The Power of Graffiti: Ancient and Modern
The people of Nottingham have reacted with a tangible sense of excitement to the news that, the world-renowned graffiti street artist, Banksy has chosen a brick wall in the suburb of Lenton to place a new installation.
My adopted hometown has had a fair bit of bad press recently given the collapse of INTU mid-way through their redevelopment of the Broadmarsh shopping centre and the spike in covid-19 cases which has led to Tier 2 restrictions. So, it has been a real pleasure to see the city brought into the light through this artwork on the corner of Illkeston Road and Rothesay Avenue.
The new installation features a stencilled spray-painted little girl, aged maybe 7 or 8, arms outstretched in balance as she hoola-hoops a bike tyre. Adjacent to her is a bicycle padlocked to a street sign with a mangled front wheel and a missing back tyre.
In these grim days, it is incredible to see such a diverse number of people getting excited by art. And I do mean diverse – when I was down at the site there were around one hundred (socially distanced) folk queueing up to take photos and they accurately represented Nottingham’s vibrant multi-racial and multi-cultural community.
So, why might an archaeologist be interested in such a modern phenomenon?
Firstly, it is important to state that archaeology is a subject as big as humanity itself. Whatever you are interested in there will be a historical material culture which can be studied archaeologically. I happen to be a buildings archaeologist and part of my job is looking at graffiti which adorns those buildings. It’s true that I can more usually be found squinting at mediaeval graffiti by the light of a torch in a parish church, but there are some deep-seated connections between the work of Banksy and that of mostly unknown folk from the past.
Historic graffiti is a very important window onto the past and offers us a dynamic social document as important as anything which could be found in an archive or museum. Prior to the more widespread adoption of literacy during the seventeenth century, graffiti tended to be pictorial. It was created by people of all social backgrounds and is a vital piece of evidence for understanding the everyday lives of ordinary people, many of whom would not leave us any traces of their lives without their graffiti. By learning to “read” those inscriptions we can learn something of their psychologies and emotions… and mostly they speak of their hopes and fears.
Hope might be represented by the carving of a beautiful ship onto the walls of Norwich Cathedral (Norfolk) – perhaps a prayer in stone by a merchant or sailor wishing for their ship to dock safely. Fear can be seen in the ritual protection marks recorded at the Tower of London which were intended to drive away the threat of evil from the building and its occupants. I have recorded graffiti in buildings all over the country from tiny cottages up to the largest cathedrals. What is apparent is that people used the walls as venues to speak of their concerns in life – the graffiti acts as a representation of what was important to them in and of the specific moment of their creation.
Banksy’s graffiti in Lenton does just this and is a very playful and thought-provoking piece. It is located near to the former factories owned by Raleigh, which manufactured bikes locally from 1886 until closure in 2002. The surrounding streets were once home to many of the factory workers. Famously, the principal character in Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Arthur Seaton, lived, worked, drank and loved in these streets. Nowadays the area is popular with students as an ideal place to live midway between town and the University of Nottingham. The graffiti speaks of the former workers at the bike factory – notably the bike in the piece is as broken as the economy after the factories closed. The work also reflects the tenacious families who continue to cling to the area despite its grim realities and the hoola-hoop tyre seems to point to an improvised make-and-mend attitude to just keep-on-keeping on. The idea of play is also a burlesque on the later reality of Lenton as a bit of a party town for students. I’m not sure that the subject matter would really work if it were presented anywhere other than these streets.
Nottingham City Council are certainly aware of the cultural cache which Banksy potentially brings to an area. Even before the artist formally acknowledged the piece via his Instagram, the local authority had installed a plastic screen to protect it. A security guard is also diligently watching over the piece. After all, Banksy’s street installations can fetch extremely high prices – in 2014 his iconic Kissing Coppers (originally from Trafalgar Street in Brighton) went for $575,000 (£345,000) at auction. The screen in Lenton may have been extremely foresighted as not long after it was fitted the wall was tagged by another graffiti artist. It was later cleaned by local residents.
There is an irony here. Firstly, it is a very widely acknowledged cultural observation that graffiti begets other graffiti. The presence of a piece of graffiti seems to act as a magnet for other pieces to be added around and over older inscriptions. This is the case both with historic graffiti and with its modern counterparts. It has already taken place in Lenton, not only with the tag, but also through the work of one wit whom has thought to make a comment on Banksy’s stencil technique by placing the phrase “MASS PRODUCED” in orange letters adjacent to the installation.
Secondly, graffiti is, by nature, a fleeting and temporary form of art. It seems unlikely that those who scribed on the walls of mediaeval buildings thought that they were creating something that would intrigue later generations or be studied by archaeologists such as myself. Instead, graffiti speaks of the contemporary moment within the mind of an individual in a particular location. Protecting or removing the piece for posterity has the potential to culturally devalue it.
Thirdly, Nottingham has gone wild for this piece (and quite rightly so). There was a real festival atmosphere on Illkeston Road. What would otherwise be a perfectly ordinary suburban arterial road has been briefly transformed into a cultural destination that is really drawing in the (socially distanced) crowds. The line of folk was slightly reminiscent of the queues to see world famous pieces of historic art such as the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and I’ve seldom seen queues of people waiting to interact with art at Nottingham Contemporary or Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery. This installation by Banksy has really brought a much-needed joy, zest and conversation to Nottingham’s streets.
Given that I have spent many years studying graffiti I’m both happy to see the Nottingham Banksy getting so much attention and not entirely surprised. I’ve witnessed the compulsive power that graffiti can have on people. That power takes many forms. Humour greeted the discovery of phalluses carved on Hadrian’s Wall by Romans trying to engender good luck. A sense of enigmatic mystique was created by the ritual protection marks at Knole (Kent) which were left by carpenters trying to defend James I from evil after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Meanwhile, there was amazement at the survival of graffiti left by the Sex Pistols in the 1970s which led to a building on Denmark Street in Soho being protected from demolition.
Graffiti is a tremendously important cultural asset in both the historic and modern eras – but there is definitely a dialogue to be had over how and why we protect it.
If this blog has perhaps piqued your interest in historic graffiti, then please do consider watching my talk on the subject…
About the author
James Wright is an award-winning buildings archaeologist. He has two decades professional experience of ferreting around in people’s cellars, hunting through their attics and digging up their gardens. He hopes to find meaningful truths about how ordinary and extraordinary folk lived their lives in the mediaeval period.
He welcomes contact through Twitter or email.
