PLAYING AT THE SEGREGATION WALL: BANKSY AND HIS CONCRETE CANVAS

PLAYING AT THE SEGREGATION WALL:
BANKSY AND HIS CONCRETE CANVAS

Mihai Lucaciu

Keywords: deconstruction, graffiti, Banksy, Baudrillard

       How to decipher deconstruction in graffiti art? What is left to decipher? What is left of
image interpretation? What remains of deconstruction for graffiti? What are the remains that can
be found in graffiti? What is beyond destruction and negation, if there is a possibility for negation
or destruction, as graffiti artists bravely argue? My plan is to analyze graffiti as a deconstructive
practice in one particular example: Banksy’s works from the West Bank Barrier.
       There is a haste to read deconstruction in graffiti works as a “dramatic denunciation of the
person of common sense and received opinion.” (Ellis 1989: ix) But this reading seems at once
obvious and suspect - suspect in its very obviousness. Graffiti appears to be straightforwardly
deconstructive. (Wigley 1993) There seems to be no conversion, just a metaphorical transfer,
graffiti is deconstruction in its artistic form, an uncomplicated application of theory to practical
domain of popular graffiti and stencil art. Form and content, origin and destination, representation
and the real are all blurred and fooled around in graffiti.

      1. Banksy at the Segregation Wall
      The wall is mechanical counterfeit to the human body. It creates an interior as a kind of
stomach that tries to digest objects and people. People are like infesters in this huge stomach.
Bansky tries to scratch this membrane but it seems that the result is indigestion. Israel describes
Segregation Wall as a vital security barrier that may not be fully constructed until 2010, while the
UN considers it illegal. But as far as Banksy, a prominent graffiti artist, is concerned, the 703
kilometers long Israeli West-Bank Barrier, a network of fences with vehicle-barrier trenches
surrounded by an on average 60 meters wide exclusion area and up to 8 meters high concrete
walls, and separates Israel from the Palestinian territories, is a vast concrete canvas.
      The puzzle of naming the barrier has an effect of mass simulation, a locus for
materialization, absorbtion and destruction of cultural contents. Israelis most commonly refer to
the barrier as the "separation fence" and "security fence" or "anti-terrorist fence", with "seam
zone" referring to the land between the fence and the 1949 armistice lines. Palestinians refer to it
as “the racial segregation wall”, and various opponents of the barrier refer to it in English as the
"Apartheid Wall." The International Court of Justice, in its advisory opinion on the barrier, had
chosen to use the term wall because "the other expressions sometimes employed are no more
accurate if understood in the physical sense." (2004) The BBC's style guide for journalists
encourages the usage of "the terms barrier, separation barrier or West Bank barrier as acceptable

