By Florence Chadwick
Banksy has taken to the tube with his latest Coronavirus-inspired artistic commentary. With a series of his renowned rats armed with anti-bacterial gel and face masks, Banksy has officially urged the public to be considerate of others and don facial coverings on public transport to protect themselves and others. Entitled ‘If You Don’t Mask – You Don’t Get’, Banksy supposedly posed as a professional cleaner and stencilled his works on different tube carriages, including on the Circle line. Banksy posted a video on his Instagram page that has been reposted and published by most major news outlets such as the Telegraph’s YouTube channel below.
Due to TFL’s strict policy on graffiti, the work was removed some days ago in accordance to their guidelines. However, they have offered the artist the opportunity to return and complete a similar piece with the same message on a specified and approved space. However, do we agree with the removal of street art or could it be argued to infringe on issues of censorship in some instances? How can street art inspire us and educate us in such difficult times? With COVID-19 and the BLM movement, street art has taken a more prominent place amongst our headlines. Artist Nathan Murdoch celebrated and thanked the NHS workers in technicolour in Peterborough, Banksy took to the tube in light of a global pandemic and Mayor Muriel Bowser commissioned the giant yellow ‘Black Lives Matter’ which was quite literally street art on a road leading to the White House in Washington D.C. Street art and tags are arguably one of the most accessible types of art – it doesn’t require a ticket or transaction, queueing or blocking a specific time out of your routine. It could be seen in the blink of an eye on your bus route to work. Your walk to the shops. Dropping a child off at school – but the stigma surrounding this medium is the issue of legality.
Let it be said now that I am a great fan of street art. My day is inevitably brightened by seeing a 20 foot multicoloured mural plastered on the side of an industrial building especially as I live in what can be the all-consuming greyness of London – but part of the charm is its anonymity. Sure, artists can submit work on canvas, paper or other mediums that are anonymous or masquerades under a pseudonym but, in my mind at least, the piece is still catering to an audience. Be it for a gallery exhibit, art fair, competition or auction. Street art is not geared towards a specific audience but instead cultivates the impression that it is by the people, for the people. Typing the term ‘street art’ into Google, the first definition that pops up tells me that this visual genre is both ‘unofficial’ and ‘independent’. There is no bureaucratic red tape or office politics that artists come up against when attempting to get their art noticed. Whether amusing, sad, colourful or political, street art is quite literally drawn onto the walls and foundations of our everyday lives putting it, often physically, into context. When trying to make a point, commentary or inspire others, this medium has a power that others can lack. Looking at Google again, most of the first images the appear for recent artworks are linked with NHS workers and acknowledging the front line.
I will not be the first to acknowledge that street art has has its flaws. Not all street art is the ‘art’ we imagine. It can be illegible writing and tags on the side of a motorway which leaves you wondering who did it and how in the hell they got into that particular position to draw it. It can be graffiti-ing over road signs or seemingly meaningless lines and symbols in backstreets and dark alleys which in the public mind has been drawn by young hooligans in hoodies in the middle of the night. In the BBC version of the Sherlock Holmes series with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman the episode entitled ‘The Blind Banker’ is driven by the illicit and potentially criminal meanings and symbolism behind graffiti. Even the term ‘graffiti’ has a negative undertone in comparison to ‘street art’ – and I cannot think of many, if any other artistic mediums that have two names with differing emotions behind them and part of the reason for this, is law. Hand in hand with graffiti come the terms defacement and vandalism. Drawing and painting on property that does not belong to you is at the very least trespassing. If the land is linked to a public company or corporation that does not agree with the political message attempting to be conveyed or if the art is offensive, that can have huge political and financial ramifications for that business. So how do we solve this dilemma?
An obvious answer is to have a webpage where buildings can commission or list available wall space that street artists can explore, of which there are already several. However, I can’t imagine many buildings or spaces that wouldn’t want to know what was about to drawn, potentially on a massive scale, on their walls. Plus isn’t a huge part of street art and graffiti culture its unpredictability, anonymity and uncensored nature? Would we be losing the essence of the art in the process? Street art evolves with the city scape, being torn down or painted over with the rise and fall of structure. In recent months the museum collective Culturespaces has made a move to reclaim a cityscape – or wallscape – to display a new type of ‘street’ art. Combining the walls and water of a disused and run down old Nazi U-Boat storage facility in the Bordeaux docks and the works of the famed Gustav Klimt, the collective uses light projections to create a massive immersive art experience. It is made all the more poignant as one of Klimt’s most famous works ‘The Kiss’ was in fact stolen by the Nazis.
As a society we are taking our criticism and our commentary with street art from the limitations of a canvas and the frozen forms of statues to images projected and sketched directly onto the foundations of our society – from brick and mortar to light and water. Street art can inform and educate us and celebrate our achievements just as much as it can offend, annoy and confuse us. I just hope I get to catch a glimpse of works such as these before they inevitably disappear and hope that they go viral – just not in the pandemic sense of the word…but I for one shall be stalking Banksy’s Instagram in the mean time and staring at any cleaner that happens to get on the bus or tube in a boiler suit…
Art History Society 
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