Banksy: here to stay

The Pales­tine con­flict

The Espai Trafal­gar gallery also hosts work­shops aimed at young graf­fiti artists, who are en­cour­aged to cre­ate and de­velop their imag­i­na­tion on the gallery’s walls on the ground floor or in the base­ment. This is where the final part of the Banksy ex­hi­bi­tion is lo­cated and is ar­guably the area that con­tains the most strik­ing works, such as the col­lec­tion of the artist’s cre­ations in the United States and, es­pe­cially, in Beth­le­hem. It was there that he left a huge paint­ing, on the wall sep­a­rat­ing Is­rael and the oc­cu­pied ter­ri­to­ries of Gaza and the West Bank. The nine-metre con­crete wall un­doubt­edly in­spired Banksy’s enor­mous ca­pac­ity for con­dem­na­tion and protest. In 2005 alone he made nine mu­rals, in­clud­ing some of his most fa­mous, such as the one of a pro­tester throw­ing a bou­quet of flow­ers in­stead of a Molo­tov cock­tail, or the one of a small girl pat­ting down a sol­dier.

One of the most in­ter­est­ing re­pro­duc­tions in the gallery, and one of the most cel­e­brated artis­tic com­men­taries on human con­flict of re­cent times, is the Is­raeli-Pales­tin­ian Pil­low Fight, orig­i­nally painted on a wall of one of the rooms of the Walled Off Hotel, which shows an Is­re­ali sol­dier and a Pales­tin­ian pro­tester fight­ing with pil­lows amid a rain of feath­ers. It’s an ironic and ab­sur­dist satir­i­cal state­ment that sums up the essence of Banksy’s work. More work from Los An­ge­les (2002), New Or­leans (2008), San Fran­cisco (2010) and New York (2013) are also dis­played on the same floor of the Barcelona gallery.

The visit, how­ever, starts on the ground floor of the Espai Trafal­gar, where the vis­i­tor is in­tro­duced to Banksy’s be­gin­nings in his na­tive Britain. Some 80% of his ear­lier work was done be­tween the cities of Lon­don and Bris­tol. An ex­am­ple is the Mild Mild West, which was his first mural in 1997, in what is be­lieved to be his na­tive Bris­tol. His debut mural de­picted a teddy bear throw­ing a Molo­tov cock­tail at three riot po­lice. The anti-sys­tem and anti-cap­i­tal­ist spirit was very much pre­sent in Banksy’s early work, which es­tab­lished the use of mock­ery, irony and satire as the main tools for his pub­lic con­dem­na­tions. Yet they are also mas­ter­ful and in­no­v­a­tive de­pic­tions that es­tab­lished Banksy’s very par­tic­u­lar style. Only he, for ex­am­ple, could have come up with the paint­ing of the two po­lice of­fi­cers kiss­ing or the well-known No Ball Games mural show­ing two chil­dren play­ing with a sign pro­hibit­ing ball games.

Route around Paris

On the first floor of the gallery, the ex­hi­bi­tion fo­cuses on Banksy’s time in Paris, and in­cludes sev­eral videos, such as one show­ing the sale of his works for 60 dol­lars in New York’s Cen­tral Park. In an­other video, the ge­og­ra­phy of the French cap­i­tal pro­vides con­text for the work he car­ried out there in 2018. The Pom­pi­dou Cen­tre, the Porte de la Chapelle, Mont­martre, Rue Vic­tor Cousin, the Seine or the Av­enue de Flan­dre were all land­mark places cho­sen by Banksy to host nine of his art­works. He also paid trib­ute to the vic­tims of the 2015 ter­ror­ist at­tack by paint­ing a work called The Sad Girl on the emer­gency door of the Bat­a­clan the­atre; the work was later stolen. An­other key art­work in Paris that no longer ex­ists is the fa­mous image of the girl paint­ing over a swastika, which be­came the vic­tim of van­dal­ism.