generic descriptions to avoid the political connotations of "security fence" (preferred by the
Israeli government) or "apartheid wall" (preferred by the Palestinians)." Banksy comes with his
own reading and naming of the barrier and tries the “ultimate gesture toward translation of an
unnameable structure:… an in-depth, irreversible implosion.”(Baudrillard 1997)
       An important element in graffiti art is location, where the stencil is made. From this point
of view, graffiti can be seen as a complex work of art, as installation, where the wall itself and
what it stands for is part of the piece together with the physical location of it.
       Banksy went to the Middle East to share his vision of the wall on the Palestinian side. His
visit is recorded in the nine stencilled pictures, some surreal, some heartbreaking, that he left on
the extremely large barrier. His work was labeled "holiday snaps" on his website and the wall is
seen as “the ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti writers.” (Banksy 2005: 110) One of
the pictures shows two jovial children with bucket and shovel standing beneath a hole in the wall
that opens on to a panorama of a tropical paradise. In another, he has transformed the wall into a
cosy sitting room complete with two enormous armchairs and a window that frames an alpine
landscape. Yet another shows a broken black line with a pair of scissors, turning a sizable square
of the wall into an imaginary cut-out. Other stencils play with trompe l'oeil representations - an
image of a heavenly beach with palm trees and white sand seen through what looks like a hole
blasted through the wall, a verdant jungle visible behind a tucked up corner of concrete. Other
pictures show a little boy kneeling at the foot of a rope ladder that climbs to the top of the wall.
       Banksy makes his pieces outside his scenery, where the artistic object is strongly connected
to the graffiti location. In this process, the graffiti artist draws “attention to the apparatus that
constitutes the medium” (Brunette and Willis 1994) and the elements that prevent a smooth
relation between the artist and location. In his attempt to create exact gaps in the wall, by
experimenting “exact” reproductions of landscapes and peaceful images on the other side, the
mediating effect of graffiti condemns Banksy’s mimetic experience to failure as it composes it. In
a similar way, the materiality of the wall deconstructs Banksy’s conceptual attempt to use an
unmediated expression that is mimetic from the outset. But exactly this play of paradox opens
graffiti art to a dynamic of differance. Graffiti appears without authorization but depends on its
surroundings, “or at most its outskirts: frame, title, signature […], reproduction, discourse,
market, in short: everywhere where one legislates on the right to painting by marking of the
limit.”(Derrida 1987) The framing of the painting, understood in terms of its boundaries and
differentiations, has a key role in the art work’s legitimacy and meaning, its constitution and
further identity. In order to read the graffiti, we have to look at the wall and its frame because
“the work is never clearly distinguishable from what supports it.” (Brunette and Willis 1994)
       Banksy’s work in Palestine demonstrates an attitude and an aesthetic predilection. The
works seem to attempt to act in response to the barrier’s ideological symbol. The ensemble of
nine stencils forms a harmonious structure that interacts with the space, to appear as a
beautification process. Banksy has also identified with the space, he has intervened and integrated
his pieces in the wall. His works have a fetishist effect, reminding the work of the Norwegian
artist Lars Laumann who has created a documentary about Berlin Wall fetishists, people who
openly speak of their love for the stones and explain their amorous relationship with them
(Capdevilla 2008). Banksy speaks about a graffiti artist’s love for a huge empty wall.
       The barrier, which is made of concrete walls and razor-wire fences, has been cited as illegal
by the UN, which has ordered it dismantled, though Israel says the wall protects it against suicide
bombers. Nigel Parry of the Electronic Intifada analysis Banksy’s work at the West Bank Barrier:
"Much of the art he produced on the wall visually subverts and draws attention to its nature as a
barrier by incorporating images of escape ... Other pieces invoke a virtual reality that underlines
the negation of humanity that the barrier represents ... reclaiming public spaces as a space for
imagination and enlightenment where they have become propagandistic barriers to thought and
awareness ... Banksy's summer project on Israel's wall stands out as one of the most pertinent
artistic and political commentaries in recent memory." (Wilson-Goldie 2005)

Against this reading, I argue that Banksy is building walls with his tricky stencils, adding
one more layer to the thickness of the wall. The whole hoax with his missing identity (apparently
no one knows for sure who Banksy actually is), is an attention-grabbing mechanism to construct
the identity of an author that actually cannot be erased or denied. Applying the same mechanism,
by denying the wall, Banksy’s stencils transform it into a bigger and more beautiful barrier. His
signature acts as an internal frame to his graffiti pieces, defining them as commodities and
establishing the limits on which the institutions of property can operate. By this signature of an
anonymous author, the homogeneity of the painted wall is broken, it becomes something else.
The signature gives distinctiveness to the work but also reveals what’s underneath it, the life of
the wall. Owners of a London private wall were first irritated by his stencils on their wall but they
afterwards realized that the piece can bring money from tourists who were taking photos with
them and implicitly their wall. The owners pressed charges against some graffiti artists who have
destroyed Banksy’s stencils on their wall with their work to protest the mainstreaming of an
underground genuine culture that is arrested in their opinion by commercializing political graffiti
art. It was a reaction to Banksy’s sold works to Christina Aguilera, Bono and Angelina Jolie.
Banksy's stencils became property and private goods that wall’s owners have to defend. Taking
the similarity to its farthest point, we won’t be surprised to see that Segregation Wall is needed
just to preserve Banksy’s works. While the subject and a special desire to see it destroyed are
consistent across these artworks, aesthetic approaches to the wall and the problem of the wall
remain remarkably varied.

