Thinking with Art: Banksy’s Metanoia

Claire Birkenshaw

“Well it ain’t written in the papers, but its written on the walls” (Matt Johnson, 1986).

In the hands of the military, the stencil graphic is utilised as a means to communicate no-nonsense graphical edicts to direct, control, and corral compliance. When used by those with power, the stencil graphic facilitates a visual shorthand to convey the “language of authority” (Gough, 2016, p.102) to those without power, subalterns. However, in the hands of British satirical street artist Banksy, this notion is inversed. Instead, Banksy uses the stencil graphic to inventively deliver provocative messages to both the powerful and the powerless.

Typically, Banksy stencils attention to a whole range of issues often over-looked, ignored, or wilfully hidden from view by those with power. To engender thinking, Banksy’s artwork often fuses recognisable, but juxtaposing, symbols together – a child hugging a bomb, or a group of children standing to attention while saluting a supermarket carrier bag – with the obvious intention to prod the viewer into questioning the nature of the social world to recalibrate their perception of things. As such, Banksy’s artwork is often interpreted as “not-so-subtle political statements” (Brenner, 2019, p.35), suggesting its underlying purpose is to introduce heterodoxic (heretical) ideas to the viewer to loosen their “doxic submission to the established order” (Bourdieu, 1998, p.56), particularly in terms of adherence to contemporary political and economic doxa (taken-for-granted). While Banksy’s work is instantly recognisable now, this has not always been the case. In fact, it was film, Jaws (dir. Spielberg, 1975) specifically, which changed Banksy’s artistic trajectory.  

While only on screen briefly, Banksy cites the billboard moment in Jaws as intellectually “transformative” (Banksy, 2023, p.72) because it unveiled graffiti’s possible purpose and potential power. Until that point, Banksy’s art sought to adhere to the street art rules, albeit unsuccessfully, emanating from New York’s ‘school’ of graffiti: essentially, “a ‘proper’ graffiti piece should consist of a complex letterform, a character and an elaborate background” (ibid., p.33, original emphasis). However, the Jaws billboard, with its satirical augmentation – the addition of a shark fin, speech bubble, and cartoonish eyes – demonstrated that graffiti could be imagined using a different set of rules. For Banksy, this meant that their art should be “audacious”, “funny”, speak the “truth”, and scare “the hell out of the mayor” (ibid., p.72). Conceivably then, Banksy’s reimagining of street art rules was a form of artistic break, or rupture, from the dominant New York taken-for-granted graffiti doxa. In other words, Banksy experienced a form of artistic metanoia.

The Oxford English Dictionary (2023) defines metanoia as “the act or process of changing one’s mind.” Grenfell (2023, p.1) adds there is a “theological dimension” to metanoia because it is typically associated with ‘conversion’ and ‘rupture’ in one’s belief. Ultimately, this break from antecedent belief leads to “a change of one’s entire vision of life and society” (ibid.). For Bourdieu, metanoia meant a sociological “mental revolution” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p.251), which he deemed necessary for sociologists to “give new eyes” (ibid.) to their study of the social world to better understand its nature, and consequences.

In many respects, Banksy’s artwork seeks to achieve something akin to Bourdieu’s idea of looking at the world afresh with a reconfigured “sociological eye” (ibid.). Due to its visual heterodoxy, Banksy’s work forces us to look at the social world anew because the social world’s doxic nature is exposed by Banksy’s ability to make the regular (taken-for-granted) social world appear irregular through techniques such as symbolic juxtaposition and “ironic inversion” (Brassett, 2009, p.232). Quite possibly then, Banksy produces provocative art in the hope that enough people will experience some form of political metanoia by thinking deeply about the messages their art is communicating in the anticipation that if a critical mass is achieved that want meaningful change, a socially just society will result. Finally, I suspect that if musician Matt Johnson were to write the lyrics for Heartland (Johnson, 1986) now, he would probably follow “but it’s written on the walls” with ‘by Banksy’.   

References

Banksy (2023) Cut & Run: 25 Years Card Labour. London: Cut & Run Productions Ltd.

Bourdieu, P. (1998) Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Translated from the French by G. Sapiro and R. Johnson. Bristol: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L.J.D. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Brassett, J. (2009) British Irony, Global Justice: A Pragmatic Reading of Chris Brown, Banksy and Ricky Gervais. Review of International Studies, 35 (1) January, pp. 219-245

Brenner, L. (2019) The Banksy Effect. Harvard International Review, 40(2), Spring, pp.34-37.

Gough, P. (2016) Existencillism: Banksy and the stencil as radical graphic form. Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 1 (1), pp.97-117.

Grenfell, M. (2023) Bourdieu’s Metanoia: Seeing the Social World Anew. Abingdon: Routledge.

Johnson, M. (1986) Heartland. New York, NY: Epic Records.

Oxford English Dictionary (2023) [Online]. Available from:< https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=metanoia+> [Accessed 13 January 2024].

Suggested citation:

Birkenshaw, C. (2024) Thinking with Art: Banksy’s Metanoia. Altered States of Academia, 13 January [Online blog]. Available from:<https://alteredstatesofacademia.blog/2024/01/13/thinking-with-art-banksys-metanoia/> [Accessed ? ].