Painting The Town

As I write this, Stanley “Tookie” Williams has been rejected clemency by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and will face the needle in just over two hours. Williams was the topic of last week’s column. Perhaps I’m slipping into moral bankruptcy; I find myself siding more and more with the criminals in our society. I’ll explain.

A few weeks ago I was flipping through my copy of Esquire magazine, “The Genius Issue.” I came across an article about a graffiti-artist in London named Banksy. As I thumbed through the pages of photographs, I thought to myself, “This is illegal?”

Banksy’s identity is unknown. It’s just the nature of the job. Using stencils, he paints lifelike pictures—some of them three or four stories high—and he does it overnight. This isn’t “Kilroy Was Here” and they’re not gangland taggings. These are sweeping pieces of social commentary, anti-establishment and pro-peace declarations that should be in museums, except that museums don’t draw the kind of traffic that street corners do.

“Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums,” Banksy wrote in one of his books, Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors…Graffiti is generally the voice of people who aren’t listened to.”

And so, cloaked by night, he moves through London with a backpack full of Krylon spray paint and stencils, leaving his mark on the city by the Thames. A cavalry of soldiers, armed with assault rifles and surrounding a tank; their own faces replaced with yellow smiley faces. Two male bobbies making out on a street corner. Armed soldiers painting over a peace sign. A masked guerilla soldier tossing a bouquet of flowers, as though it was a grenade.

It is simply breathtaking.

Esquire named him their Artist of the Year, calling him “the premier guerilla street artist in the world.” The mere mention of his name brings smiles to the faces of Londoners of all walks of life. “Since spotting my first few Banksies, I have been desperately seeking out more. When I do come across them, surreptitiously peeping out of an alley or boldly emblazoned on a wall, I find it hard to contain myself…They make me smile and feel optimistic about the possibilities of shared dreams and common ownership.” So said journalist Simon Hattenstone, writing for “The Guardian,” and his reaction is not unique.

His website plays host to a “manifesto,” so I checked it out, hoping for profound statements about what drives him. What I got was profound and cryptic, an excerpt from the diary of a British soldier who was among the first to liberate a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. As the soldier trundles through the unspeakable carnage, resisting the urge to save every life, a shipment arrives. It’s not much-needed food, water or medicine. It’s lipstick. “At last someone had done something to make them individuals again…no longer merely the number tattooed on their arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”

Visit Banksy’s world at www.banksy.co.uk.

-From Pulse
December 15, 2005