      2. What is a wall?
       The diversity of terms and meanings of the wall cannot be stopped; the wall is a shifting
concept in endlessly questioning our own position in approaching it. The wall stands for
multiplicity in a virtual/utopian/present/absent/functionalist way of coming to terms with a
phallocentrism of language. (Grosz 2001) From a permanent upright construction, having a
length much greater than the thickness and presenting a continuous surface except where pierced
by doors, windows, etc., used for shelter, protection, or privacy, or to subdivide interior space, to
support floors, roofs, or the like, to retain earth, to fence in an area to an immaterial or intangible
barrier, obstruction, etc., suggesting a wall: a wall of prejudice, from enclosing, shutting off,
dividing, protecting, bordering, with or as if with a wall like in to wall the yard; to wall in the
play area; He is walled in by lack of opportunity to sealing or entombing (something or someone)
within a wall "I determined to wall [the body] up in the cellar" (Edgar Allan Poe) to the
interjection that indicates confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone, a request for further
explication, coming from the idiom like talking to a blank wall, the term represents first of all an
attempt to artificially create a border that excludes the settlers, creating "facts on the
ground". Wall as a fixed entity/given building or as a stable object is transformed through
language and it becomes mobile and changeable, just what Banksy is playing with: the un-fixity
of walls and their function, opening spaces and rethinking the static plan of the wall in the fussy
way of graffiti & stencil. His works are addressing questions about the structure itself after the
wall is built. Through stencils, through what an artist is doing to it, the wall becomes a living
creature, it moves and it changes, is a floating entity, it shifts to further transformation, it
undergoes metamorphoses.

      3. Attempts to deconstruct the wall
       Banksy’s project does not signify the very first time the Segregation Wall has been painted
and probably it won't stand for the last. Some murals are clearly meant to vandalize the wall, to
register a politics of visual protest. The multitude of languages scrawled across the wall now
attests to how many artists from abroad have come to express their intense discontent, and
curiously though perhaps in vain, Israeli artists who have painted their own protests against the

wall have done so on the Palestinian side (the Israeli side apparently remains quite bare except for
a few propaganda pieces about brotherhood and prosperity).
       Other murals function more as coping mechanisms, using art as a means of justifying the
utter physical horror of the wall. A family in the West Bank village of Masha tried to paint a
colorful mural of flowers and animals on a patch of wall that cuts right in front of their house.
"This painting is for the children," said the father, Hani Aamer, "to make their lives happier, to
make things mentally and emotionally a little easier for them." The Israeli Army stopped them,
however, so it remains unfinished. (Wilson-Goldie 2005)
       Such acts of beautification are rather like painting window boxes and flower pots onto the
brick facades of housing projects for the poor - a tiny bandage for a gaping wound of poverty and
urban blight. But how much distance exists between these two positions - art as biting critique
versus art as consolatory gesture? Where can we find Banksy’s works in this type of reading a
painting on the wall? The Segregation Wall can represent “something [that] has been constructed,
a philosophical system, a tradition, a culture, and along comes a de-constructor [Banksy who]
destroys it stone by stone, analyses the structure and dissolves it… One looks at a system… and
examines how it was built, which keystone, which angle… supports the building; one shifts them
and thereby frees oneself from the authority of the system.” Banksy is not experimenting a
“technique of reversed construction” but “a probing which touches the very technique itself,”
(Derrida 1986) his process of painting the wall has the potential to deconstruct the technique of
building the wall.
       Banksy made his feelings about the barrier abundantly comprehensible: "Is it wrong to
vandalize a wall if the wall is illegal in the first place?" he asked. Noting that the wall, as Israel is
building it, will stand three times the height of the Berlin Wall (to which it is often compared) and
will run "the distance from London to Zurich", Banksy said, "It essentially turns Palestine into the
world's largest open-air prison”(Banksy 2005). By constructing the legitimacy of his works
against the solid institution of walls, “at the place of their greatest resistance: political structures,
levers of economic decision, the material and phantasmatic apparatuses which connect state, civil
society, capital, bureaucracy, cultural power and architectural education – a remarkably sensitive
relay,”(Derrida 1986b) Banksy doesn’t enter the line of feeble deconstructions.
       If in a well-known joke, the absolute deconstruction was the Berlin Wall coming down in
1989, the similarities between the Berlin Wall and the West Bank Barrier are at play in Banksy’s
stencils. In analogy to the Berlin Wall, the West Bank Barrier was erected by government and
acquired "life span" symbolic meanings which went beyond the pragmatic political intention
behind its building. As a demarcation line, the Barrier plays a significant symbolic role in the
"imaginative geography" as a coexistence of different "imaginary" and "real" discourses about its
role. These type of discourses participated also in the production of the Berlin Wall's historical
meaning through the way they shaped its perception and negotiated its meaning in the public
sphere. Consequently, the Berlin Wall has been used as a symbol and metaphor in the political as
well as in the imaginative space of public discourse. The Berlin Wall was not only a political
phenomenon but a rhetorical resource which captured the public imagination. It has been
represented in various artistic forms (both popular and high culture) as well as in "factual"
journalistic forms, as a symbol of the twentieth century, a locus of the great historical events of
the century, and a focus of modern angst.(Loshitzky 1997) The West Bank Barrier functions in
similar terms in a different context and Banksy plays with these particular symbols, especially
with the geographical dichotomy of freedom/repression that turned the concrete wall into an
existential symbol exceeding immediate political significance. It is not surprising, therefore, that
the Barrier is called by so many names, each reflecting antithetical ideological projections.
Obviously, the meanings and perceptions of the Barrier are changing over time and Banksy gets
involved in this process.
       The deconstructive approach to a wall as text is to dismantle it, paying particular attention
to its patriarchal, authoritative or otherwise unchic presuppositions. The job of a graffiti artist is

