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The fifth edition of “Santa’s Ghetto,” the annual exhibition staged by the “Great Communicator,” Banksy, and his associated print house, Pictures of Walls, took place right in the middle of London’s West End, at 15 Oxford Street. There, in an old Clark’s shoe store, some of the most noted artists of the international underground scene got together: from Jamie Hewlett (creator of the virtual pop group Gorillaz) to Space Invader (from Tittifreak) to Pete Fowler (from Ericailcane) to Peter Kennard (whose photographic montage in one window shows the English Prime Minister, Tony Blair, surrounded by oil wells on fire whilst he is in the act of taking a picture of himself with his cell phone). |
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Santa’s Ghetto #5: Between Pop and Squat – Lorenzo Giusti
The fifth edition of “Santa’s Ghetto,” the annual exhibition staged by the “Great Communicator,” Banksy, and his associated print house, Pictures of Walls, took place right in the middle of London’s West End, at 15 Oxford Street. There, in an old Clark’s shoe store, some of the most noted artists of the international underground scene got together: from Jamie Hewlett (creator of the virtual pop group Gorillaz) to Space Invader (from Tittifreak) to Pete Fowler (from Ericailcane) to Peter Kennard (whose photographic montage in one window shows the English Prime Minister, Tony Blair, surrounded by oil wells on fire whilst he is in the act of taking a picture of himself with his cell phone). Therefore, these are not just graffiti or street artists, but artists of various kinds (painters, sculptors, photographers, designers and performance artists), united by a pronounced anarchic vein and social critique. “I felt the spirit of Christmas was being lost,” declared Banksy through his spokesperson, “it was being increasingly uncommercialised and more and more to do with religion. So, we decided to open our own shop to sell all the pointless stuff you didn’t need.”
“Santa’s Ghetto” emerges both as a cultural initiative and, at the same time, as an outright commercial operation, due to its ability to involve thousands of ignorant consumers, distracted passersby who are simply curious, as a very dense group of conscious supporters of the antagonistic culture, and of artistic abusiveness. From this point of view, the whole exhibition, in itself, strikes out as a figure of a self-evident expression of the squat’s poetics; which characterizes Banksy’s work, as well as that of numerous other artists of the street or underground circuit of the last generation. The exhibition is based upon an openly admitted use of communication strategies brought forward by marketing and advertisement, but aimed at their semantic overturn and used as a vehicle for alternative messages. No wonder then, if forms of expression explicitly hostile to the market—forms inclined to consider secondary or accessory the restricted exhibition circuit of galleries and museums, contesting in many cases the paternity of authorship, the very idea of the uniqueness of artworks—consciously and openly set their action inside commercial contexts.
Consequently, the “Santa’s Ghetto” operation is not intended as an alternative market (downtown shopping being most likely even less alternative to art collecting), but rather as mass market that discloses its own consumerist, fetishistic and accumulative logic—along with the related consequences on the social dynamics level. Not a different market, therefore, but one differently perceived and acknowledged: “An even greater sense of disillusionment to the whole West End shopping experience,” the organizers pointed out.
From a purely formal point of view, the majority of the exhibits show, starting with Banksy’s own work, a substantial pop matrix that serves their poetics; an aesthetic “standardized, transitory, easy, serial, ingenious, sexy, suggestive, commercial,” to use the words with which Richard Hamilton, the father of English pop, described his own art. In a closed context, like that of the London show, the pop element of Banksy’s language emerges as the primary source with regard to the influence of movements whose founders are usually considered the fathers of modern street culture: Debordian Situationism; conceptual art, working within a notion of decontextualization and dematerialization of the art object; the New York graffiti movement of the 70s—the one that was consecrated and diffused by Basquiat, Haring and Brown in the 80s. Taken from the streets and inserted into an expository context (even if alternative, as in the case of “Santa’s Ghetto”) the works of Banksy lose the dazing effect that a vision at random creates in the street and acquire a sort of iconic valence, intrinsically pop, that amplifies exponentially their fetishistic character. But whereas pop art works with a mass aesthetic, detached from any emotional implication and political commitment, the art of Banksy, as well as of many others in the show, bare instead an explicit social criticism, even bearing toward cultural anarchism.
The debt contracted by underground artists of the last generation towards the Pop aesthetic—if they exclude works more expressly pictorial—shows its results clearly in many of the works present in the show. Rubick Kubrick, for example—a portrait in mosaic of Alex, the protagonist from A Clockwork Orange, created by the French artist Space Invader, using a series of Rubik’s cubes—seems to send one back to the regular grid of the magazine’s printing press and to primary colors of the cartoon paintings of Lichtenstein. It is again the cartoon imaginary, with the addition of a clear vein of irony, drawn on the modified covers by Faile or the collages of Bast.
The pistols and tommy guns of Ben Turnbull, enclosed in glass boxes to break, “in case of emergency”, shift on a ground of social criticism; the reflection started by the plasters of Oldenburg around/about the aesthetic of consumer good. To the environment of Edward Kienholz and to the sculptures of George Segal refer instead to the mannequins of Mark Jenkins, an American Situationist noted for his street performance. More obviously, “Neo-Pop” can be defined in the works of artists clearly inspired by the aesthetic of cartoons, like the statues and drawings of Pete Fowler, or of the erotic prints of graffiti artist Mode 2.
But where pop art seems to have influenced mostly the underground aesthetic, from a stylistic point of view as well as a point of view of the conceptual analysis of the artistic subject, it is certainly in the colored icons of Andy Warhol, in his silk screens without half tones. Pure colors and flat tints return almost everywhere in the works shown, together with the idea of a seriality, of reproducibility of the artistic product. The prints of Dolk Lungren (author of a portrait of Prince Charles with the crown of Burger King and of a Che Guevara wearing a t-shirt with his own face) are reminiscent of Warhol, like those of Eelus, the gun slinging children of Insect, to say nothing of the two Mona Lisas present in the show (the Mona Simpson of Nick Walzer, with blue-haired and yellow-skinned Marge, and a Mona Lisa that shows her posterior). However these are not mere references to the American master, but rather a switch from the prototypical images of Warhol to a sometimes-derisive level of a New Dada matrix, and sometimes to an explicit denunciation. In other words, many of the works in the show amplify the semantic ambiguity of Warhol’s Mao playing with a clear desecrating vein that contrasts the “sovereign indifference” of the masters of English and American Pop. Whereas Pop art is “optimistic, generous, ingenuous”, as defined by Robert Indiana, underground art of the new millennium is instead critical, disenchanted and antagonistic.
Once again the works of Banksy are indicators of this poetic devoted to the communication of messages of denunciation through a recognizable and “traditional” language. The stencil technique itself, of which Banksy is a master, due to its idea of immediate reproducibility, as well as his aesthetic, due to its use of synthetic and flat visual language, reveals an undeniable pop identity. Irony, semantic ambiguity, desecration, critical reflection are the ingredients of Banksy’s success, success confirmed by the fifth edition of his festival (rumor wants that his painting of Hansel and Gretel in the witch’s house – where the witch, in the act of giving a Christmas treat to the two children, has assumed the appearance of Michael Jackson – was sold for 100,000 pounds to an anonymous buyer). Look at a dazed Santa Claus shown by Banksy in the window with a sign in his hand saying “It’s cancelled”. More squat or more pop? Certainly a mix of the two cultures, but moreover, a part from categories of sometimes self-referential character, Banksy remains among the most significant artists of the last years, the “Great Communicator”, as Obey Giant has called him.
