Blake and Banksy: Dissenting Voices [by Richard Crawford]
Despite the gap between their eras (approximately 200 years), the authors of this blog contend that there is a strong argument for William Blake (1757-1827) and Banksy (c.1973 - ) to say that both have opposed the social, economic and artistic conventions of their time. This blog argues that dissent to conventional norms is the hallmark of both their artistic visions.
Attacking conventional artistic and social norms
At the beginning of the 19th century, Blake was one of the few English artists who rejected the normal method of exhibiting art through annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy. This was partly his choice, realising that his art would never be fashionable and thus likely to be bought by wealthy patrons. Blake also had an old-fashioned approach to the technique of painting, preferring the linear style of Raphael to the “mannerist” style that was fashionable in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This brought Blake into conflict with leading Academicians of his day such as Sir Joshua Reynolds. Blake expressed his disgust at figures such as Reynolds by writing a number of polemical annotations to Reynolds’ “Discourses”, in which Blake denounced Rubens, Titian and other artists who were heroes of the popular artists of this time and who tended to generalise the human form on canvas. Blake dismissed this view: “To generalise is to be an idiot”. He experienced great difficulty getting his paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy and regarded Reynolds and other academicians as social climbers and fraudsters.
In a different but parallel way, Banksy has also mocked the contemporary art world as profoundly ephemeral and often deceitful. The famous incident in 2018 of the selling of his picture Balloon Girl, which was set up to shred itself after it was bought at auction for just over £1 million, is a case in point. The “stunt” was then proclaimed by Sotheby’s as a creative work of art itself, and the buyer of the now shredded picture, given the new title of Love is in the Bin, reportedly sold it on for $25 million in 2021. On another occasion Banksy expressed his contemptuous attitude to the concept of art as commodity, commenting to potential buyers of another picture: “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit”.
Banksy has consistently attacked the bourgeois concept of the value of art, and his image and behaviour as a “street artist” has critiqued the role of traditional art in contemporary society. He has said that the art world is “the biggest joke. It’s a rest home of the over privileged, the pretentious and the weak.” He also mocked consumerism through his parody of Warhol’s soup cans screen print that substitutes Tesco budget soup cans for Campbell’s soup cans, substituting a no-brand economy product for a well-known brand in Warhol’s original image set in the post-war United States. Note that Banksy is here not just lampooning society’s attitude to Old Masters, but also to contemporary society’s fetishization of even recent works, such as Warhol’s, which were originally supposed to be a playful commentary on the increasing significance of consumerism within art in the mid-20th century.
Blake was fundamentally a parochial artist, who rarely travelled outside his native London. (It is arguable that as Blake’s artistic inspiration was predominantly found in his spirituality and vision, rather than in the world of the senses, it didn’t matter to him where he created his work). He could have gone to Paris, as Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft did towards the end of the 18th century, but stayed in London. The only exception to this was his stay of a few years in the countryside, at Felpham in Sussex, but his art does not reflect this short journey and settlement in any way.
By contrast, Banksy is an international figure. Although this is partly reflective of our own world where international travel is far easier and where it is hard to avoid having a presence on the internet, Banksy has overtly publicised his work through social media and has his own website and Instagram pages. He is widely travelled, especially in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, and his street art has appeared wherever he has travelled, reflecting the feelings and ideas that these places evoke in him. His public works in galleries can be seen across the world and he sells work to international collectors.
Blake was an engraver - an artisan who engraved images on metal plates. Banksy appears to see his own craft as a significant element in his artistic practice, making his images using mechanical processes such as stencilling, rather than using traditional tools or media. Blake published his works as prints or in book form. Banksy’s art is mainly located in public places. However he has also completed some traditional paintings, often “quoting” from past works and styles of art, but usually subverting traditional images - for example, he has painted Monet’s “Waterlilies” with a supermarket trolley left in Monet’s garden pond. However he usually works with stencils and spray paint, which could hardly be a more contemporary medium, consistent with the work of an artisan rather than a traditional artist. In this respect again, Blake and Banksy can be seen as having similar approaches.
