Banksy’s World
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immediately becomes the highest and most valuable form of expression. Debord’s group, The Situationist International, christened this “hijacking” or “diversion” as détournement––a playful brand of sabotage that sought to disrupt bourgeois complacency through parody, appropriation and spontaneous action. (We’ve come to know it from its degraded incarnations, from Pussy Riot to flash mobs to youtube mash-ups of Brian Williams rapping “Gin and Juice.”) Under this rubric, the image becomes less an article of passive consumption and more a social instrument with which to guide, or direct public awareness of the culture itself.Graffiti, and the street art movement that grew out of it, has always had an intrinsic relationship to the strategy of “rerouting”––by virtue of the fact that it is created largely out of existing space, and repurposes, or reshapes the attention previously given to that space. Banksy has managed, quite remarkably, to become one of the most significant heirs to this genre of image diversion. While some of the artists associated with the movement, like Shepard Fairey and Invader, made use of this tactic through ambiguous, niche imagery (Fairey first became known for reproducing the image of Andre the Giant’s face, and Invader for characters from 80s video games) others, like Above and Banksy have gained notoriety through the use of overt political commentary.Naturally, Banksy’s work is inherently bound to questions regarding the production of art in relation to power––where that power lies, where its cracks are, and how it can be undermined. As a draftsman, his work bears an obvious resemblance to Parisian graffiti artist Blek le Rat, and his penchant for popular figures is derivatively Warholian. Genre is more difficult to observe. Banksy is widely regarded as a graffiti artist, though he works predominantly with stencils, (and there are some members of the graffiti community who debate whether or not this makes him an authentic member of the club.) He is also known for producing sculptures and the occasional silkscreen.There is also the 2010 documentary attributed to him, Exit Through the Gift Shop––about the explosive success of street artist Mr. Brainwash, AKA Thierry Guetta, an epigone of Banksy and his contemporaries. In fact, there is a theory that Mr. Brainwash is really an elaborate project of Banksy’s, designed to reveal how the promotional machine of media can be used to establish a perceived value of art, and how flimsy and uninformed the public’s perception of such art truly is. The contagion of conspiracies like this, together with the mystique built around his identity, has made Banksy’s very existence into a kind of performance piece.Indeed, speculations like this have allowed Banksy, not as an artist, but as a subject, to become something of a cultural hobbyhorse––frequently cited as an innovative force in the art world, but ultimately too embalmed in irony and conjecture to nail down with any kind of confidence. This, in turn, has created a climate of pathological distrust, in which everything is a potential prank. When the Dismaland site crashed as a result of traffic shortly after tickets went on sale, people assumed it was a put on, part of the joke. At a point this loses its fun and the whole thing starts to feel vertiginous.Unlike some street artists, such as Shepard Fairey and KAWS, whom have either collaborated with the mainstream or joined it directly (Fairey being the founder of OBEY clothing), Banksy has managed to remain fairly impervious to the institutionalization of his aesthetic. There are some exceptions to this. With endorsement, he provided artwork for the Blur album Think Tank, and an opening couch-gag for The Simpsons. That his work has resisted commodification entirely is only a half-truth. Much of his work now appears on t-shirts, prints, and in books cleanly designed for coffee tables, albeit without his permission. That such reproductions do exist, however, serves to illustrate how the productive forces his work seeks to defy will always be there to outrace him. Indeed, Banksy has had to pace this irony with his own brand of shtick just to keep up. During his month in New York, he set up a stall in Central Park where real canvases of original work were sold for sixties dollars a piece, mocking the hundreds of thousands they now go for at private auction.In the age of mechanical reproduction––where, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, the “auras” of individual works of art have faded under an industrial model––that Banksy’s work binds itself to place and is not designed for ubiquitous consumption is a virtue that should be observed. But in the era of the internet this raises an obvious paradox: since graffiti is physically accessible only to few and for a short time before it is either degraded or removed, the majority of people who see Banksy’s work will do so through some alternative medium, via photos of his pieces, images of images, without ever having seen one in person.There are things to admire about Banksy’s work––the way it violates and steals back corporate space, the instant recognizability of his pieces and the geopolitical aspect they often assume. There is also the way that recurring imagery