{"id":69206,"date":"2016-02-01T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2016-02-01T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=69206"},"modified":"2016-02-01T10:09:35","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T10:09:35","slug":"why-banksys-art-is-such-a-deadly-political-weapon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/02\/why-banksys-art-is-such-a-deadly-political-weapon\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Banksy\u2019s Art Is Such a Deadly Political Weapon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Banksy\u2019s latest work\u2014relating to the tear-gassing of migrants in Calais by French police\u2014highlights his skill for crafting pieces of piercing, immediate relevance.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"banksy\"<\/a><\/p>\n

27 Jan 2016 – <\/em>In a 2007 interview with The New Yorker<\/em>, Banksy<\/a>, the subversive British graffiti artist, was asked what drew him to his work. \u201cI used to want to save the world,\u201d he responded dryly<\/a>, \u201cbut now I\u2019m not sure I like it enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paradox of that sentiment has been a constant in his stencilled paintings, a portfolio of facile one-liners manifested in text and images.<\/p>\n

Banksy\u2019s most recent creation popped up over the weekend in London, on a wall opposite the French embassy: a mural re-imagining an iconic image of Cosette from the musical Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em><\/a>, crying as a cloud of tear gas envelops her.<\/p>\n

The arresting work is a pointed critique of the alleged use of tear gas by French police in the slum-like \u201cJungle\u201d Calais refugee camp, where roughly 5,000 migrants from countries like Syria, Libya, and Eritrea are thought to have settled.<\/p>\n

Last week, with assistance from aid groups like HelpRefugees and Care4Calais, French authorities evicted 1,500 from the overflowing shantytown<\/a>, moving them into churches and other facilities.<\/p>\n

French police have denied using tear gas, but a video that surfaced after the eviction shows them doing just that during a previous raid of the refugee camps.<\/p>\n

The video can be accessed by anyone who passes Banksy\u2019s Cosette: beneath her is a stencilled QR barcode which links to the footage when viewers scan it with their smartphones. (Banksy has confirmed that the work is indeed his, posting an image of the mural on his website<\/a>. His representatives did not return requests for further comment.)<\/p>\n

The Cosette mural is the artist\u2019s first interactive work\u2014a clever move by Banksy that underscores how genuinely responsive and in-the-moment his work is. It\u2019s also his latest in a series of commentaries on Europe\u2019s migrant crisis, many of which appeared in and around the Calais refugee camp last December.<\/p>\n

One was an image of Steve Jobs<\/a>, the late Apple co-founder, clutching a dated Macintosh computer in one hand and a trash bag slung over his shoulder\u2014a reference to Jobs\u2019s biological father, who immigrated to the U.S. from Syria after World War II.<\/p>\n

Banksy, who rarely comments on his work to the press, released a statement<\/a> about the Jobs mural to The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times <\/em>via a spokesperson.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country\u2019s resources, but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant,\u201d he said. \u201cApple is the world\u2019s most profitable company, it pays over $7 billion a year in taxes\u2014and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other of Banksy\u2019s works in Calais included a re-imagining of Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault\u2019s The Raft of Medusa<\/em>, the infamous 19th century painting of shipwreck survivors who crashed while trying to colonize Senegal.<\/p>\n

G\u00e9ricault drew meticulously from the accounts of two survivors when painting his masterpiece. In Banksy\u2019s version, the survivors wave frantically, as a yacht fit for Jay-Z darts across the horizon.<\/p>\n

Banksy also made political waves last summer with his temporary Dismaland \u201cBemusement Park\u201d in Weston-super-Mare, the dilapidated English seaside resort, where he constructed an installation of boats packed with refugees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Banksy\u2019s art has long been rife with political overtones, like his 2005 trompe l\u2019oeil stencils<\/a> of holes on the Palestinian side of Israel\u2019s West Bank wall. (In a statement, the elusive graffiti artist said that the wall \u201cis illegal under international law and essentially turns Palestine into the world\u2019s largest open prison.\u201d) He returned to the region last spring, painting murals on buildings and ruins in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Banksy once told his friend<\/a>, the author Tristan Manco, that he likes \u201cthe political edge\u201d of his work. \u201cAll graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, Banksy seems to be mounting his own revolution against the officials in Europe who have sanctioned refugees for crossing their borders.<\/p>\n

Politics and activism are frequently referenced by artists, both little-known and famous, but the immediacy and accessibility of Banksy\u2019s politically-inspired work makes it especially potent.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll art is political in some way, but Banksy always has that quick response,\u201d Rachel Campbell Johnston, the London Times<\/em><\/a>\u00a0art critic, told The Daily Beast. \u201cIt\u2019s prominent because it\u2019s in the moment and visible to the public. He uses art as a weapon. I think many artists use politics in order to get into galleries, whereas Banksy does the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n

War has always been a mainstay for artists. Johnston cited British artist Mark Wallinger as an artist who, like Banksy, has responded cleverly and immediately to touchstones in political debates.<\/p>\n

After Brian Haw\u2019s Iraq war protest in Britain\u2019s Parliament Square was confiscated in 2005 under a law that said protests are forbidden in a specified area around Parliament, Wallinger re-created the camp<\/a> in a 2007 exhibit at the Tate Modern\u2014technically still within the \u201cexclusion area\u201d surrounding Parliament.<\/p>\n

Johnston also cited \u201cFuck the heir for Puppy Bear,\u201d a pornographic performance by Voina, the Russian art collective, in response to Dmitry Medvedev\u2019s 2008 presidential election (he served until 2012).<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone thought Medvedev was a puppet for Putin, so they all stripped naked and fucked each other up the ass,\u201d Johnston said of the show, which was staged in February 2008 at the Moscow Biological Museum.<\/p>\n

While some art critics think Banksy\u2019s art is too obvious, others think his on-the-nose political one-liners are genius.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very sharp as a political cartoonist\u2019s joke, with a leaning-against-the-bar punchline that appeals particularly to the English sense of humor,\u201d said Johnston.<\/p>\n

The political activism in his work resonates even more with the average viewer because he\u2019s an anti-establishment artist.<\/p>\n

Even as his artwork fetches hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, Banksy gives it away for free. He isn\u2019t represented by galleries and, as a result, he\u2019s entirely in control of his own narrative.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thedailybeast.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a 2007 interview with The New Yorker, Banksy, the subversive British graffiti artist, was asked what drew him to his work. \u201cI used to want to save the world,\u201d he responded dryly, \u201cbut now I\u2019m not sure I like it enough.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}