Throughout history the arts have documented and dominated public consciousness, both as a tool of power and of revolution. But if we think about what impacts our lives now, literature, music, and film certainly do, but for most of us the stuff on the inside of a gallery won’t register. Enter Banksy, a man whose work has been putting a solid two fingers up to the establishment for years, flagging up issues of social injustice and government control, while changing the contemporary discussion on art itself. In the stunningly titled Wall and Piece he writes, ‘When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.’ So, Banksy takes his art straight to the streets; no one pays, no one owns, everyone sees.
His newest location however, is a little different from the urban metropolises on which he has previously made his mark. Policemen kissing on a wall in Soho is one thing, but weighing in on the Israel-Palestine conflict? Tricky, to say the least.
This however isn’t the first time that Banksy has been to Palestine: a trip there ten years ago left nine pieces on the wall separating the occupied territories from Israel. His images included children with buckets and spades in front of holes in the wall showing through to beach paradises, a little girl using balloons to try to float over the wall, and a little boy painting a ladder to get over it. Beautiful pieces, but problematically so. Is it right to make something so monstrous prettier? Did Banksy whitewash the problem here?
No, he didn’t. Being 12 in 2005, I had very little awareness of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I saw those images. Yes, art will make it pretty, but pretty attracts attention – art married with politics will make you look and make you think.
Banksy’s technique of bringing art to the streets in order for people to take note isn’t quite as easily achieved when you’re over two-thousand miles away. This time, he has engineered a different, innovative and intelligent way to make us look. Instead of photographs of the pieces, Banksy has made a travel guide style video, encouraging viewers to ‘Make this year the year YOU discover a new destination.’
Is it right to make something so monstrous prettier?
He stated his intention to ‘highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens.’ Low and behold, one of his pieces shows a kitten on a wall, positioned to be playing with some of the debris. It seems he has also picked up on the quest for originality in travel destinations in the 21st century’s twenty-somethings; the scenes of children playing and snaps of conversation with the locals are vaguely reminiscent of something you might see from someone’s GoPro compilation from their gap yah. Still, the images, ironic captions and cutting parenthetical statements combine to make you realise this isn’t somewhere you’d ever like to spend your time. The video is without doubt an unsettling watch. The camera pans across scenes of destruction to a wide shot of the wall and watchtower, the caption reading ‘Nestled in an exclusive setting,’ and in brackets underneath ‘(Surrounded by a wall on three sides and a line of gun boats on the other.)’ Some of the other facts have been deemed inaccurate by Israeli sources, for example the video’s statement that no cement has been allowed into Gaza is apparently false, and some critics have argued that Banksy’s clear bias is inappropriate in such a delicate conflict. Would we be right to take these statements with trepidation, knowing how problematic an issue bias has already been in our perception of the conflict? When faced with a video like this (not to mention last summer’s atrocities – but that’s a different story), it’s very hard to remain neutral – the evidence of destroyed lives is laid in front of us. Banksy knows this. It seems he pre-empted his critics, ending the video with an image of a statement written in red on a wall: ‘If we wash our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless we side with the powerful — we don’t remain neutral.’
If we put this statement against the initial question of whether Banksy was right to weigh in on the conflict, it seems we are only left with one answer. This is what he does, forces our attention where it needs to be, using his combination of art and popular culture to make us look, and his cutting challenges to injustice to make us think. If anything, this may be where the likes of Banksy are needed most – we needed to ‘discover’ this ‘new destination.’ After the horror of last summer, someone needed to put Gaza back into our collective consciousness, and Banksy does this in an intelligent, subtle and thereby particularly powerful manner – highlighting not only the injustice in Gaza itself, but how we misuse our privilege to information on the internet. There’s plenty of material on the conflict out there – but we’re more interested in cats and searching out the next backpacking hotspot. This is where the marriage of art, popular culture and politics is most poignant – Banksy makes us look and makes us think.
Chess Carnell
Images: Banksy