to expose an inherent contradiction in the very idea of the meaning or veracity of a wall. Banksy’s
deconstructionism is focused on finding contradictions in a socially constructed picture of reality
and he tries this game at the West Bank Barrier. The main issue at stake here is that the Barrier
itself is a construction of contradictions and it just absorbs stencils into its own paradoxical
structure. The failure of deconstruction comes from contradicting the reality of the Barrier and
not pointing its contradictions as proving that Barrier’s reality is a social construct and its picture
is not actually true, by showing its paradox.
       Deconstructing the Barrier is similar to dismantling a house to see what mistakes were
made in its building. When Banksy deconstructs, he is examining it for prejudice and bias that
the author might have used for purposes of control. He gets into its concrete structure to show
what is hidden and what is absent: children playing, a nice living room, an oasis. They all appear
outsized in a deconstructionist interpretation of the wall. It is the typical deconstructive play with
the presence of absence. In this play contradictions of the wall are uncovered, hidden and
suppressed meanings that inhere in the wall are shown. Since the official meaning of a discourse
on the presence of the wall is determined by those in power, graffiti artists deconstruct those
meanings to discover what is hidden or suppressed in the textuality of the wall, thereby
discrediting the establishment which stands behind the text and gaining the possibility to subvert
its authority.
       An important aim of a deconstructive interpretation of a wall is to construct a meaning
which accounts for one's own experience or that of a group. And this is exactly the point where
Banksy fails because his work is not related to the construction of the wall in its location but to a
universal wall that is a perfect universal target for any Western graffiti artist.

