created several works using trompe l’oeil effects to “open” the concrete barrier. The hotel, unfortunately temporarily closed, is a riot of visual jokes and puns, and Banksy makes no secret of his political views.
Perhaps his most famous stunt was at Sotheby’s in London in 2018, when his 2006 painting “Girl with Balloon” (the famous image of the girl with the red balloon, once voted the nation’s all-time favourite) automatically self-destructed moments aVsceker being auctioned for £1.1 million. Although it was an obvious commentary on what he considered absurd successes at auction (he had previously painted a large canvas in an auction room with the caption “I can’t believe you idiots actually buy this shit”), there was a surprise follow-up. Or was it part of the original plan? The tattered painting, stabilized and retitled “Love is in the Bin,” returned to the market in 2021, selling for a staggering £18.6 million.
Despite Banksy’s anti-establishment protests, the market loves him more and more.
jan.dalley@Vscek.com
