Radar Rat 2008 Offset lithograph on record sleeve 31x62 cm
Rubber Ducky 2006 Acrylic paint on canvas 91x91 cm
Gangsta Rat 2004 Silkscreen print 50x35 cm The Banksy gangster rat mimics the American “gangsta” (according to urban jargon) rappers of the 1990s, icons of hip hop culture who influenced the artist during his training in Bristol. The rats rank among Banksy’s most depicted subjects, he writes: “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.” The artist captures a parallelism between rats and the condition in which street artists are, which also serves to warn us against quiet masses. Banksy’s rats are often thought to have been borrowed from the repertoire of another street artist, the French artist Blek Le Rat, who during the 1980s disseminated his rodent inspired artworks throughout Paris with a fashion akin to that of the
Rubber Ducky. The titles of Banksy’s works are almost always simple captions of what the image represents—in this case, the child’s bath toy. This is a very rare freehand acrylic painting done in 2006—one of the years when the artist produced some of his most well-known masterpieces, days when his art was welcomed by the Hollywood stars flocking to the Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles. The scene depicts a duckling in a domestic bath setting; but we see a shark emerging beneath the surface of the water. The metaphor is clear: the
British artist. Banksy’s Gangsta Rat sits next to a large portable stereo, a typical hip hop accessory also known as a “boom box”. Scrawled above the rat in contemporary “style writing” are the letters “POW”, a reference to Banksy’s print house, Pictures On Walls, but also to the better known form of this acronym: Prisoner of War.
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large fish has already eaten the little fish, and is now turning its efforts to ducklings. Banksy is one of just a handful of artists who address the issue of protecting childhood growing in a world where it is considered a market segment, a product of global marketing. Once again, the artist produces an image to shake our ethics, an iconic soft power that spurs us towards a critical counterbalance against amoral commodification.
