 in the press Banksy bombs the wall CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS EXPLORE NUANCES OF IMAGERY RELATED TO THE IMPOSING ISRAELI BARRIER
Banksy, who was born in Bristol in 1974 and refuses to divulge his real name, has been working as an arch prankster for years. His stencils and stunts have become well known through their steady accumulation, a few gallery shows, two books and ample word-of-mouth. Banksy has daubed public surfaces with stencils of police officers kissing, a young girl hugging a missile, and Queen Victoria sitting on another woman's face. He's slapped the phrases "Another crap advert" and "It's not a race" onto London overpasses. He once broke into the elephant pen of the London Zoo to scrawl the message: "I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring." He surreptitiously added a hoax artwork called "Early Man Goes to Market," of a caveman chasing a wildebeest with a shopping trolley, to the collection of the British Museum. In March, he hit four New York institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, where he installed a cheap oil painting - a gold-framed society portrait - to whose face he trenchantly added a gas mask. Banksy's murals in Palestine carry all his characteristic sarcasm, irreverence and subversive wit. One shows a neat black stencil of a young girl with a fistful of balloons, being lifted, presumably, up and over the wall. Another shows a crude white stencil of a rope ladder scaling the eight-meter-high concrete structure. Yet another shows a broken black line with a pair of scissors, turning a sizable square of the wall into an imaginary cut-out. The rest toy with trompe l'oeil - an image of a blissful beach with palm trees and white sand seen through what looks like a hole blasted through the wall, a mountain landscape framed by a picture window above two plushy armchairs, a verdant jungle visible behind a tucked up corner of concrete. As Nigel Parry of the Electronic Intifada points out, "Much of the art he produced on the wall visually subverts and draws attention to its nature as a barrier by incorporating images of escape ... Other pieces invoke a virtual reality that underlines the negation of humanity that the barrier represents ... reclaiming public spaces as a space for imagination and enlightenment where they have become propagandistic barriers to thought and awareness ... Banksy's summer project on Israel's wall stands out as one of the most pertinent artistic and political commentaries in recent memory." This is not the first time the wall has been painted and it likely won't be the last. Some murals are clearly meant to deface the wall, to register a politics of visual protest. The multitude of languages scrawled across the wall now attests to how many artists from abroad have come to express their extreme discontent, and curiously though perhaps ineffectively, Israeli artists who have painted their own protests against the wall have done so on the Palestinian side (the Israeli side apparently remains quite bare except for a few propaganda pieces about brotherhood and prosperity). Other murals function more as coping mechanisms, using art as a means of mitigating the sheer physical horror of the wall. In September, The Christian Science Monitor reported a story about a family in the West Bank village of Masha who tried to paint a colorful mural of flowers and animals on a patch of wall that cuts right in front of their house. "This painting is for the children," said the father, Hani Aamer, "to make their lives happier, to make things mentally and emotionally a little easier for them." The Israeli Army stopped them, however, so it remains unfinished. Such acts of beautification are rather like painting window boxes and flower pots onto the brick facades of run-down housing projects in the South Bronx - a tiny bandage for a gaping wound of poverty and urban blight. But how much distance exists between these two positions - art as biting critique versus art as consolatory gesture? To pull off the murals in Palestine, Banksy worked with the organization Stop the Wall and, according to remarks in the press by a proxy spokesperson, he had a few altercations with the Israeli security forces along the way. In August, Banksy made his feelings about the barrier abundantly clear on his Web site: "Is it wrong to vandalize a wall if the wall is illegal in the first place?" he asked. Noting that the wall, as Israel is building it, will stand three times the height of the Berlin Wall (to which it is often compared) and will run over 700 kilometers ("the distance from London to Zurich"), Banksy said, "It essentially turns Palestine into the world's largest open-air prison. It also makes it the ultimate holiday destination for graffiti writers." While he was finishing one of his murals, an old man stopped him and said: "You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful." "Thanks," Banksy replied. "We don't want it to be beautiful," the old man countered. "We hate this wall. Go home." In addition to artwork slapped onto the wall itself, artwork that features images and evocations of the wall have been cropping up more and more over the past few years, which begs the question, how does the wall function as an image? "I started photographing the wall more than two years ago, right after they started building it," explains Rula Halawani, an artist who was born and raised in East Jerusalem and is currently working on a book about the Qalandia checkpoint. Her installation of four huge images of the wall projected as digital stills went on view in April at the Sharjah Biennial and online at ArteEast's virtual gallery. Each picture is as haunting as it is imposing. "I'm not just telling my feelings toward this ugly construction wall," she says, "but also each photograph symbolizes what the years of Israeli occupation have done to my land ... The standing stone symbolizes the tombs of the dead, those I have seen killed by the Israeli Army. The water symbolizes all the water that has been stolen from the West Bank by Israel. The ugly shadow reflected on the wall symbolizes the monster of the settlements that casts a shadow over our lives. And finally, the emptiness in my photographs symbolizes Israel's continuing attempt to erase Palestinian society." While Halawani's photographs are tellingly barren, Tarek al-Ghoussein's work on the wall insists on human presence. "To me, the wall - or any wall - only gains meaning when considered in its specific context and in relation to human beings," he says. "By bringing the human into the image, allowing the scale of the human in relation to the enormous wall [to] be visible, the power - and in my view the destructive and/or self-destructive power - is underlined. By its sheer scale, the wall overpowers both the individual and communities." Ghoussein's work, which was also on view at Sharjah and will be exhibited next year at Darat al-Funun in Amman, references the wall obliquely and by way of metaphor. A Palestinian who was born in Kuwait and now lives in the U.A.E., Ghoussein cannot go to Palestine and feels the effects of the wall at a distance. His images were actually shot in Sharjah. In addition to Halawani and Ghoussein, other artists grappling with the image of the wall in the work include photographer Anne-Marie Filaire, filmmakers Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan ("Route 181"), and filmmaker Simone Bitton (whose film "Wall" was projected onto the wall itself in Abu Dis). But while the subject - and the more or less universal desire to see it destroyed - is consistent across these artworks, aesthetic approaches to the wall and the problem of the wall remain remarkably varied. "In the new series, there are walls and fences, barriers and dead ends. There are few illusions," notes curator Jack Persekian (who was responsible for the Sharjah exhibition), in an article about Ghoussein's work for the magazine Bidoun. "Ghoussein has internalized these obstacles in his work, trying to investigate their physicality and appreciate their particular aesthetics. It is as though he's marking his own bearing, his exile, with those objects/acts that are displacing thousands of Palestinians, denying them their land, home and livelihood." 
more from this section  • Pittsburgh's Mellon Green finally unoccupied, Bill Vidonic, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Thursday, February 9th, 2012  • The revolution will be televised, streamed and uploaded, Amanda Lin Costa, European Journalism Centre, Thursday, January 26th, 2012 • Living our Lives project: Nigel Parry, Patrick Young, LivingOurLives.net, Friday, January 13th, 2012 • 'It's All Political': Eviction and Arrests of Global Revolution Livestreamers Part of Pattern of Crackdowns on Alternative Living, Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet, Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 • Occupy Livestream Operators Will Be Homeless After They Get Out of Jail, Adam Martin, The Atlantic Wire, Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 • Off the grid: Occupy Pittsburgh gets charged up the natural way, Darlene White Natale, Point Park News Service, Sunday, November 6th, 2011 • #OccupyPGH Day 1: Interview with Global Revolution's Nigel Parry, Eric Byler, Coffee Party, Saturday, October 15th, 2011 • Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga, Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, Friday, September 2nd, 2011 |
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