By Ian Russell
Photographs by Conor McCarthy

Caption: Banksy’s portable toilet monument with the Glastonbury ‘sacred circle’ behind
I would like to commend Prof. John F. Cherry for his recent contribution to Archaeolog titled ‘Has anyone seen Banksy?’. I am a firm supporter of the growing synergies between archaeology and contemporary art. As many archaeologists are collaborating on developing new paradigms for perception of archaeological research and conceptions of what archaeology is, I, however, am moved to make an urgent critique of Cherry’s article.
Although the article provides a well articulated timeline of some of Banksy’s work, notably after an expositional review of some archaeological theory and the intriguing work of Cassidy Curtis’ Graffiti Archaeology Project, I am concerned that in Cherry’s attempt to address the significance of Banksy’s art work for archaeology, he has not succeeded in critically engaging Bansky’s work, leaving us with some misconceptions.

Cherry argued that Banksy’s photographic documentation of his public art interventions are ‘in a sense akin to archaeologists’ meticulous recording of what they then destroy by digging’. Although a convenient and perhaps convincing metaphor, it does, however, suggest that Banksy’s work is something which may destroy a surface or a space through intervention – reifying the position that his ‘graffiti’ is ‘vandalism’.
Although it is a popular trope that archaeological excavation is destructive, this metaphor does a disservice to the creative mediative potentials of archaeology in the world. Indeed, I would suggest that a more productive metaphorical relationship between Banksy and archaeology would be the productive and creative intervention into physical space as an ongoing process of mediation.
One thing the history of the discipline of archaeology has taught its students is the dangers of the appropriation of material culture for the purposes of justifying an intellectual position or reifying a social conception. Although there may be visual or conceptual similarities between the forms of mediation of phenomena, this does not mean that there are de facto similarities in content. We should be careful not to support meta-cultural historical interpretations of art and archaeological work. Rather, we could embrace the potentialities of archaeological mediation to open new spaces for performance and social participation.
Returning to Cherry’s ideas, when considering the documentary practices deployed by Banksy (e.g. himself, his team, followers), it is a valid criticism to suggest that his (and others) attempts to document the work could be a deployment of contemporary media in the vain pursuit of celebrity or perhaps immortality in an art form, which has been traditionally accepted to be fluid and ephemeral.
This is an especially prescient point in light of the cult of celebrity which has grown up around Banksy’s work where subsequent graffiti and tags are removed in order to preserve the ‘original’ work by Banksy, as was noted by Cherry. This brings us to a much more critical issue for art and archaeology, the manifestation and mediation of authenticity and the constitution of ‘high art’.
Archaeology traditionally has imposed a rhetoric of self-evident authenticity, particularly in the case of its representation in traditional media (e.g. museum displays). Artefacts as art-facts. Banksy’s ‘authenticity’ and ‘celebrity’ has, however, (although supported by the deployment of documentation and PR strategies) grown organically through public reception of his work and a bottom-up (in terms of the ‘art world’) consensus of its significance.
This is the strength of much of Banksy’s early work – its site-specificity and its relentless engagement with contemporary politics and aesthetics. His ethos of constructive (but rigorously critical) intervention into shared public space offers a more dynamic vision for the possibilities of archaeological practice.
This brings me to one of Banksy’s most recent pieces which Cherry discussed – his portable toilet ‘Stonehenge’ at Glastonbury. One of the most alarming issues with Cherry’s article is its appropriation of unbalanced interpretations of Banksy’s Glastonbury intervention and its remediation. Cherry contends that Banksy’s installation of plastic portoloos near to the ‘sacred circle’ of Glastonbury (which has a ‘no-plastic’ rule) prompted the installation to be ‘tagged’ extensively before the Glastonbury festival. Cherry suggested that this meant that Banksy’s installation was ‘place-inappropriate’.
Firstly, this is a striking comment because by asserting this claim, it follows that all of Banksy’s work which contravenes social policies or legal codes are ‘place-inappropriate’. Is graffiti ever place appropriate? That there is a ‘no-plastic’ rule for the ‘sacred circle’, perhaps this makes Banksy’s intervention all the more appropriate. Rather, I suggest that ‘appropriateness’ is not a supportive way of discussing artwork or indeed any mode of creative intervention.
Secondly, his contention that the subsequent ‘tags’ and graffiti on the body of the portoloos was in response to their materiality – their plasticity – is incorrect. If one examines the graffiti which appears on the installations more closely, one can see that they rather are a palimpsest of ‘tags’, ‘slogans’ and ‘images’ none of which make reference to any sort of inappropriateness of the piece. Perhaps Banksy’s intervention rather offered a new platform and social space for re-mediating and re-considering materials, surfaces and ideas.

The type of graffiti which appeared on Banksy’s installation appears on the public loos throughout other locations at the Glastonbury festival as well. Given this, it is a selective revisionism of the remediation of Banksy’s intervention which led to a misconception of the dynamics of the phenomenon. Furthermore, the reading of the plastic of the portoloos as the cause for the process of remediation supports a fundamentalist perspective on human perception of materialities and reifies the position that Banksy’s work is authentic and original and non-negotiable. I would suggest that the spirit behind Banksy’s art is that it is negotiable and open to fluid remediation.

Perhaps there is some truth in Cherry’s article, found in his question ‘Has anyone seen Banksy?’. When you consider that the photograph which was posted at the head of his article is an appropriated and unaccredited image taken by Rod Ward on 22 June 2007 at Glastonbury festival found publicly on such sites as Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Banksyglasto.JPG), I am forced to respond, I’ve seen Banksy. Have you?