Banksy and the Amazon Multiple

Bomb Love (Bomb Hugger)

2003 Silkscreen print 70x50 cm

Like many of Banksy’s works, this image has an official title and one adopted by the public. The one attributable to the British artist is Bomb Love but the public have welcomed the title Bomb Hugger. It is one of the artist’s most popular and iconic images, published in a series of 750 serigraph editions in 2003 by Pictures On Walls—Banksy’s print house in London—in a year which saw great demonstrations in Great Britain in opposition to joint armed intervention with the US against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Against a reassuring pink pop background, a little girl hugs a bomb as though she’s hugging a teddy bear. The artist recounts the version of the war fed to the public in the stories told by the government, backed by the media during those years: carefully curated narratives formed to bathe the notion of war in a positive and reassuring light and justify the attack on Iraq in a war to “export democracy”. In the pages of his 2001 Black Book, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, Banksy associates this very image to his aphorism that reads: “A wall is a very big weapon, it’s one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with”. As is typical of Banksy, this image has been reproduced by the artist in various formats on numerous occasions, appearing on walls throughout Europe in cities like Berlin, often being created with the distinctive stencilling technique but also distributed in leaflet form to the public during anti-military protests across Great Britain. Although the image originally dates back to 2000, Banksy’s archive includes some 2003 monochrome stencil reproductions of “Bomb Hugger” on public facing walls in East London and later, Brighton. In his 2004 Black Book Cut it Out Banksy reunites bombs and hugs, writing: “Suicide bombers just need a hug.”

Virgin Mary (Toxic Mary)

2003 Silkscreen print 76x56 cm

Banksy’s Virgin Mary is also known to the public by the name Toxic Mary due to the toxic hazard symbol that adorns little baby Jesus’ milk bottle. According to some interpretations the image is an explicit criticism of the role of religion. According to others, it makes a powerful statement about how we are educating our children today. The work recalls the classical Madonna and Child, in a style typical of the Italian Renaissance. Reworked by Banksy the image drips downwards in a particular stylistic nod to the artist’s early urban street art. The artist reelaborates this typical popular image with a process of détournement. This processing of images allows to exploit images in their already crystallised state in the collective memory, manipulating them and placing elements that undermine their acquired meaning. The most famous example of the use of this artistic technique is arguably Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa with a moustache. The term détournement was introduced by the situationist philosopher Guy Debord who interpreted it as follows: “the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu...” Debord also believed that plagiarism is a necessary operation implied by progress as a means to replace a false idea with a true idea, a thought that appears to be constitutive of Banksy’s modus operandi. The Virgin Mary was first presented as a stencil painting on canvas during the Turf War exhibition in a warehouse on Kingsland Road in East London during the summer of 2003.

Pulp Fiction

2004 Silkscreen print 50x70 cm

Pulp Fiction is a tribute to the characters in the Quentin Tarantino’s film of the same name. The artwork depicts protagonists Vincent and Jules sideby-side, holding bananas instead of pistols. Just as Tarantino defuses the violent potential of his films by rendering them exaggerative, so too does Banksy interpret the paradox as a static iconography, replacing the weapons with harmless bananas. The image first appeared in 2002 as a work of street art on Old Street in London. In 2007, the city-owned Transport for London covered the work, declaring that it conveyed an image of squalor in the neighbourhood. Banksy painted the work again on the same wall, covering the Transport for London’s image, but in this version, the protagonists were wearing banana costumes and armed with real pistols. It’s likely that the artist was familiar with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, producers of the 1969 screwball comedy sketch Self Defence Against Fresh Fruit, about acts of violence being committed with bananas, apples and oranges. Other hypotheses are that Banksy was inspired by the cover of the Velvet Underground’s 1967 album designed by Andy Warhol or that the piece is a reference to a common theme in the artist’s repertoire: monkeys.

Turf War

2003 Silkscreen print 56x41 cm

The image was made by Banksy in 2003 for the exhibition Turf War, his first show in London, organized in a warehouse on Kingsland Road. The exhibition, opened on July 18, was meant to close just a few days later, on July 24, but the police shut it down after only two days due to the presence of live animals in the exhibition. The piece, boasting punk influences, shows Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II, imagined by the artist as a punk rocker. Banksy topped Churchill’s bald head with a bright green mohawk like a punk, that, despite making him seem like a Mohican, is actually a reference to grass. Indeed, to decipher Turf War, it’s important to understand the double wordplay of the title. Turf means a clump of grass, while the expression “turf war” is used to indicate a war between street gangs. Tied to the theme of war, the image and its title

Grenade

1999 Spray paint on panel 18x15 cm

seem to mean that for the artist, the essence of war is nothing more than a dispute between two sides fighting over a piece of land.

Family Target

2003 Spray paint on board 90x90 cm

In 2003, Banksy made this two-level stencil on board the same year the US and UK invaded Iraq, declaring war on Saddam Hussein. One million people poured into the streets of London demanding not to fight, Banksy himself took part in the demonstration with numerous interventions, as documented in his 2004 Black Book Cut It Out. Iraq was attacked and invaded, and soldiers were left with the task of explaining to us the modern equipment of a new form of warfare. Thus the term “smart bombs”—bombs capable of striking their target with surgical precision—entered our lexicon. The reality conveyed by our media showed the usual spectacle of war with dead children and civilians— collateral damage, according to power, and the real targets according to Banksy. Much of his work consists of producing images to unmask the hypocrisy of power, a sort of reverse advertising— counterpersuasion conveyed by images.