The Banksy "Slave Labour" Piece Controversy: A Call for "Sui Generis" Rights to Public Art

Banksy is no stranger to controversy. His street art pieces, done in secrecy usually poking at issues of state domination and social inequality, such has his work on the Israel-Palestine wall, and his critique of Guantanamo Bay launched via an installation on Disney property, use simple and elegant stencils or installations through iconic figures and images to detour, transform, the dominant meanings ascribed to overdetermined spaces.  Banksy's secrecy magnifies the mystery and allure around his work, working to retain a sense of the street and underground even as some of his work is sold in galleries for thousands of dollars.

Recently, one of his pieces, titled "Slave Labour," showing a Dickens-esque barefoot youth working away on making a Union Jack combines an incisive critique of nationalism and the labor inequalities that an exceptionalist attachment can both paper over and sustain, was located in Haringey, a borough outside of London that was the location of some of the 2011 London Riots. Located on the London equivalent of a dollar-store (everything costs a pound, the store called, aptly, Poundland), the piece is arguably a point of "local pride" attracting tourists and non-residents to the otherwise unremarkable Wood Green neighborhood.

In early February the piece was ripped from the wall with no explanation by property owners Wood Green Investments. It appeared in Miami, at Fine Art Auctions Miami with a price tag between $500,000 and $700,000. After substantial public vitriol the auction house has claimed that it has returned the piece to the consignor, identity unknown, while Wood Green town council leaders have continued to demand that the piece be returned.

The controversy has received coverage in the New York Times, and other major news sources, and yet, although the sense of loss and outrage felt on the part of neighborhood residents points to the importance that the art piece had as a public art work in public space, media analysis blithely parrots back commonsense understandings of "private property" in order to short circuit debate.

Sarah Lyall, in her NYT piece notes: "Legal opinion generally holds that Banksy’s street art belongs not to him, but to whoever owns the walls he uses as canvases." Sure, legally, Wood Green Investments has legal title over the wall, but pragmatically and on an everyday level the residents and workers who spend time within and outside of the building are indeed the custodians of the wall and the citizens who bear the effects of the art work as it reshapes the appearance of the wall and neighborhood.

This commonsense capitulation to private property ignores how public art reclaims and can constitute public space, and highlights the need to engage in broader public dialogue about collective ownership over public space. These "commonsense" concepts of the economic as a realm of the private have resonances to rhetorical histories and public sphere theory. Robert Asen has argued that appeals to an "ownership society" in the United States make "ownership" an "emblem of good citizenship" papering over social inequalities that create barriers to both "ownership" and equal citizenship, making bourgeois publics stand in for a multiplicity of other kinds of publics. Further, Megan Foley points to how tropes of the home, or oikos, persist in political economy discourse, and function perversely to make citizens the caretakers of big banking, and those who were the collateral damage in the housing crisis "delinquent" citizens. 

The buck, or, rights to the city, stopping with owners rather than users has been resisted by organizations like The Community Rejuvination Project in Oakland, California, a community mural organization that understands ownership over space to be based on use and stewardship rather than contract, using the above claim to justify interventions and reclamations over abandoned spaces through artwork and cleanup projects.

Banksy is a star in the street art world, having a level of name recognition that in many respects makes his work its own genre, working through different processes and broader realms of reception and circulation than more "ordinary" public art practices such as illegal writers, and permission based muralism such as the CRP project. However, what the Haringey controversy highlights is that much like the celebration of star artists such as Jean Michel Basquiat and Kieth Haring, focus shifts too much in media reception to the novelty of the art work at the expense of attending to its context, its location and relation to public space.

However, the resurgence of the questions of rights to space in the wake of the "Slave Labour" transnational trip (ironic in many ways given the legacies of transatlantic middle passage where social life is transformed into commodity value) demonstrates that public space has a durability and a capacity to haunt debates where the "public" is often elided. Nevertheless, the aporia in critical discourse around the mural also points to the absolute necessity in developing public vocabularies of public space, and collective ownership based on lived relations rather than abstract contract law, something along the lines of what Vandana Shiva has called for in the context of Intellectual Property Rights, as sui generis rights, communal rights to resources and a more robust sense of the commons.

