RAT CLOCK WITH HEADSET, 2019

THE RAT AND THE READymade

Rat Clock with Headset brings together two of Banksy’s most persistent strategies: the rat as an urban alter ego and the transformation of an ordinary functional object into an artwork. Rather than representing a clock, Banksy uses the clock itself as the support. The object continues to measure time while the rat inhabiting its face converts that function into the subject of the work.

Banksy’s rats have occupied his imagery since the beginning of his career. Small, unwanted, adaptable and notoriously difficult to eradicate, they provided an obvious surrogate for the illegal street artist: creatures inhabiting the margins of the city and surviving despite repeated attempts to remove them. Here, however, the rat is no longer simply loose in the urban environment. It has entered the mechanism by which modern life is measured.

The resulting metaphor is beautifully economical. The rat and the clock inevitably evoke the “rat race”—the repetitive cycle of work, consumption and competition governed by schedules and deadlines. Time advances relentlessly while the rat remains confined within the same circular system.

FROM MANHATTAN TO THE CLOCK

The idea has an important precedent in Banksy’s street practice. On 14 March 2018, Banksy stencilled a large running rat directly onto an existing clock on the former Greenwich Savings Bank at West 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. The animal appeared caught within the clock face, converting a piece of urban architecture into a literal representation of the rat race. The building was already vacant and awaiting demolition, adding an unusually poignant dimension to an image concerned with the passage of time.

The intervention proved remarkably short-lived. On 20 March, less than a week after Banksy revealed it, the clock was removed from the building and placed in storage. The condemned bank was subsequently demolished.

The idea resurfaced the following year in Rat Clock, produced for Banksy’s Gross Domestic Product project in 2019. Instead of appropriating a clock already embedded in the architecture of New York, Banksy used an inexpensive office wall clock, screenprinting and individually hand-smudging the rat across its face. The work was produced in an edition of 150, approximately 45 cm in diameter, and remained a functioning household object.

The transition is characteristically clever. In 2018 Banksy transformed a public clock into street art; in 2019 he transformed an ordinary consumer clock into a Banksy.

HEADPHONES, MUSIC AND ESCAPE

The addition of the headset distinguishes the present work from the standard Rat Clock composition and changes its psychological character. The rat is no longer simply running against time: it appears equipped with a means of withdrawing, at least mentally, from the system in which it has been placed.

That motif has a longer resonance within Banksy’s rat imagery. His rats do not merely represent vermin or social outsiders; they frequently imitate human behaviour—painting, protesting, photographing, listening, carrying signs and manipulating the urban environment. Anthropomorphism allows Banksy to use them as miniature stand-ins for contemporary society.

In Rat Clock with Headset, the conjunction is particularly effective. The clock imposes external order: hours, schedules, work and repetition. The headset suggests an interior world—music, distraction, communication or escape. The rat may remain physically trapped inside the clock, but psychologically it seems to have found somewhere else to go.

That interpretation should remain deliberately open. Banksy rarely requires a single reading, and without an artist statement specifically addressing this variant it would be excessive to assign a fixed meaning to the headphones. What matters is the alteration they introduce to the familiar Rat Clock: the rat race continues, but its participant is no longer entirely listening to it.

FROM STREET OBJECT TO COLLECTOR'S OBJECT

The clock also encapsulates a larger contradiction within Banksy’s practice. Rats originated as ephemeral stencil interventions on urban walls—images that could be painted over, removed or destroyed. By Gross Domestic Product, the same vocabulary had entered deliberately manufactured domestic objects sold directly by the artist.

GDP was itself conceived partly in response to a trademark dispute and operated simultaneously as shop, installation and satire on merchandising. Banksy described the objects as art-derived homewares, deliberately collapsing distinctions between artwork, commodity and everyday object. The standard Rat Clock was particularly successful in this respect because its conceptual meaning depended upon remaining precisely what it was: a cheap-looking functional clock.

Banksy subsequently pushed the transformation further with Rat Clock (Gold) in 2021. These unique variants replaced the utilitarian appearance of the GDP clock with a conspicuously gold surface. Yet the essential joke remained unchanged: however luxurious the clock becomes, the rat continues running and time continues passing.

Rat Clock with Headset belongs naturally within this evolution. Across these works, Banksy repeatedly changes the status of the object while preserving the basic relationship between rat and time: from an architectural clock on a condemned Manhattan bank, to a functional consumer object, to increasingly individualised collectible variants.