in his work (like rats and balloons, for example) despite appearing to have no obvious significance, gather credibility and authority over time through repetition and visibility, like a set of golden arches or a cleanly carved apple. On this frontier, street artists like Banksy have successfully tapped into the central logic of brand culture and exposed its essential arbitrariness.The traits for which he is most celebrated though, as a “provocateur,” an outsider to the industry, an anarchist and anti-capitalist, are continuously overstated and myopically claimed. Any form of art that requires breaking the law in order to carry out could be said, in a strict, legal sense, to promote anarchy, certainly. As for the work itself, it exists firmly within a tradition of borrowed iconography and readymade sloganeering. A few, more notable examples of this are: the image of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction wielding Warhol bananas in place of hand guns; a little girl morosely holding a balloon under the Sex Pistols’ lyric “No Future”; and a piece that appeared on the side of a building near Oxford Circus in 2008 that read: “ONE NATION UNDER CCTV.”Sometimes his pieces are bewilderingly mixed and absurdly hyperbolic, like one titled “Napalm” (2004) in which Roland McDonald and Mickey Mouse are depicted gleefully astride Kim Phuc, the naked child from Nick Ut’s famous photograph of a group of Vietnamese children running down a highway after being sprayed with napalm. Obvious even to someone of “entry level anarchism” is the utter want of mordancy or cleverness that we come to expect of good satire, as well as the absence of any enthusiasm or profundity. His most recent target is even more obvious. Behold, instead of Disney Land, we have Dismaland.The appeal of a place like Dismaland is essentially Saturnalian. It comes to us as a stylized inversion of our world, a carnival that we go to in order to see our ordinary values appropriated and overturned, and which we enter into willingly, seeking from it a kind of comic relief, doing so with the knowledge that it is only a temporary engagement, a farce that we are permitting and free to leave at any time. Like the Roman masters who assumed the place of their slaves for one day, we accept this as a brief visitation to a world we are happy to entertain but don’t actually wish to inhabit. The person who gleefully captures an anti-consumerist sentiment with his or her iPhone would balk at the prospect of having to surrender the phone completely.Such parodistic methods have often been used to obtain comical effects. But such humor is the result of contradictions within a condition whose existence is taken for granted… contradictions don’t make us laugh. It is thus necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of détourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.
On one hand, the accumulation of détourned elements have reached a level of ubiquity that they have been stripped the edifying effect Debord had dreamed of, while at the same time they have managed to form a language of their own, beyond the parodic, beyond the satirical and the merely subversive. The technique has also succeeded in the sense that it works, having been coopted by advertising and mainstream entertainment, which is to say that it has achieved commercial serious, even if it hasn’t reached the desired moral seriousness.The dual nature of détourned art (in having to seize commercial tactics in order to subvert them) means that it must be at once populist and visibly heretical. The images that détournement thrives on––now produced en masse by internet amateurs every day––are thus not especially innovative, or new. To the contrary, they are massively popular and consumed casually without the slightest sense that they represent anything subversive or daring. Think again of the video of Brian Williams rapping Snoop Dogg’s lyrics; it belongs to the same class of flippant and cheaply acquired appropriation that Debord knew we already took for granted. For better or worse, Banksy belongs to the very cult of the image that his work is putatively at war with, and has become a successful––however apparently deviant––phenomenon within that culture. In place of the brands he attempts to defy, he has erected a brand of his own, which will continue to exist as long as his enemies do.The parodic-serious form didn’t evolve along the revolutionary lines that Debord foresaw, which would have resulted in the demolition of a regnant bourgeois aesthetic, thus making older works of art culturally obsolete. Like Duchamp’s mustached Mona Lisa, Banksy’s alteration of Monet’s Water Lilies is not enough to diminish the authority of the original, nor has it dissolved the reverence we feel for the period. To the contrary, Monet is more respected now than he was in his own time. Not only has the parodic-serious style failed in achieving an indifference towards canonical works of art, it has instead had a boomerang effect, wherein this fatigue is now directed squarely at itself. A giant spray paint can wrapped in a Campbell’s Soup label announces itself as tired and diminished in a way that a Monet never could. Indeed, the desired effect would seem to be for you to roll your eyes at something that is already rolling eyes at itself.
