Behind the wall - The art of Banksy
di // pubblicato il 14 Settembre, 2011
Once past the excitement rendered by sights of blown-up proportions, the amount of people in the streets and in the buildings, the intermittent architectures, the sheer efficiency and diffuseness of public transport, London shows a different and – although predictable – unexpected face. It all begins with the sensing of a grey, inhospitable air; one feels then the urge to deconstruct it, and in this haze can make out some better defined feelings. A crushing anonimity, the constant leer of security cameras, for what concerns oneself; in one's own peers, the morbid haste and the sharp edges of personal space.
The obsession towards control and self-control, in this and other hectic metropolises, contributed to the birth of so-called street-art. At first, declaration of freedom and defiance of decorum; in recent times, valuable regular for every avant-garde art collector (the work of Shepard Fairey, one of the first and most seminal street-artists, is now on display at New York's MoMA); in its best occurrences, this art form can be an effective and challenging commentary on the urban landscape and the way it is managed.
Street-art, as polymorphous as the environment in which it unfolds, does not employ one technique but many: paint is one of these, but so are posters, mosaics, stencils, and sometimes actual installations. Broadening the view, it's about anyting that might interfere with and – at least in the authors' best intentions – embellish the city. And the concept of interference itself is central to this kind of art, that happens at night, by canals, on roofs, more or less covertly; from a legal point of view, it qualifies as vandalism.
The history of London's street-art is nowadays inextricable from that of Banksy. Not much of him is known, as he always maintains strict anonimity: born in Bristol, there he began his career painting graffiti in the early '90s, but it was by moving to London around the year 2000 that he began to stir up conversation with his stencils. A little girl searching a soldier, two kissing policemen, a royal guard urinating against the wall: the antimilitaristic overtones of the subjects seemed, to many, the artist's distinctive feature. But these pictures also present a reversal of traditional roles (which often entails a provocative involvement of childhood), the surprise and distance from expectations which, upon closer inspection, seem to be Banksy's real concern. A defining stencil, on this topic, portrays a maid lifting the (painted) wall as if it were a curtain, in order to dust, thus revealing the (real) wall underneath. It's a clear statement of the fact that walls and cities can be different, and unpredictably so, from how we experience them; that even the most functional architectural element, such as a wall, can have a double life.
Banksy has been able to build upon this reflection, otherwise not wholly original, with interesting consequences in the following years. Direct interventions on the city's objects, such as an iconic red phone booth, bent and bloodied after being hit by a pickaxe, abandoned in a side alley around the time when British Telecom started dismantling them. A series of counterfeited paintings, that the artist has been hanging in various museums next to the real canvases. And then, as a most visionary and fascinating effort, the nine illustrations carried out on the Israeli West Bank barrier; among them are some seaside views, emerging from parts of the wall “torn down” by stencilled children. In 2010, Banksy premiered his first film Exit through the gift shop at Sundance Festival, which received a “Best documentary” nomination at the Academy Awards (and which deserves, quite frankly, another entire article).
The other side of this coin, of course, is the criticism regularly attracted by Banksy. There are the accusations of cheap dissent, executed with evocative, but ultimately not so meaningful, visual combinations; or those of fighting the right battles on the wrong field, namely private property. But these writings, these silhouettes that often pop up and disappear over the course of few days, adhered to London's walls so well, that they could actually become a metaphor of the town. The “system” is under attack by its own icons, now turned against it; the assailant is famous, influential and faceless. Everywhere and nowhere at once, just like sometimes may appear the concepts of “right”, “beautiful”, identity, in a city with many nameless souls, that chaotically proceeds according to plan.