Banksy is up to his old tricks again
The elusive artist is working on a series animal graffiti across London
Photo: Simone Joyner/Getty Images
The world is an unstable place, but one thing we can always count on is that Batman Banksy will show up right when we need him most. The artist is going back to his roots in London, as the U.K. undergoes a period of continuing political strife and unrest. Over the past week, the elusive artist has claimed a number of black animal silhouettes (and one police box piranha tank) that have been popping up in the wee hours of the morning on billboards and facades across the city. The pieces have included two elephants greeting each other through windows in a building, pelicans eating fish off a chippy sign, monkeys swinging from a subway bridge, and most recently, a rhinoceros that appears to be humping a car.
If you’re in London, you’ll have to be quick if you want to spot the rhino. Several works from this series have already been removed, including a wolf howling at the moon from a satellite dish, which, according to The Guardian, was swiped by suspected thieves on Thursday, and a cat stretching out on a billboard, which was taken down by contractors mere hours after its appearance in case someone “rips it down and leaves it unsafe.”
While Banksy still hasn’t publicly confirmed his identity, he did provide The Guardian with an artist’s statement for the series. “The artist’s vision is simple: the latest street art has been designed to cheer up the public during a period when the news headlines have been bleak, and light has often been harder to spot than shade,” the outlet reported. “Banksy’s hope… is that the uplifting works cheer people with a moment of unexpected amusement, as well as to gently underline the human capacity for creative play, rather than for destruction and negativity.” While it’s tempting to read the rhino, for example, as a comment on the species’ rapid endangerment, the artist’s support organization, Pest Control Office, cautions that “some recent theorising about the deeper significance of each new image has been way too involved.”
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That’s not to say that Banksy is an apolitical operative—far from it. For the past five years, the artist has been funding a high-speed lifeboat called the M.V. Louise Michel that helps asylum seekers reach Europe from North Africa. Just yesterday, the organization reported that it had helped 40 refugees from 2 distressed ships disembark safely in Pozzallo, Italy. In June, the artist staged a piece that involved crowd-surfing an inflatable migrant ship at Glastonbury in support of the project. Shortly after, he posted the following on Instagram, after Home Secretary James Cleverly called the performance “vile and unacceptable”:
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