David Teniers the Younger, The Monkey Painter, 1805, Prado, Madrid. Image: Bridgeman Images

While the placard-carrying monkey here could be read as pointed socio-political commentary on the dangerously buffoonish tactics of our ruling elite, useful reference to the 18th century trend for ‘peintre singe’ (‘monkey painter’ in French) provides a further point of reference. Used historically as a means of critiquing the pomposity of the artworld more specifically, the tradition of ‘peintre singe’ certainly resonates with Banksy’s anti-establishment position, and as a way of speaking back to graffiti’s historically maligned status.

Self-Portrait, 2000

Seen as uncivilized by Darwinian evolutionary logic, the Monkey itself proves to be something of a cipher for the anonymous guerrilla artist, underscoring graffiti’s reputation as a crude and ‘untrained’ mode of art-making in the context of cultural elitism, classism, and definitions of ‘high art’. Banksy clearly made this identification at an early stage in his career, his Self-Portrait from 2000 featuring a monkey-headed figure wielding two spray cans, a disguise picked up again in the monkey mask adopted by the artist in the 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Executed in 2002, just as Banksy was transitioning from anonymous street artist to a globally recognized icon, Laugh Now But One Day We’ll Be In Charge marks one of the most important chapters in Banksy’s career, and of the movement of street art from unexpected, public locations into more sanctioned spaces. Departing from the urban materials of brick walls and metal railway carriages more usually associated with graffiti, the work itself appears on canvas, one of five created by the artist using this stencil in this format and palette. Different iterations of the monkey stencil have been included in all major Banksy exhibitions, including his United States debut, Existencilism, a landmark exhibition which opened during the summer of 2002 in Los Angeles, at 33 1/3 Gallery.

More than any other motif, the lineage of the Laugh Now monkeys highlight the success with which Banksy has translated the energy and invective of graffiti into more traditional art world contexts, the stencil having been famously used in a specifically commissioned context in Brighton’s Ocean Rooms nightclub in 2002. The six-meter-long commission was designed to form the backdrop of the nightclub’s bar, six of the monkeys bearing the titular slogan.

But the iconic design has its roots firmly in the tradition of street art, appearing in Banksy’s first, and now legendary, London exhibition in 2000.

Staging what the flyer invitation described as ‘an illicit outdoor gallery experience’ Banksy populated Rivington Street in London’s Shoreditch area with twelve stencils, including an iteration of the present work featuring the titular slogan. Although no murals of the work now survive, it remains an enduring image of British counterculture and the thriving street art scene in the years leading up to the millennium.