Out running on Tuesday evening, I went past a goat, stood precariously on a cream pillar jutting out of the wall of a building. People bunched around, gawping at it and taking photos. Below was parked a car belonging to a private security firm. The goat was all black and two-dimensional – it was the first of four pieces Banksy has done in London so far this week.
The anonymous Bristolian has been working his way east, then south. The goat was opposite Kew Bridge in Richmond, south-west London. Then Banksy unveiled two elephant heads, stretching their trunks towards each other from a pair of blocked-out windows in Chelsea. On Wednesday, he delivered a further three monkeys swinging across a railway bridge above Brick Lane. On Thursday, a howling wolf on a satellite dish in Peckham, which was carried off by thieves in broad daylight after its installation. Banksy is, of course, years past being in any way cool or cutting edge. The artistic and political merits of his work are as thin as his stencils. All it’s fit for is Sotheby’s, or a picture in the paper.
And his relentless lionisation by middlebrow media is a distraction from the world he supposedly hails from. Because what’s far more interesting than Banksy is the stuff that’s scrubbed off a building rather than guarded by security: graffiti. When I commute to and from work, I walk alongside the Hungerford Bridge, a dull green Victorian structure spanning the Thames between Waterloo and Embankment. Yesterday evening, I counted at least seven graffiti tags on it reading “10 FOOT”. I see that tag everywhere now, ever since I read the FT profile of London’s most prolific graffiti writer last February. In London, 10 Foot has tagged everything, everywhere, and put his liberty (and life) at considerable risk doing so.
People have been writing their names on things for about as long as people have had names, or things to write them on. But modern graffiti, as distinguished from that in ancient Rome and the like, is generally considered to have begun in 1960s New York and Philadelphia, where bored, fame-hungry teenagers would spray paint their tags on walls and the sides of subways. One of them was Jean-Michel Basquiat. With his buddy Al Diaz, he came up with the tag SAMO© (“same old shit”), and in the late 1970s, they starting writing it around New York in conjunction with short messages: “SAMO© AS AN END TO THE 9 TO 5”; “SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD”.
Like many things teenagers do, it didn’t last, and Basquiat soon moved into the proper art world. The SAMO© tags are long since erased, while his paintings linger in Swiss vaults and the third homes of hedge fund bosses. But in a way, Basquiat’s trajectory mirrored that of graffiti in general – or “street art”, as it’s called in the instances where authority figures like it. Though graffiti tags quickly become a symbol of inner-city rot, colourful street art murals are now smiled on benevolently by municipal governments. In cities around the world, you can go on street art tours, and be shown half a dozen pictures of Walter White from Breaking Bad and a slightly psychedelic-looking Biggie Smalls.
Even tagging has had tentative moments of rehabilitation: in 2016, McDonald’s redecorated the interior of its Brixton branch with fake graffiti. But this didn’t go down well with many locals, for whom it seemed like McDonald’s was writing their neighbourhood off as an urban wasteland. Whereas pictorial street art is widely seen as cool by people who aren’t, and therefore given state sanction, graffiti is rarely even tolerated.
It’s true that, when massed together, graffiti can blight a city. But compared to a solitary tag, which can have a certain graceful fluidity, most street art looks worse – more garish and simply uglier. Street art, with Banksy in the vanguard, has become a globalised, lowest-common-denominator idea of hip. Graffiti, though it might not be art, has a genuine conceptual power. To see 10 Foot’s tag in some impossibly high-up spot is to see his past presence. In a city that millions of people wind through every day, I know that he was there. In a city perpetually reshaped and tidied up by money, tags spring up briefly through the cracks. It’s not necessarily nice or particularly benevolent. But if art has something to do with representing the human spirit, graffiti does that far better than a stencilled goat.
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