SWAT Van, 2006
Household gloss and spray paint on van
295x700x250 cm (116 1/8 x 275 9/16 x 98 7/16 inches)
Unique
Bonhams London: 29 June 2016
GBP 218,500 / USD 297,090
Bonhams London: 29 June 2016
GBP 218,500 / USD 297,090
Exhibited
Barely Legal, Los Angeles, October 2006
SWAT Van is one of the most ambitious and important works by Banksy to appear on the open market; nowhere else have his greatest strengths been combined to such success as in the present work. Banksy‘s classic response to fear and tyranny is laughter and in the case of the present work the artist toys with his anti-establishment persona, ridiculing the police not just by depicting a scene in which heavily armed, faceless Special Forces agents are hoodwinked by a small boy but by doing so on the very apparatus of their strength.
Banksy’s best works combine vicious black humor with a clarity of message that many of the best advertisers would kill for and a rage that simply will not be ignored. His playfulness is the velvet glove that hides the iron fist of a social conscience honed on the streets of Bristol and which found its apotheosis in his breakout show Barely Legal in Los Angeles in 2006. SWAT Van is an imposing object; its menace is palpable. The art historical trope of the readymade has never been so loaded as with the present work and yet this piece shares more DNA with Duchamp‘s Fountain than many of the works of his numberless imitators. For any decontextualization to have an impact it must subvert the original function of the object; if a urinal can become a fountain then an armored vehicle can become both a playground and a counter-cultural canvas.
The secret of Banksy’s success is built on the foundations of his relationship with the police of his native Avon and Somerset. Worried that painting freehand would take too long and risk leaving him caught in the act, Banksy borrowed a technique from the French artist Blek le Rat of using a pre-fabricated stencil that could be fixed to the wall and overpainted in seconds. The benefit was not simply that he was suddenly able to leave his mark and melt into the shadows in an instant but that the image left behind was by its very nature graphic and legible. SWAT Van itself is an elegant evocation of all the contradictions of the artist’s career and specifically his artistic output. On the one side of the van the taut, technical composition of a fiendishly complex stencil catches the breathless moment before the boy’s prank takes place. The other side both physically and figuratively shows the raw aggression and vandalism of the overlapping, freehand tags. All of Banksy is on show here, his bravado, his imagination, his technical prowess, his confidence and his willingness to put his head above the parapet and speak truth to power.