Blake attacked religious orthodoxies and embraced many dissenting theologies of his time, following the teachings of Swedenborg and others. He rejected mainstream Christian theological positions, such as the Holy Trinity, The Fall, and the idea that man lives in a state of original sin unless he undergoes Baptism. Blake’s own theology glorified the good in people, rather than supporting the Church’s role as constantly reminding them of their sins. In Blake’s work, he consistently attacks the traditional view of God and the Church as social forces of convention and moral discipline. Blake condemns the God of the Old Testament and the Church as mostly regarding the human person as a reckless child who constantly requires close watching by an excessively zealous parent, rather than allowing the individual to be free to grow into its authentic self.
Banksy’s view of religion has not been a major subject of his work (perhaps here too Blake and Banksy are products of their time), and there are few examples of Banksy openly criticising traditional religion: he appears to be less interested in specific doctrines than in the politics of power commonly misused by established or traditional faith structures or ecclesiastical leadership. For example, his image Cardinal Sin represents a cardinal with his face disguised by pixilation. Commentators of Banksy have suggested that “it was created as a response to the child abuse scandal in the Catholic church and its subsequent cover-up”. Nevertheless, both artists’ work gives the impression of their attack of the mainstream Christian Church as being hypocritical for condemning others, seeing the tiny chip of wood in another’s eye but unable to see the plank in their Church’s own.
Similar Dissenting Voices
Both Blake’s and Banksy’s works express their belief that innocence will eventually overcome coercive power.
Bansky made Stop and Search, a stencilled work in which an armed policeman searches a basket belonging to girl who is identifiable as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, while Toto, her dog, looks on. In the film, Dorothy was an innocent child lost in an unknown country, but who was nonetheless able to overcome the powerful magic of Wicked Witch of the West because she had on the magic slippers that a Good Witch had given to her in order to protect her from malign forces. In similar vein, Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun depicts an innocent woman harassed by a huge demon. Blake gave the defenceless woman golden wings to enable her to escape the oppressive presence of the Red Dragon.
New characters express old ideas in Banksy’s images. The Red Dragon, who epitomised terrifying force in Blake’s engravings, is replaced by Micky Mouse in Banksy’s Napalm (2004). This disturbing image depicts Micky Mouse and Ronald McDonald running alongside a naked girls fleeing from an American Napalm attack. They represent the culture that brought death and misery to the innocent people of Vietnam.
Banksy uses irony and parody to critique the establishment, organised religion, the war machine, the police and any other institutionalised form of injustice. In Banksy’s imagery, powerful people are often made to look absurd or ridiculous, as in his depiction of two grim-faced gangsters from the film Pulp Fiction who point bananas, not guns, at their victim. Who would feel threatened by a banana? Blake, on the other hand, never doubted the power of religious beliefs and the religious establishment that policed them, and instead of ridiculing orthodox belief systems he proposed his own, radically different, interpretation of the scriptures in which individuals stand up official dogmas no matter how stacked the odds are against them. His engraving of God Judging Adam, for example, depicts a bearded patriarch seated in a ‘chariot of fire’, pointing his sceptre at the naked figure of Adam. Adam, who is vulnerable and scared, is unable to fight back against overwhelming force. He submits to the judgement that he has sinned. If Blake had met Banksy, he might have been tempted to replace that sceptre with a banana to level up the odds.
Blake and Banksy may be hugely different in their artistic expression, but are similar in their underlying dissenting spirit. Banksy may be more subversive of the spirit of our time through his art, but Blake’s innate outrage at the tragedies of his own age also created memorable images that hold a mirror up to his own generation.
Only this month (April 2022), an image of Mary Wollstonecraft was re-created on the wall of Newington Green Meeting House by the artist Stewy. The connection with Banksy’s stencil technique is obvious when compared with Girl with Balloon or Stop and Search. Wollstonecraft’s view of a good deal of art in the late 18th century as unrealistic or “fake” was similar to many of Blake’s and Banksy’s negative opinions: as she said, women of her time are often “bred to useless arts, which terminate in vanity and sensuality.” The inner truth of art, along with the authentic development and freedom of the human person, have been regarded as Blake, Banksy and Wollstonecraft as more significant than the perfection of its outward appearance.