Entry Point 2: New York Graffiti 06

HMV (His Master's Voice)

2003 Silkscreen print 35x49 cm

His Master's Voice is one of the earliest images made by Banksy, appearing in Bristol as a stencil in various sizes and colors, and later made as a silkscreen print. HMV is a modified allusion to the logo of the British record label founded in 1920 following the advent of wind-up gramophones. The original logo showed a dog looking curiously at a gramophone, listening to its owner’s voice. Banksy transformed the scene so that the dog, exhausted from listening, aims a bazooka at the gramophone. The humorous element to the work is open to various interpretations: on the one hand, it shows us how to confront obsolete ways to thinking, while on the other, it underlines the possible outcome of tensions over the aging western population; it could also suggest how to behave towards anyone who declares themselves to be the owner of something.

Mickey Snake

2015 Fiberglass, polyester resin, acrylic 72x82x262 cm

The snake swallowing Mickey Mouse, Mickey Snake, is one of the sculptures-installations presented by Banksy at Dismaland, the apocalyptic temporary theme park opened by the artist in 2015 in Weston-Super-Mare, south of England. The relationship between Banksy and Disney is ancient and controversial, the entertainment multinational has often been the artist’s target for its intent to involve childhood in the representation of a world of fable and unreal rhetoric.

Barcode

2004 Silkscreen print 50x70 cm

Barcode was created by Banksy in 2004 and sold by Pictures On Walls that same year. The stencil was painted onto the wall of a house on Pembrock Road in Bristol sometime between 1999 and 2000. The work disappeared in August 2010 during renovations to the property, but it came to light four years later in a nearby school, when one of the teachers revealed that her husband was a builder who had worked on the house. The teacher and her husband recognized the stencil, which was marked for destruction, as a Banksy and received permission from the owner of the house to remove it. They kept it hidden under their bed for four years, when it was finally showed to the public. Another version of the same stencil went on display during the exhibition Existencilism, held at the 33 1/3 in Los Angeles in 2002.

Untitled (Bloodhounds)

1998 Spray paint on heavy board 22,8x71,1 cm

Although untitled, this painting stencilled on wood in 1998 is known as Bloodhounds. Some sources maintain it is the first painting Banksy ever sold. With this imagery, Banksy criticizes the artists, but more generally all those who follow the system rather than question it, just as the Bloodhounds tracks a scent. The work appeared in the form of a stencil on walls around Bristol in the early 1990s, when Banksy was writing things like: “…in reality, the 30 square centimeters of your brain are trespassed upon every day by teams of marketing experts. Graffiti is a perfectly proportionate response to being sold unattainable goals by a society obsessed with status and infamy.” The painting is one of Banksy’s very first stencils: essential, monochrome, accompanied in the street versions by the following quotation from British director David Terence Puttnam: “Nowhere in the world will you find a statue of a critic, or the biography of a committee.”