I jumped on the Banksy bandwagon before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences but after Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, which means I was a little late to the game. Banksy is an anonymous British street artist whose social and political commentary has appeared on walls and billboards around the world, including the Israeli West Bank barrier. Of that partition, which is controlled by a series of checkpoints, he says, “Palestine is now the world’s largest open-air prison and the ultimate activity holiday for graffiti artists.” He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 2010 documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” about the evolution of street art. Several Banksy-esque pieces popped up around Los Angeles in the days leading up to the awards. (He lost to the film “Inside Job” about the financial meltdown.)
In his 2006 book “Wall and Piece,” Banksy explains his philosophy on street art:
“The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit, which makes their opinion worthless.
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The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back. Well, they started the fight and the wall is the weapon of choice to hit them back.”
Some of my favorite pieces of his include:
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A lot of Banksy’s work includes monkeys and rats, the latter because, “They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilisations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role models.” That last image was done near the Bethlehem checkpoint at the Israeli/ Palestinian apartheid wall. It shows an Israeli soldier getting frisked — an act that, reportedly, Palestinians commonly experience and that likely does more to humiliate and control the population than to actually promote public safety.
These Banksy pieces were brought to mind last week when I wrote a story about a first grader in Oakland, Calif., who accidentally brought a 9mm handgun to school in his* backpack. This 7-year-old gets to school at about 8:45 a.m. and starts taking things out of his book bag and putting them on his desk when he and the teacher both notice, at about the same time, that there’s a gun in there. The kid has no idea where it came from or why it’s there, and police have to come remove it. It turned out there was one bullet in the chamber.
This struck me as a pretty powerful symbol of the challenges schools and students face. Violence follows these kids literally and figuratively into the classroom — literally in the form of weapons and figuratively in the sense that students have to cope with the effects of it every day, even when they’re coming in to learn. One study conducted in South and East L.A. found that almost 30 percent of public-school students suffered symptoms of PTSD. Marleen Wong, an L.A. Unified crisis counselor, explained in a 2008 interview, “A person in that kind of mental state is not ready to learn, because they’re focused on survival, and it’s a different part of the brain that’s operating than the frontal part of the brain, which is relaxed, open to listening to what the teacher is saying, thinking about what does this mean, taking in new information.”
Writing about the first grader also made me wonder what that moment when the gun was discovered looked like. I thought about all the levels of meaning that would have been inherent in a photograph of the student’s surprise or of the teacher grabbing away the backpack. Since nobody will ever be able to capture that moment on film, I thought it would be interesting to try to illustrate it. Banksy could do a pretty incredible rendering of it, I thought. And hopefully he would do it on the side of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s mansion.
* The spokesman wouldn’t tell me the gender of the student, so I went with “him” in this post to keep it simple. The article I wrote is available here.