      4. Pleasure to the wall
       “A wall has always been the best place to publish your work.” (Banksy 2005: 8) Graffiti is
an emblematic sign of culture that refreshes ways of seeing, provides access to the real and
provides critical commentary on the authentic or subjective expression.
       Following Baudrillard, “one must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contest anything,
if it ever did… The work of art offers itself of its own initiative as immediately integrable in a
global system that conjugates it like any other object or group of objects.” (Baudrillard 1981:
110) Revolt through underground art is denied by its serial aspect: it becomes a commodity. The
stencils from Segregation Wall try to negate the function of the wall itself, critical, innovative, as
well as immediately assimilated, accepted, integrated and consumed by the locals and by a
potential public. (Kellner 1989)
       A stencil from the Segregation Wall plays with contemporary world representations and is
included in the game. It “can parody this world, illustrate it, simulate it, alter it; it never disturbs
the order, which is also its own.” (Baudrillard 1981: 110) Banksy records how an old Palestinian
man said his painting made the wall look beautiful. Banksy thanked him, only to be told: "We
don't want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home." (Banksy 2005: 116)
       In the style of hyperrealism and simulation, stencils from Segregation Wall do not attempt
to represent any objects or social reality, but simply reproduce hyperreal models or simulations
through representations of signs that serially simulate or pastiche former paintings or images,
social paradigms, or simulate commodity and image production. (Kellner 1989: 112-113)
       Against Adorno, Benjamin or other cultural revolutionaries, Baudrillard claims the
impossibility of art to operate as radical critique or as destructive metaphor. What is left is an
opportunity for play: “one can play in all possible ways, but no longer against anyone. There is no
longer an enemy, no longer any system.” (Baudrillard 1984: 24) There is a vanishing effect of
political or cultural order that art can relate to. And from this perspective, art is losing any
specificity. All that is left is to come back to itself, in a spiraling self-reference and to continue to
operate in a game of its own representation, to be part of a mosaic or to work in a continuous

combinatory manner. Stencils are playing this game of resuscitating images at the second level, a
level of irony. What is left in this game is an impossibility of definition: they were all
deconstructed or destroyed. There are no more references to form. No more positioning is
possible. The entire universe was deconstructed and all we are left with are pieces. All that is
achievable is to play with the pieces and Banksy is one of the best players at this game. All
potential art forms have been created, attacked, recharged, deconstructed or replaced. (Baudrillard
1984: 24) Because all targets of art of resistance have been destroyed, art cannot effectively
negate anymore something that exists, all that art, theory, politics, women and men can do is play,
recombine those forms that are already produced and live further with what is left.
       What we can find in those stencils from Segregation Wall is a certain pleasure in the irony
of things and in playing together with Banksy a wall game.

      References
       ****, 2004, "Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory: Advisory Opinion". Cases. International Court of Justice
       Banksy, 2005, “Wall and Piece”, London: Century
       Baudrillard, J., 1981, “For a Critique of the Political Economy of Signs”, St Louis: Telos
       Baudrillard, J., 1984, “Interview: Game with Vestiges”, On the Beach, vol. 5, pp.17-25
       Baudrillard, J., 1997, “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence” in Neil Leach (ed.),
“Rethinking Architecture: A reader in cultural theory”, London: Routledge, pp. 210-218
       Brunette, P. and Willis, D. (eds), 1994, “Deconstruction and the visual arts: art, media, architecture”,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-8
       Capdevila, P, May 2008, Construction and deconstruction, Lápiz. Revista Internacional de Arte nº
243
       Derrida, J., 1986. “Architetture ove il desiderio piu abitare – Interview by Eva Meyer”, Domus, No.
671
       Derrida, J., 1986b. “ Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture”, Architectural Association Files nr.
12, p.15
       Derrida, J., 1987, “The Truth in Painting”, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.11
       Ellis, J.M., 1989, “Against Deconstruction”, Princeton: Princeton University Press
       Grosz, E., 2001, “Architecture from the outside: essays on virtual and real space”, Cambridge: MIT
Press
       Kellner, D., 1989, “Jean Baudrillard: from Marxism to postmodernism and beyond”, Stanford:
Stanford University Press
       Loshitzky, Y., 1997, Constructing and Deconstructing the Wall, CLIO, Vol. 26
       Wigley, M., 1993, “The architecture of deconstruction: Derrida's haunt”, Cambridge: MIT Press
       Wilson-Goldie, K., October 27th 2005, “Banksy bombs the wall” in Daily Star Lebanon

Author: Mihai Lucaciu
Position: PhD Student
Central European University, Gender Studies Department
Nador u. 9, H - 1051 Budapest, Hungary
Telephone +36705416636
Email lucaciu_mihai@phd.ceu.hu