"There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover"
-Metropolitan Police Spokesperson. Cover of Wall and Peace (Banksy, 2006).
Exit through the gift shop (2010).
This week I read an article on why Banksy is probably a woman. I also have been watching some fake news about the police arresting Banksy or Banksy finally giving an interview. In view of this being a current subject, I wrote down a couple of thoughts on the matter.
Banksy might be the pseudonym of a (or several) street artist(s). Maybe Banksy is not even such thing as an –or several- street artist(s), s/he [2] might be a fictional phenomena conceived by the media, a figure that breaks into the public and private space and makes small –or maybe not that small- damages in the order and division of these two spheres.
Silvia Federici [3], a feminist theorist, critic on the globalization movement, discusses the notion of the ‘commons’ as a broad range of activities and relationships where people come together and exercise a communal control over the means of their (re) production, challenging the logics of the market and the state throughout a logic of collectivity instead (2010). She takes in consideration other movements as Zapatistas, transgender, ecologists, eco-feminists, anti-capitalist among others as a starting point.
Banksy somehow breaks into the ‘public’ space considering it as a common. But then s/he finds out that public space is just a euphemism for the State’s private property, in the same way bodies are. Banksy has commanded the attention of the street and the Internet because of its power of communing.
Why it doesn’t matter whether Banksy is a woman, a man, an apple or God?
I strongly disagree with the article’s attempt to prove that Banksy is a woman through categorizing some of his/her work’s characteristics into a gender binary bias framework. The article argues that the presence of girls and women in Banksy’s work in contrast with the lack of it in some other male street artists work, suggest that Banksy is actually a woman; supposing only women are sensible towards gender issues. In a logic of Banksy being a woman because only women depict women, suggests that Banksy could also be a rat, or a south-Asian kid, or Queen Elizabeth.
Then the article analyzes that Banksy actually makes the viewer get in touch with his/her artwork in an empathetic way in contrast of his/her male colleagues. This suggests that the article assumes that empathy can be exclusively associated with a single ‘female’ gender.
The article is also not very clear about the difference between a masculine and patriarchal possession of the public space the category ‘man’; in the same way, the article automatically associates a practice that distances itself from traditional logic of masculine domination of the street with some kind of ‘womanness’.
The rupture of the traditional logic of the relationship between people and public space, bias of gender, private property, capitalism, exploitation, militarization, police repression are being questioned in Banksy’s artwork. And of course it is not only a matter of gender that is being challenged, but some other intersecting categories such as race, social class, sexual orientation, among others.
The article determines: “Women experience the street in a different way than men do. Women experience the art world in a different way than men do”. And, of course they do, I totally agree. But this inquiry should be approached from a more fluid cultural or sociological framework rather than one that associates these differences with fixed categories such as man or woman. Public space still being hostile and violent toward women, but also toward transgender, gay, lesbians, functional diverse people, indigenous, illegal immigrants, sex workers, etc. Public- and also private- space is hostile with all kind of dissident bodies and minds.
Assigning characteristic such as empathy, gender consciousness, and relating some specific features to a specific gender legitimates and naturalizes the binary segregation of society in men and women and is one of the most basic issues of domination bias. The figure of Banksy challenges such biases and that makes it queer.
What I certainly agree with in the article is that Banksy’s performance works by opening multiple possibilities towards his/her identity(ies). It increases the reader’s questions about it, and it focus media attention in this specific question, making a whole media game in which there are some news about the capture and imprisonment of Banksy or Banksy finally giving an interview revealing his/her identity. It only increases the doubt toward this subject.
What have in common Banksy and a post-modern leader of an indigenous rebel movement?
This discussion reminds me of an article by Beatriz Preciado [4] about the Subcomandante Marcos, pseudonym of the leader and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of the National Liberation (EZLN), a Mexican, anti-capitalism and anti-globalization movement by indigenous people. Subcomandante Marcos is a character, using a fictitious name and his identity remains a mystery. He could be a woman as well, we can’t know.
In this text, Preciado analyzes the issue of the identity of Subcomandante Marcos as a central technique of political subjectivity production that the Zapatist movement preaches, it deprivatizes the own name through the borrowed name and it deconstructs the individualist fiction of a facial identity by using the typical Zapatista balaclava (2014). The Zapatista balaclava operates like the indigenous homologous of Banksy’s streetwise black hoodie that covers his/her face.
In this process of dis-identification [5], occurs an emerging redefinition of marginality as location. It relies on the subject’s capacity to move and displace, as a way of resistance and agency, being coherent with Deleuze and Guattari’s [6] deterritorialization: the subject is not ontological [7]. And, what do queer-dissident bodies do if it isn’t dis-identification, deterritorialization and occupation of strategic and collective identities?
Banksy strategically appropriates mainstream codes, s/he makes some replies to them and then they are returned to public space; but they don’t return being the same, s/he changes a pattern in the original and make these codes a failure of the public property. Queer multitudes appropriate the dissident bodies to make it a failure of the heterosexual State.
Preciado also compares the performatic identity of Subcomandante Marcos with the drag and transgender culture, she says “for Zapatistas, the borrowed name and the balaclava work both as the invented names, the drag wig, the moustache and the high heels in trans culture: intentional signs and exaggerated of a sexual-political travestism, those are indigenous-queer weapons that confront neoliberal aesthetic” (2014).
Then, beyond his graffitis and performances, Banksy itself is as character and a media product is his/her best own piece of art.
[1] “Why Banksy is (probably) a woman. Kriston Capps. November 4th, 2014. [http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/why-banksy-is-probably-a-woman/382202/]
[2] From now on, I will use s/he as a gender neutral pronoun to emphasize in the mystery towards Banksy’s gender.
[3] Federici, S. (2010). Feminism and the politics of the common.
[4] Beatriz Preciado. Marcos fore ver. [Avaliable on http://www.liberation.fr/chroniques/2014/06/06/marcos-for-ever_1035394]
[5] De Lauretis, T. (1990). Eccentric subjects: feminist theory and historical consciousness. Feminist Studies, 16(1), 115-150.
[6] Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
[7] Deleuze and Guattari (1972). Deterritorilazation notion: encourages philosophy among other disciplines to take the old fix terms and concepts and to empty them of their original meanings and reapropiate them by giving them other sense.
