Say what you will about Banksy – he’s either an incisive social commentator or simply an egoist stealing the spotlight – but A Visual Protest: The Art of Banksy reveals the British artist to be a prolific creator in a variety of media.
The 221-page hardcover with some 80 illustrations and five essays is edited by Italian curator Gianni Mercurio, who traces Banksy’s roots to Situationism which, allied with Dadaism, aims to expose the absurdity of contemporary life. Mercurio says Banksy's formative years in the Bristol punk scene also contributed to his flippant anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalistic stance.
Banksy, "Girl With Red Balloon," 2004
“We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles,” Banksy announced in 2001. “In the meantime, we should all go shopping to console ourselves.”
Banksy recognizes the contradiction. He, himself, is a contradiction. He abhors the art world but has been absorbed by the very system he targets. Show Me the Monet, in which discarded shopping carts are tossed into a pond of water lilies, fouling an otherwise idyllic scene, recently sold for $9.8 million U.S.
Banksy, "San Francisco," 2010
A Visual Protest is loaded with Banksy's familiar icons – the girl with the red balloon, policemen with smiley faces and riot gear, and the rats. Lots of rats. There are pages of them, including rats as rappers and rats as painters. They may be universal symbols of vermin and decay, but Banksy uses them as outlaw graffitists spreading cheeky and irreverent messages.
Banksy, "London," 2007
He’s clever too, wrapping his imagery around a structure’s physical characteristics. A drainpipe becomes a flagpole from which he flies a stencilled a supermarket bag or, my favourite, a trompe l’eoil in which a housemaid lifts up a piece of whitewashed wall as if it’s a bed sheet.
It would be wrong to pigeonhole Bansky as a spray-can street artist. The book shows off his painting chops as well. Fetish Lady is a cheeky riff on 18th-century portraiture, while Still Life With Flies is well, a still life with flies.
Banksy, "Walled Off Hotel," 2017
Other highlights include The Walled Off Hotel, which overlooks the West Bank Barrier in Bethlehem. The book invites us in to see Banksy’s interior decoration. From the wall of surveillance cameras in the lounge to a painting of two adversaries having a pillow fight, Banksy uses black humour to illustrate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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A spread from "A Visual Protest: The Art of Banksy," showing his 2015 project, "Dismaland."
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Detail from "A Visual Protest: The Art of Banksy," showing his 2015 project, "Dismaland."
The book also presents Dismaland, a real-life, real-sized Disneyland re-imagined as a backwards bemusement park. Attractions include Cinderella’s lifeless body slung over the door of her overturned carriage. The 2015 installation attracted 150,000 people during its 36-day run in the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset.
A Visual Protest: The Art of Banksy is an exhaustive survey of the artist’s works and background. My only criticism? I would have liked some details about execution. Some of the pieces fill an entire wall and are too detailed for a quick dash and run. Other figures are stencilled onto walls several storeys high, which suggests scaffolding. But, of course, that only adds to the mystery. And as Mercurio argues, mystery strengthens Banksy’s battle with conventionality. ■
A Visual Protest: The Art of Banksy, edited by Gianni Mercurio. Prestel, 2020.
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