Black Books 2001-2004
this time around, they are immersed in a paradoxical framework. Loneliness is no longer loneliness, but paradoxical loneliness. Frustration is paradoxical, depression is paradoxical, and so on—as if a psychedelic multiplier had been added to unease. If you add that there is no longer an alternative, all we can do is pretend it’s nothing, go mad, or disappear. Banksy’s realism has its origins in its unreality.
There is no alternative to capitalism, says Thatcher, and according to Fisher this idea is interiorized to the point that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”—as if capitalism were a state of nature, as if limitlessness as a principle of human action were acceptable. And so now we find ourselves coming to terms with the end of the world. Reality is like that: it comes knocking at the door and threatens you with extinction. Realism is the discovery that reality does not need us, and that something outside is ready to sweep us away—the same outside that Banksy invites us to pursue with Better Out Than In. The artist’s interpretative strength is not of capitalism, but in capitalism, and this is his principle of reality, his true image. From the darkness of the unknowable, of the unknown, of the unattainable, Banksy is either the unexplained starting from which everything must be explained, or he is not. The type of capitalist realism that Banksy interprets is speculative, in the true sense of the Latin speculum: a mirror. It is a realism that reflects itself, and the realism of the reflected act is what it consists of. This is why we will never experience Banksy but only the Banksy function, because we are not shown what that which exists consists of; we are only allowed to believe—in ghosts, of course.
Hyperartist: The Capital of Realism Gianluca Marziani
The family relationship between Art and Realism is a Hamletic dilemma, but an athletic one, too. The Device Society updates the Shakespearian doubt with an approach saying “To be there or not to be there,” thus removing every trace of moral atonement, limiting the metaphysical boundary to a video screen, and preferring the constant blast of the instant over the stormy lessons of history. The human terminals of the digital society, with their rites of gesticulation on mobile devices, drain Hamlet of any implication of judgment, preferring the tactical noise of having and of being there, without the ethical essence of being. And here, the dilemma becomes athletic: whoever realizes the Hamletic reversal leaps into the athletic field of urban gears, the new, secular church, where the artist finds his gymnasium of aesthetic militancy, a display in 3D format to direct operations that are antagonistic but also agonistic in the true sense of the word, embodying in cities the idea that the works are
Golf Sale 2003 Silkscreen print
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chemistry to be shared, and not only possessed by the individual. Banksy’s realism rewrites the archetype of the (super)realist artist, creating a hyperartist that integrates social apparatus with figurative codes, the high with the low, the exclusive with the inclusive, solid matter with the digital process, the old terms of the twentieth century with the parameters of the newly plausible. Integration takes place through a fact so obvious that it becomes unsurmountable for many—that is, the capacity for concrete speculation within realism, bestowing massive doses of status quo while the final alternative to epochal instability is practiced. Banksy’s sticky mode attacks reality with an ironic frontal face, remaining muscular in the issues, but gentle in reaction; concrete and cynical in registering discomfort, but poetic and serious in dosing the selfishness of emergency. His operations resemble the militant texts of Mark Fisher, Nick Land, and Bernard Stiegler, a long, dialectic endowment that records social defeat and starts anew from the world's negative datum—from awareness of evil, from the (post)anarchic clash against the Capital’s institutional façades. When everything goes wrong, it is better to just go shopping: a Banksian mantra that contains more morality than much false rhetoric, a hymn to joy amid the waves of a planet navigating its atavistic evils, in its soaking inflammations, in its dragging itself toward a destiny that has already been inscribed in the prologue. The artist has always dictated the strategies of telepathy, indicating on canvas the maps of a psychogeography of continuous destruction; for some time, in a geography of digital maps, the artist has been transforming into a hyperartist beyond pure clairvoyance: a new, evolved species that affects the summary of time with the clairvoyant measure of a still practicable space.
