A recent Archaeolog posting drew attention to the Graffiti Archaeology Project of Cassidy Curtis and his team, documenting accretional changes to graffiti walls in a number of urban locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Such a project has become possible only by the development of software for the manipulation of digital imagery and of new photo-sharing websites such as Flickr. The interest it has attracted is palpable – as indexed not only by the thousands of members of Curtis’s on-line group for “graffiti archaeology” and a good deal of buzz in the blogosphere, but by stories appearing in the mainstream media and, most recently, a full-length article by Samir Patel in Archaeology magazine (readership: roughly half a million). Patel’s subtitle says it all: “The Graffiti Archaeology Project challenges the definition of archaeology.” In what sense can the documentation of graffiti, whose physical persistence is in most cases ephemeral and extremely short-lived, have relevance to archaeology (whose very etymology invokes a discourse on things ancient and primitive)?
In fact, archaeology as a discipline has been pushing against this boundary for some time. The initial impetus, perhaps, could be seen in the intense interest in ethnoarchaeology as a subfield that developed within the New Archaeology of the 1960s and 70s, leading on inexorably to manifestos on “the archaeology of us” (Gould and Schiffer 1981) and “archaeologies of the contemporary past” (Buchli and Lucas 2001), alongside other detailed archaeological studies of modern material culture, such as Bill Rathje’s Garbage Project (Rathje and Murphy 1992) or Michael Schiffer’s (1991) study of portable radios. Work in this vein presupposes a view of archaeology defined not simply as a field uniquely positioned to inform us about the material remains of the deep past, but also (in Christopher Witmore’s words, quoted in Patel’s article) in terms of “a wider sensibility about how humans live with their material environments.” In this reading, archaeology is all around us, ever in a state of becoming: the objects, structures, landscapes, images created by human action provide the stage for change, negotiation, resistance, destruction. The material world pushes back, and objects in that sense have agency too. The material present becomes the material past as soon as it comes into being. And one of archaeology’s distinctive roles is to try to understand humans’ complex relationships with things — whether past or present. Graffiti art (“graf art”) is no different from material culture in general, except that is has an unusually short shelf-life, whether because of “tagging” by other graffiti writers, “buffing” (painting over) by anti-vandalism municipal authorities, or natural processes of decay. Curtis’s project is in this way, to some extent, salvage archaeology: an attempt to capture something of the culture and dynamics of a material world changing at lightning speed.

Curtis’s project, and all the press it has received, focuses entirely on the west and east coasts of the USA. Across the ocean, however, a remarkable, and in many ways comparable phenomenon has been unfolding in the past several years around the graffiti artist known as Banksy, now virtually a household name in England. His real name might be Robert Banks, born in 1974, near Bristol. No-one can be sure, since nobody has ever met him, or can be sure that the Banksy they say they met was in fact him, or a decoy; perhaps Banksy’s PR person is Banksy? Total anonymity is central to his image and to his project. Even though he now mounts very public shows, maintains a website, is a published author (e.g., Banksy 2005), has been the subject of a New Yorker magazine article, and his work has been bought by celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and at Sotheby’s auctions for six-figure sums, he (allegedly) never attends his own openings; nor does he give face-to-face interviews — understandably in light of the need to elude the police, in hot pursuit of a “quality vandal,” as Banksy styles himself. This stance (and its manifest success) is a fascinating subversion of the role of the artist in Western art, in which a name, a signature, a persona, and a validated body of work is the sine qua non of success.
Banksy’s work – whether graf art, shows, stunts, or highbrow gallery art — is both humorous and satirical, revolving around topics that concern contemporary culture, politics, and ethics. Sometimes it amounts to not much more than urban pranks, such as spray-painted manifestos in very public places: “The Joy of Not Being Sold Anything” (on empty billboards); police crime-scene tape (“Police Line: Do Not Cross”) mockingly replaced with “Polite Line: Do Not Get Cross”; the famous statue of the Iceni queen Boadicea in her chariot, on the bank of the Thames, boot-clamped for illegal parking (that one, recorded on video, lasted several days before being spotted). Zoos and theme parks are evidently easy targets: at the London Zoo’s penguin enclosure, in seven-foot tall letters, “We’re bored of fish”; at Disneyland, a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay detainee left adjacent to one of the train rides.
Museums, one would suppose, are a different matter. But this is where Banksy has made some spectacular strikes. His modus operandi is to modify an existing painting — whether a copy of a well-known masterpiece, or the low-grade art one might buy at a garage sale — as a “subverted artwork” and to sneak it into the collections of major museums and galleries. False beards, trenchcoats, and decoy accomplices are all of help here, as documented by video viewable on the Banksy website. In a single day, he managed by these means to “mount” his own work in no less than four major New York collections; the Louvre and the Tate Gallery have also been among his victims. Amazingly, although seen by plenty of baffled museum-goers, these installations escaped detection by the authorities for as long as two weeks.