A View 30 Years Later: "Style Wars" and "Meeting of Styles"

"Style Wars," released in 1983 and directed by Tony Silver with Henry Chalfant, documents the 1970s and 1980s graffiti movement in New York City. Mapping the growth of graffiti as part of the rise of hip hop culture, the documentary also records graffiti's contested social and legal status, interviewing Mayor Ed Koch, directors of the MTA Police and the Vandal Squad, gallery elite, as well as parents of writers and everyday subway writers to reveal a divided public opinion about graffiti being either vandalism and a symbol of "loss of control" or an exciting form of art.

Watching the documentary in 2013, at age 26, where writers from age 12 to 22 are interviewed articulating opinions about legality, freedom, publicity, and aesthetics is a jarring experience, essentially watching the formation of positions about graffiti and style that have a calcified or "common sense" status emerge from the field of the contingent.


Notably, style emerges as a way of achieving recognition occurring within a competitive framework, rocking a style referencing the rocking, physical, aural, and visual that is expressed in getting "loose" while expressing the various pillars of hiphop:  rapping, DJ-ing,b-boy and b-bgirl breaking [dancing], and graffiti.

"Style Wars" then also marks the confrontation over styles of life, styles of urbanism: control-based and clean public transport systems, versus inscribed upon, messy, and colorful subway cars that make explicit ongoing commentary between official (police) and unofficial (writers) discourses, new kinds of visibility. It also illuminates styles of mattering, for instance, in an interview with Skeme, an all-city writer, his mother also participates, both the writer and his mother speaking to the camera, using it as a mediator to express the differend (Lyotard) between their different world views. "I bomb to be all city, to take over the line" Skeme argues, "but to what ends?" his mothers counters, "'All city'? You see what I am dealing with here, what does that even mean?" Later on in the interview it comes to light that Skeme tells his mother when he goes on "missions" to the train-yards and layups to do whole-car productions. "I want my mom to know what's going on, in case I end up in jail." She shakes her head, sighs, looking at the table and the interviewer, whose voice is obscured throughout the film, who speaks "Not every writer would keep their mom in the loop." Here a glimpse of what a clash of idioms looks like emerges, but perhaps also an optimistic moment for potential future understanding, or not. It is unclear if the police chief's view of "benefit to society" in arguing that writers should "take up sponges and mops" to "really do something for their community" instead of paint cans, and Skeme's mother coincide. But what is clear is that a war over styles of citizenship, of being part of polis, is in process.

 

These wars, over urban appearance, civic value, and public speech are still unravelling. In spaces such as "Meeting of the Styles Chicago," it is less a war than a kind of museological exposition of ongoing tensions and debates in graffiti culture and graffiti style, fast forwarding "Style Wars" thirty years to a point where writers have children, grandchildren, and steady jobs, but still seek to participate and have an impact on writing culture. Many writers have bombed the system, but also have participated in the system. Less partisan and dramatic than "Style Wars," "Meeting of Styles Chicago" is an annual practice of commemoration and visual reflection about graffiti's past and future in Chicago, less war than wondering.

Unsocial Sociability: Why Public Art is Not Just Touchy-Feely

Hello 2013. It has been awhile, and intense work on getting this dissertation written has unfortunately traded off with my ability to gallavant around and just BE and observe the constantly blossoming art scene here in Chicago, and blog about. But I miss you, Chicago. And I am thinking about you. I am also recently thinking about how graffiti art, a kind of art that has a definite, strong, and deep community, can also be helpful for non-graffiti writers or savants in thinking about the way that urban community works, or, its energetic dynamics.

