If you haven’t taken the Banksy driving tour yet, you’ve already missed a piece, but not to Fred Radke unless he has drastically changed his style. Someone spraypainted over the boy swinging in the life preserver at Claiborne and Reynes in the Lower Ninth Ward. That’s unfortunate, but it also underlines part of the excitement of public art – it’s temporary nature. Time, the weather, mischievous hands or other forces will likely claim all of his work here eventually.
His work is not only worth seeing because it’s a cool moment in New Orleans cultural history, but because his pieces do what smart graffiti does; it reanimates an otherwise mundane public space. Gang-related graffiti and tagging – if you assume taggers are connected to gangs – do so in a negative way, putting a sign of possible danger in an otherwise neutral space. There is a stenciler whose work has been intriguing, as he/she has stenciled Pee Wee Herman on the Tchoupitoulas Street flood wall, an angry cat in a party hat on Frenchmen Street, and the Pope on a power line pole. His/her work makes spaces more mysterious, asking passersby to figure out the relationship between the work and the space. Radke has eradicated much of the stenciler’s work, but recently, he/she has started stenciling Radke’s likeness on walls with a voice balloon. Why the voice balloon? Is it to suggest that Radke don’t say nuthin’, he just keeps on rollin’ along, or is it a space left for other graffiti artists to fill in the blanks?
Banksy also makes his works with stencils, but they’re more sophisticated, allowing for multiple colors, and he has more technique. The painter on Clio and Carondelet is stenciled on the wall, but the illusion of wrinkles in his cover-alls is created by zigzagging white paint horizontally down his torso. His work also has a clear agenda. Unlike the stenciler whose working in a dada style, throwing incongruous images in public spaces, Banksy is clearly sympathetic to the underclass and suspicious of authority. The best of his work uses images, not slogans, to politicize public spaces. Because they went up seemingly overnight, they also gave us pause to reconsider our relationships to those spaces. How long have they been here? Has this been here a while and I just missed it? That was certainly my reaction to the looting National Guardsmen at Elysian Fields and Decatur near the OffBeat offices.
But if all that doesn’t speak to you, then the pieces are simply resonant as works of art. They’re clever, provocative and well-executed. When I see the silhouetted pieces, they bring to mind silhouettes left after another manmade disaster – those left on the walls of Hiroshima after the H-Bomb was dropped. Whether he intended that reference or not doesn’t matter; the works speak intelligently and echo in a lot of directions.
