Brooks+Final+Installation

Materiality and Production
Created in May 2008 @ Leake Street in London, during the "Cans Festival". Created using stencils, spray paint of different colors, on cement wall.

Presentation and Market Value
This piece was done on the walls of the Leake Street tunnel, a legal and popular spot for graffiti in London. There is no market value except for the selling price of Banksy's books that document his ephemeral pieces. "Wall and Piece" currently goes for $15.61 on Amazon.com. This piece lasted from May through August of 2008.

Visual Grammar
This piece shows a street working power washing either a recreation or a hypothetically actual cave drawings, similar to those found in the Altamira caves in Spain or the Lascaux caves in France. The relationship between the street worker and the cave paintings creates a fore ground and a background. The worker has lighter hues as does his power washer, while the cave drawing has darker and warmer tones. The washer has no actual face, and uses only a few color tones to create detail. The cave painting has a richer combination of colors to create an appearance of greater texture. The cave painting has varying sizes of people and animals creating its own depth using contouric figures with little detail. The spray from the washer is the brightest feature and shows movement, as does the dripping lines coming from the cave painting as it is being erased.

Theory / Meaning
Banksy's cave painting is a commentary on the state of graffiti. As a public display of expression, graffiti in particular has become limited and made "illegal". This piece brings to mind the people who lived before these times, who hunted the wild and lived within nature; surviving. In their experience, their only form of documentation was the caves, where they painted scenes of life, such as the hunting of the herd. Many of the walls in both Lascaux and Altamira show picture of animals and nature. This is the original graffiti, the original art form. Here, in Banksy's scene, the worker, a iconic symbol of the state and society, proceeds to do his job, without looking or thinking, and removes the representation or actual cave drawing. The power washer emphasizes the disconnection between humans and nature, and humans and their past.