Banksy ft. Blek le rat
I’ve always been intrigued by street stencil art.
The stencil of the guy with the tennis racquet on the train bridge over Park Road in Milton, although rather amateurish, catches my eye every time I’m sitting at the traffic lights there.
When staying in Chippendale, Sydney, recently, with a friend of mine, her street had a private wall dedicated to the stuff.
Everybody knows of Banksy - probably the most famous stencil artist. The enigma surrounding him for the most part of his artistic career added to his appeal, and to this day he is known as a ‘guerrilla artist’.
Now I’m not really an expert on street art, in general, or stencil art, in particular. In fact I probably know very little about it. But one thing I have picked up is that stencil art, at least those artists who become well known and iconic, is based around conveying a social or political message.
For example, this is the work that Banksy is probably most famous for:
Here are some others…
Using guns to enforce peace - ironic.
Fast food - for lesser humans or makes lesser humans?
I think this one is self-explanatory, really.
A little bit of colour in a bland urban landscape.
…
What a lot of people, like me, didn’t know, was that Banksy follows on from a tradition started by French stencil artist Blek le rat.
Banksy himself has been quoted as saying something along the lines of, ‘All my ideas have already been done by Blek le rat, only twenty years earlier’.
He is named after the first images he produced - rats.
Why?
“Because rats are the only wild living things in cities and only rats will survive when the human race will have disappeared and died out” — Blek le rat.
He started working in the early 1980s, and wanted to pick up on ideas initiated in New York graffiti art. But with a French touch.
These days, however, you see more of him in a gallery than you do on the streets of Paris…
You can definitely see the similarities, can’t you.
The thing is, the work being in a gallery kind of takes away a lot of their meaning.
With street art, context is kind of everything.
…
I thought I should throw in some Australian talent.
Mox
Louis Georg
Unknown, Canada Lane, Carlton (Melbourne)
Unknown, Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.
This one’s cool because it’s clearly quoting a work by Banksy - Kissing Policemen.
…
We actually have an ‘Australian Stencil Art Prize’ (ASAP - funny, no?). And it isn’t without controversy.
Intriguingly, the prize is funded through Marrickville Council’s Arts and Cultural Grants Program. So how do the organisers square their funding source – and the prize’s explicit aim of mainstreaming stencil art and promoting the careers of the form’s practitioners within the gallery system – with the fact that the most celebrated use of the medium is technically illegal? — Money for Stencils (And the Cops for Free) - The Enthusiast
It comes back to the context thing I mentioned earlier. Can stencil art still be effective if taken out of its ‘guerrilla’ context?
Part of why I’m always drawn to Milton tennis racquet man is because it’s unexpected. It catches my eye because I know it shouldn’t be there, and I know there’s a story behind it. Somebody put themselves on the line, probably in the early hours of the morning, their heart was probably pounding in their chest. But they wanted to give someone like me the gift of art in life.
You can’t really get that in a gallery.
