Hammer boy - Banksy

I passed by a Banksy tag yesterday on my way to the Met. Jackson Pollock had a famous quote when he was interviewed about his painting process. “New art needs new techniques, and new techniques need new art.” After watching ‘exit through the gift shop’, I was curious how Banksy developed his stencil technique. I found a funny interview recounting the unlikely origins of his process.

“When i was 18, I was painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up and everyone ran. The rest of my mates made it to the car,” Banksy recalled, “and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks, I realized I had to cut my painting time in half or give it up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stenciled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank when I realized I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.... As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.”

Many of the walls Banksy has tagged are covered by rival graffiti artists protecting their turf. In London, of the 52 sites he’s bombed, only 40 survive today. Initially Banksy thought rivals didn’t like his stencil technique. He later concluded, rival artists are just very protective of their turf,  On October 20, 2013, Banksy tagged the side of a building a couple blocks from where I live with the ‘Hammer Boy’. The tag plays with existing conditions on the wall.  It’s a silhouette of a boy about to slam his sledgehammer on a Siamese fire hydrant.... Rising up behind the hydrant is a metal conduit that terminates above with a few signs and a alarm bell. You can imagine if the hammer boy struck hard enough, the bell above would sound his achievement like at those amusement park ‘test your strength’ contraptions. The wall is in a much different location that the dangerous streets of Bristol where Banksy first developed his craft... 79th street and Broadway is in a middle class neighborhood, well lit and well trafficked. The building is owned by the iconic Jewish deli across the street called Zabar’s, famous for its counters overflowing with cheeses, pastramis, and smoked fishes. 

The Zabar brothers were called the following day about the crowds and police gathering around the ‘Hammer Boy’. Wanting to protect their famous and invaluable artwork, they had some spare deli counter plastic material drilled over the graffiti and a security camera installed.  Thanks to their quick thinking actions, the hammer  boy was  protected just in time since the  following day, the plexiglass was spray painted red with the words ‘let the streets decide’. 

Despite the deli plastic and surveillance camera, the street setting for banksy’s art, and it’s direct connection to viewers could not be more different that the art hanging in the metropolitan museum just a mile east across Central Park on the m79 bus route.