The argument is as follows: Cities, per folks such as Nigel Thrift, Lauren Berlant, Georg Simmel, and others, are simmering spaces of tension, malice, skin-of-your-teeth tolerance, and sensory overload, spaces that we are drawn to, but simultaneously annoyed, terrified, and burned out by.

These above accounts of the urban, a space of love, hate, and slightly detached enjoyment, among other things, share deep resonances with Kant's account of antagonism, rehearsed by Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine in their 1999 text, "Polemicization."

Arditi and Valentine quote Kant:


"The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of law­governed social order. By antagonism, I mean in this context the unsocial sociability of men, that is, their tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up. This propensity is obviously rooted in human nature. Man has an inclination to live in society, since he feels in this state more like a man, that is, he feels able to develop his natural capacities. But he also has a great tendency to live as an individual, to isolate
himself, since he also encounters in himself the unsocial characteristic of wanting to direct everything in accordance with his own ideas. He therefore expects resistance all around, just as he knows of himself that he is in turn inclined to offer resistance to others. It is this very resistance which awakens all man's powers and induces him to overcome his tendency to laziness. Through the desire for honour, power or property, it drives him to seek status among his fellows, whom he cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave. (44)"

In other words, that which elicits in us the desire to excel is a profound dissatisfaction innate in human society. The MUCK, and irritability that the social elicits energizes attempts to order society, but such communal undertakings cannot fully erase the resentment and discomfort that participants may feel in such an endeavor.

Kant's account of antagonism is compelling to me: it is easy to love a city, it is difficult to love stranger-co-urban citizens. The idea of the city in all its density that one might want to have a relationship with is much more frustrating, inefficient, noisy, and shallow when encountered in real time/space and people.

Arditi and Valentine note that "For the first time conflict, antagonism, is recruited to philosophy as a positive good" (50) a mechanism for social projects.

So what does this have to do with graffiti?

I am working on my last two chapters about Meeting of Styles Mexico, and Meeting of Styles Chicago, and am thinking through how to describe the festival. It is a space of celebration, friendship, demonstration, excellence, skill, education, and intense energy: generations of writers getting together, young writers getting to meet and learn from older famous ones, families chilling in the autumn air with the music of spray cans filling the air, beers being drunk and blunts smoked as outlines, contrasts, characters and auras are laid down, creating new fantastic scenes where there was just rubble before. But it is also a space where anxiety, frustration, anger, and worry crop up. Are there ever enough spots? What happens when someone messes up the color scheme, or is in the wrong spot? Why do the young kids keep lining out pieces with discarded cans so work has to be redone on Sunday? What if there isn't enough paint sponsors, or gallery space? And how does a graffiti community hold on to a sense of Mexico or Chicago style history in a scene that is increasingly global?


I think that what public art, and especially transitional graffiti scenes like Meeting of Styles teach us, is that you can have unsocial sociability-- you can have simmering beef, competition, worry, and posturing, but still have excellence, skills development, and beauty at the same time.

The benefit of public art, especially graffiti, is that it is an aesthetic lineage that is incredibly dense: lettering styles speak volumes about histories of stylistic development from different cities and people, the skill of the writer, while at the same time still holding something close, not fully readable, and maybe not meant to be fully decoded, a kind of "sacred text" per Raven.

Public art doesn't necessarily need to help us all get along and completely mediate the ongoing antagonism and cranksterism that makes up an urban everyday-- it might just provide a thought provoking, beautiful, skilled and surprising new surface to serve as a reminder that even though cities are spaces of malice, brokenness, and disagreement, they are also spaces that can hold intimate, loving, friendly, and competitive practices that both challenge and release creative energy.

Public art, a form of publicity MEANT to work through anonymity and the author leaving the scene, speaks to the productivity of urban citizens working to articulate an individual style, and create a groove of deep calm amidst the din of everyday city life, or to inject some noise into muted, greying city spaces, but also beholden to physical and social networks to provide creative inspirations (other writers and artistic styles) and mere surfaces (the layers of track, wall, and viaducts that make up urban canvas) to realize it.