In 2005, Banksy successfully sneaked a piece of fake rock-art into the Romano-British galleries of the British Museum. It showed a prehistoric hunter with a supermarket trolley, described in the authentic-looking accompanying signage as thought to show “early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds” in the “Post-Catatonic era.” In this case, it was only a posting on Banksy’s own website that finally brought it to the attention of Museum officials who, to their credit, accessioned the piece into their permanent collection; and, in a delightful irony, it has since been on display in other venues with an accompanying notice saying “on loan from the British Museum.”
Much like the Graffiti Archaeology Project, Banksy evidently takes a keen interest in the time dimension of his work. Nearly all of it is recorded digitally and subsequently posted on the internet or published in other media, giving it a permanence the original graf art cannot hope to achieve – in a sense akin to archaeologists’ meticulous recording of what they then destroy by digging. His book Wall and Piece (2005) too contains examples of photographic documentation of the accretion of graffiti on a single wall over time. In a number of cases, Banksy himself provokes this, by stenciling onto a blank wall an official-looking notice declaring it to be a “Designated Graffiti Area” — and then chronicling what happens next. Interestingly, despite the municipal authorities’ zeal in removing all illegal graffiti, in a number of cases in which a Banksy “original” has subsequently been tagged with other graffiti they have opted to remove only the latter, essentially acknowledging his status as a “real” artist and his huge popular appeal.

This was nowhere more evident than in the response to a striking image painted on a wall in Bristol in 2006. It shows a cuckolded man leaning out of a window and peering into the distance, an anxious woman in her underwear behind him, while below them a naked man hangs from the windowsill, apparently trying to escape detection. Much of Banksy’s art is place-specific (most notably, the series of trompe l’oeuil images painted on the Palestinian side of the new wall separating the occupied territories from Israel, and so too in this case: the wall belongs to a sexual health clinic and faces onto municipal offices. In a remarkable turn of events demonstrating the power of material culture, the city council invited public feedback on whether the image should stay or go: 97% said it must stay.
But in this complex space of material engagements — between place, things, artist, audience — the creator of the object is not always in control. As a final example, consider the photograph at the head of this posting. At the Glastonbury Festival in June 2007, Banksy installed a “Stonehenge” comprised of a circle of portable toilets, perhaps one of his less imaginative creations, considering the existence of carhenge, fridgehenge, mudhenge, foamhenge, and many other Stonehenge “replicas”. His mistake, though, was to erect it in the same field as the Festival’s “sacred circle,” which has always had a no plastic rule, so that many felt it to be place-inappropriate. The result? Banksy’s installation was itself thoroughly tagged by other graffiti-writers and became an eyesore, even before the Festival opened.
Works Cited
Banksy 2005. Wall and Piece. London: Century.
Buchli, V. and G. Lucas (eds) 2001. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London and New York: Routledge.
Gould, R. A., and M. B. Schiffer (eds) 1981. Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us. New York: Academic Press.
Rathje, W., and C. Murphy 1992. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. New York: Harper Collins.
Schiffer, M. B. 1991. The Portable Radio in American Life. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.