It is hard to dis­pute the ar­gu­ment that the key to Banksy’s work is its ca­pac­ity to cross bor­ders in order to strike at the heart of uni­ver­sal is­sues such as love, war, con­sump­tion, or op­pres­sion. “I think he’s an artist who thinks the con­tent of the mes­sage is more im­por­tant than who is writ­ing it. It’s a very hum­ble and self­less ap­proach, very strange in our time when every­one wants to be fa­mous in just a few clicks,” says Hazis Var­dar. “He acts at night, quickly and anony­mously, and the only trace he leaves is his work and his mes­sage. These art­works are very con­tem­po­rary and rel­e­vant. In Is­rael, for ex­am­ple, he de­nounces the wall, in France he con­demns the left wing and the ter­ror at­tacks, in the United States his tar­get is cap­i­tal­ism. He is al­ways con­nect­ing with the place and the mo­ment,” he adds.

Hid­den and at night

Banksy is a global street artist with a plan, as well as a team to help him to avoid the au­thor­i­ties. “In the end, the tech­nique is not the thing that is so dif­fi­cult, be­cause Banksy uses sprays and sten­cils. What’s dif­fi­cult is the idea, cre­at­ing the mes­sage. That’s the most im­por­tant thing. Or­gan­is­ing it is also very dif­fi­cult. There is a large team around Banksy that helps him do the work at night. Street art is il­le­gal, after all,” points out Akbas, who com­pares Banksy to one of the first graf­fiti artists, the French­man, Blek le Rat. “Their work is very ac­ces­si­ble. They are uni­ver­sal. And that is very dif­fi­cult for any artist to achieve. At the same time they are very sim­ple, and at­tain­ing sim­plic­ity is the hard­est part. Banksy’s art­works have a story be­hind them, which pro­vides him with a vi­sion that he knows how to de­scribe with a sin­gle image. For ex­am­ple, in the wake of the Covid pan­demic, the image he came up with was of a child play­ing with a toy nurse,” says Akbas. Slave Labour and Piss­ing Sol­dier, both made in Lon­don in 2012, also show Banksy’s use of sim­plic­ity to tackle com­plex con­cepts.

Con­tra­dic­tory?

“There’s noth­ing more dan­ger­ous than some­one who wants to make the world a bet­ter place.” This phrase from Banksy him­self could seem to be a con­tra­dic­tion from some­one who uses street art to ex­pose and con­demn many of the in­jus­tices and im­bal­ances that plague the planet. “There’s noth­ing worse than peo­ple promis­ing a bet­ter world, in which they would be the new kings. Over­all, that world would be bet­ter just for them. Banksy de­nounces what is wrong. He’s not run­ning in the elec­tions,” says the cu­ra­tor of the ex­hi­bi­tion.

Banksy is also a de­clared enemy of copy­right. And he isn’t shy when it comes to crit­i­cis­ing ex­hi­bi­tions of his work that he doesn’t like. “Banksy’s po­si­tion on this issue is very clear. He is against copy­right, con­demn­ing peo­ple who are rich and who get richer spec­u­lat­ing on art­works, in­clud­ing their own. For this ex­hi­bi­tion, the work has been done by street artists and can­not be sold. But we also have to pay the rent and salaries. Banksy has a list in which he cites the ex­hi­bi­tions he doesn’t like, and this one in Barcelona is not on his list,” Hazis Var­dar ex­plains.

Wher­ever it might ap­pear, Banksy’s work is in­stantly recog­nis­able. “Ar­guably one of his most fa­mous art­works is the mural of the lit­tle girl hold­ing a heart-shaped bal­loon (There is al­ways hope). As soon as you see it you know it’s by Banksy. But if you ask me, the most im­por­tant work is what he did on the wall in Beth­le­hem, where he tack­les a con­flict that has lasted for too many decades,” says Akbas.

Banksy’s anti-war stance comes across loud and clear in the Barcelona ex­hi­bi­tion, and the street artist does not pull his punches when it comes to pre­dict­ing the po­ten­tial out­come should we fail to learn and change our ways. “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge,” is the mes­sage wit­ten on a sand­wich board worn by a mon­key in one of his mu­rals, in a nod to the film The Planet of the Apes. Both the work and the mes­sage are very Banksy in­deed.