BANKSY™ CLOCK

Catalogue Note

The Rat Race Made Literal

Banksy™ Clock transforms one of the most ordinary objects of working life into a characteristically simple visual joke. Across the face of an otherwise conventional office clock, Banksy places one of his familiar rats in full motion. Its body stretches forward and its tail follows the curve of the dial, as though the animal were running endlessly around the clock without ever being able to escape it.

Upcycled from an office supplies store, this timepiece features a trademark Banksy rat and is suitable for home, office, or Home Office.

The metaphor is immediate: this is the rat race made literal. The clock measures the working day while the rat remains trapped within its circular logic, endlessly running but never arriving anywhere. Banksy takes an expression so familiar that we barely notice its meaning and turns it back into an image. Work, routine, productivity and time itself are compressed into a single object.

Gross Domestic Product

The clock was released in 2019 as part of Gross Domestic Product, Banksy's extraordinary experiment with art, merchandise and consumer culture. Rather than presenting another conventional exhibition, Banksy created a range of branded household goods that included mugs, cushions, rugs, toys and other deliberately improbable objects. The project was partly connected to a trademark dispute over Banksy's name and imagery, but it quickly became something larger: a parody of the mechanisms through which art, branding and consumer desire become intertwined.

Banksy™ Clock fitted perfectly within this strange domestic universe. According to the original description, the clocks were “upcycled” from an office-supplies store and were suitable for “home, office, or Home Office.” The humour lies partly in how little Banksy changes. This remains a functioning mass-produced clock requiring an ordinary AA battery. The intervention is essentially one image, but the presence of the rat completely changes how we understand the object.

Clocking In, Clocking Out

The choice of an office clock is particularly effective. Time is not merely an abstract philosophical concept in the work; it is connected directly to labour. We clock in, clock out, count hours, meet deadlines and organize our lives according to increasingly precise divisions of time. Banksy's rat seems condemned to inhabit that system permanently.

The precision mechanism requires 1x AA battery to accurately mark our relentless and steady ticking towards the great unknown.

The original GDP description pushes the joke further, explaining that the precision mechanism accurately records our “relentless and steady ticking towards the great unknown.” Behind the humour lies a darker observation. The clock measures working hours, but ultimately it measures something much more universal: the finite amount of time available to everyone. The rat may be running because it is late for work, chasing success or simply trying to get somewhere, but the hands of the clock continue moving regardless.

Banksy and the Rat

The rat is particularly appropriate for this role because it has occupied a central position in Banksy's visual vocabulary since the beginning of his career. His rats paint walls, carry placards, listen to music, take photographs and challenge authority. Small, unwanted and extraordinarily resilient, they inhabit the margins of the city and frequently operate as surrogates for outsiders—and, at times, for the graffiti artist himself.

In Banksy™ Clock, however, the rat appears less rebellious than trapped. It has entered the respectable domestic world of Gross Domestic Product only to find itself running inside one of society's most universal systems. The rebellious street rat has become an office worker, and even Banksy's most persistent outsider cannot escape the clock.

Banksy™ Clock is one of the most successful objects produced through Gross Domestic Product because the artwork and the function of the object are inseparable. Banksy has not simply printed a rat onto a piece of merchandise; he has chosen an object whose purpose completes the metaphor. Remove the clock and much of the joke disappears.

The later gold versions would transform the same idea into something more luxurious and conspicuous, but the original 2019 edition retains the conceptual purity of the joke. It is an inexpensive office clock, a Banksy rat and a mechanism that continues turning whether anyone is watching or not.

The rat keeps running, the hands keep moving, and nobody gets any more time.