Four Murals In Four Days, To Date

Banksy, the protean British graffiti artist, prankster, philanthropist and erstwhile fringe political commentator long-assumed to be Robin Gunningham, has moved up from his native Bristol for a late-summer residency in the nation’s capital. To date, four fetching and — for Gunningham anyway — surprisingly sedate figurative stencils involving wildlife have been installed, to wit: a mountain goat perched atop a buttress on the side wall of a small factory facing Kew Bridge (pictured above); three jungle-canopy-dwelling monkeys on a Tube overpass in Brick Lane, East London; a pair of elephants trumpeting each other from two bricked-in windows in Chelsea.

Just in the last day there has appeared the fourth figure, and it certainly fits the popular image we maintain of the nocturnal animal we know as Gunningham himself. It’s an especially breezy figure of a lone baying wolf stenciled on a white satellite dish on an apparently abandoned shopfront in Peckham, south London. With the supposed dish as the canvas, it’s as if the wolf is backlit by a huge harvest moon. Pictured below.

Banksy/Gunningham’s specialty is in selecting quotidian imagery — in this series, wildlife — and inserting those images into previously ignored or disregarded clefts within the selected urban architecture, such as the buttress on the streetside of the Kew Bridge building or the bricked up windows in Chelsea. The spaces and/or surfaces serve in their original architectural roles and as the integral canvases for the artwork. It’s the tension manufactured by the siting that produces what we can call the Banksy improbability, or the Banksy “joke.” Of course there could be no mountain goat atop the little crag of that middle buttress, but it’s fun and funny to think so, and the stencil of the goat in that precise spot allows us to think it.

For students of Banksy, the one trademark element missing from the current portfolio is the sharp political edge of the figures, and that’s made all the more striking by the recent rioting by far-right elements in British cities nationwide. That noted, it’s too early to say that Banksy has “softened.” Although not much is known about Gunningham, it certainly can be that, as rooted as he is in Yate, his birthplace, and Bristol, home of the original music/graffitist scene from which he sprang, that the man has managed a family well under the radar, or at least a significant other.

Above, across the street from the (acknowledged) goat, a little Banksy-ish note of a graffito of some apparently armed men with coursing dogs on a lead hunting for…something. It’s not yet been locked down — in the sense of an acknowledgement online or through his agency of authentification, known as Pest Control — whether this work was done by Banksy, or when, exactly. But of the recent work, it’s the only one that depicts humans in a circumstance that could be interpreted as political.

Whether he has or hasn’t issue, it’s not clear that Banksy is done with London yet. Londoners, and the coursing dogs of Fleet Street, are very much hoping that another mural appears this evening, and another after that. And even if there are children at play on the presumably remote Gunningham seat in the River Avon territory, there’s a enough of the school holiday left for any number of nights’ work in the capital.

Because: Once you get the site logistics lined up — for instance, the sturdy mountain-climbers’ harnesses or the scaffold that must have hung over the side of east London Tube bridge over the Brick Lane work, pictured above — those stenciled monkeys go up quick.