For this paper, I will look at the work of the anonymous graffiti artist known as Banksy and his use of street art as a means of challenging the dominant hegemonies of Western capitalist culture. To this end, I will analyze the two main components of Banksy’s arguably successful approach to graffiti oriented socio-political protest: his use of whimsical or absurdist artistic and thematic framings to ensnare viewers and get them to engage in his more serious underlying discourses of hegemonic resistance represented in his work and his employment of multiple media platforms in order to disseminate his graffiti pieces to a wider audience well beyond their original physical location. I hope to show that by couching what has become at this point very well known (and often dismissed out of fatigue) protests against post-globalized Western capitalist culture in layers of fantastical humor, absurdism, and levity, he is able to present his critiques in a fresh manner to be considered by the public instead of being dismissed out of hand, as many more conventional instances of socio-political protest often are. Furthermore, I will argue that a large part of Banksy’s success in disseminating his socio-political messages of protest to the wide audiences that it has reached thus far lies in his ability to harness a combination of guerrilla protest techniques and the viral tendencies of the internet. Ultimately I hope to demonstrate that Banksy’s unique approach to socio-political protest can be seen as a fresh and engaging means of changing minds and affecting change.
About the presenterDaniel Gilmore
Daniel is an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University, NYU, and CUNY in the areas of Communications and Media Studies. He has a PhD in Communication, Culture, & Media from Drexel University, with a dissertation that focused on the visual organization of surfaces in the context of modern protest movements. His research interests center around ways that people make themselves visible—culturally, socially, and politically—and how that process is often a result of contention.