stencil the world!
banksy - apache with pink bow
‘When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness.’ – Emo Philips (quoted on the manifesto page of banksy’s (official?) site)
I’d love to run across a real banksy rat while I’m strolling around London sometime. The rats I suppose are a nod to Blek le Rat, banksy’s role model and famous predecessor – a French stencil artist born in 1952 under the name of Xavier Prou. As opposed to Prou, we don’t know the name banksy’s mamma gave him when he came into the world – speculations abound but we would not dream of dealing in those. His art is simple but sharp – a form of visual witticism, a stencil quip, if you will. A maid lifting the ‘curtain’ of the wall and sweeping garbage under it, two English bobbies kissing on a street corner, an ATM holding a little girl in the air with a robotic arm. Or a Star Wars AT AT walker standing in front of a little AT ST walker and saying ‘I am your father.’ And rats – lots of little rats – parachuting down from upper floors, carrying little picket signs with cute little inscriptions along the lines of ‘you lose’, or ’so little to say… and so much time’.
banksy - exterior paint specialist
‘Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.’ – Banksy
The style I quite like – representations are simplified to the highest degree that still allows them to appear lifelike – like photographs manipulated in Photoshop to consist of only black or white surfaces, reduced in detail to the extreme but still maintaining a sense of photorealism from the original image. The realistic quality of the images accentuates the points they try to make – in my case at least it increases my capability of empathising with the image. And the quotes I’ve read which are attributed to the man (it’s a little hard to trust any source when we’re talking about a man with no face and no name – how does one confirm anything?? But there is a type of quote I feel goes with the images, and so I choose to believe that they both come from the same man – and one day no doubt we will know his name) make me like him more – they are branded by a charmingly direct no-nonsense approach to life and art, coupled with a healthy dose of skewed angle of perception. And I always was a sucker for the non-status quo……… Who was it that said once, that the difference between the old and the young is not in years, but in the fact that the young struggle to overthrow the status quo, while the old struggle to preserve it – and it is by this measure that the age of men is calculated more accurately than by years alone? It is a quote, or a paraphrase I suppose – I just can’t remember whence I came upon it. But banksy’s work resonates with the idea – he is by this definition certainly one of the Young.
banksy - 'I am your father'
‘You know what hip-hop has done with the word ‘nigger’ – I’m trying to do that with the word vandalism, bring it back.’ – Banksy
When we try to decide what is and isn’t art – or rather, what makes an artwork good or bad, what criteria do we use to reach a decision? One could be – ‘could I do this?’ Both in terms of execution and in terms of concept, some artwork clearly inspires a sense of ‘I couldn’t come up with this, I couldn’t make it look that good, it never would have dawned on me to put those elements together but now that I see them together they seem to come together in a perfect whole’. Then on the other hand, we have masterpieces like Martin Creed’s ‘Lights Going On and Off’, which inspire a profound sense of ‘yeah I could do that – and I could think of it too, except I’d think it’s lame’ – which, you have to admit, it is a little. So I’m a banksy fan – I like the snips of social criticism packed into punchy stencils, demonstrating both human charm and technical skill. So I name banksy Man of the Week （＾ヮ＾）