an article from the Scotland on Sunday
Published Date: 29 March 2009
As the Irishman who portrayed his Prime Minister naked on the toilet faces jail,
Chitra Ramaswamy casts a critical eye over the best guerrilla artists down the years.
Chitra Ramaswamy casts a critical eye over the best guerrilla artists down the years.
CONOR CASBY
By day he was a shy secondary school teacher in Dublin. But by night Conor Casby was a guerrilla artist, wielding his paintbrush to capture the likeness of into two of the city's most prestigious galleries. One briefly took pride of place among paintings of Michael Collins, Yeats and Bono. It featured the Taoiseach on the lavatory, toilet roll in hand, body unadorned but for the spectacles on his nose. It was branded 'Biffo on the bog' after the Prime Minister's X-rated acronym. The other painting depicted Cowen holding up a pair of Y-fronts. Casby now faces the prospect of jail for criminal damage – for hammering nails into the gallery walls.
JAMES GILLRAY
Every irreverent work of art in Britain can be traced back to James Gillray, the son of a Lanark soldier. An engraver who studied at the Royal Academy in the 1770s, by 1782 Gillray had begun to focus on political caricatures, and everyone felt the sharp slash of his wit.
He ridiculed the French and Napoleon, and – in an echo of the Brian Cowen controversy – depicted Lord North and Charles James Fox defecating into a pan bearing the royal coat of arms. The Prince of Wales didn't think much of Gillray's L'Assemblée Nationale, thought of at the time as "the most talented caricature that has ever appeared", and paid to have it suppressed and its plate destroyed.
SHEPARD FAIREY
Remember the Barack Obama Hope posters during the US presidential election campaign of last year? They were not the brainchild of some corporate marketing team, but created by one of the most influential guerrilla artists around, Shepard Fairey, who has been operating since the Eighties, with his designs adorning skate parks across America. He was responsible for anti-Bush sticker campaigns such as 'Be the Revolution' and 'Obey'. The iconic Obama design, pictured, was initially distributed independently, but soon with official approval. He followed it up with a companion portrait inviting people to 'adopt' shelter dogs, brilliantly lampooning the historical significance of the original.
GUERRILLA GIRLS
This radical group of feminists started out in New York in 1985 with the intention of campaigning about the lack of women in the arts, pasting up posters with slogans such as 'Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?' This was famously plastered across city buses in 1989 and was a result of a "weenie count" at the gallery. This collective of guerrilla artists take the moniker a step further by donning gorilla masks for protests and naming themselves after dead women artists.
PRINCESS HIJAB
We do not know whether Princess Hijab is a woman or a Muslim, just that her guerrilla art involves 'hijab-ising' adverts in Paris. Her stencils started to spring up in Paris in 2006, around the time that discussions about whether wearing the hijab was compatible with French secularism were first taking place. She uses spray paint and a black marker to cover women up in ads – although they may be wearing mini-chadors and high heels and carrying guns – and pastes her 'Hijab Ads' everywhere she goes. We don't know much else, which is just as it should be in the guerrilla art world.
BANKSY
The most famous guerrilla artist of them all (if he can be famous when no one really knows who he is or what he looks like, despite tabloid newspaper attempts to unmask him), Banksy is either the anti-capitalist artistic conscience of the streets or the sell-out who panders to the establishment he once provoked. He is now revered enough that city councils keep his stencils on public buildings, and in 2007, a single work sold for £288,000, around 20 times the estimate of Bonham's. Banksy produced spoof £10 notes from the 'Banksy of England', defaced Paris Hilton CDs, and painted the Queen as a chimpanzee during her Golden Jubilee. In August 2005, he painted nine images on the concrete wall dividing Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, including a girl floating over the wall holding balloons.
POSTER BOY
Poster Boy has been slinking around New York's subways for the past year taking a razor to advertising posters. The results are simple, satirical and brilliant. He slashes a poster of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, making a ghoulish Frankenstein of two of the most beautiful faces on screen, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. He turns an Indiana Jones poster into a comment on colonialism.
Sometimes – he has to work quickly before the police catch him – he does very little at all, as in the poster of blockbuster Iron Man, which he meddled with to create new words: Iran > Nam. He has been called the "Matisse of subway-ad mash-ups" and has said he has no intention of taking his work into galleries. The real deal.
KEITH HARING
The original street artist, it was Haring's chalk drawings on the subway walls of New York that first got him noticed.
In New York, he found the art community at its most experimental outside the gallery, in the city's streets and clubs.
His outline figures did not have faces and yet expressed a range of powerful emotions. Taking a stand against capitalism and attitudes to HIV, he hung out with Jean-Michel Basquiat, who in the late Seventies began spray painting his iconic SAMO graffiti around the city, a pithy satirical series that foreshadowed the tone of much guerrilla art.
JAMES MATTHEWS
A former soldier, Matthews was taking part in a May Day anti-capitalism protest outside the Houses of Parliament in 2000 when he wrote his name in the annals of guerrilla art. He used a sod of turf to make a statue of Winston Churchill look like a punk with a Mohican haircut, and used red paint to make it look as if blood was coming out of Churchill's mouth. The image flashed around the world. The former Royal Marine, who served in Bosnia and Croatia, was later sentenced to 30 days' imprisonment and ordered to pay £250 to the Royal Parks Agency.
He told the court: "I thought that on a day when people all over the world were gathering to express their human rights and the right to freedom of speech, I would express a challenge to an icon of the British establishment."
By day he was a shy secondary school teacher in Dublin. But by night Conor Casby was a guerrilla artist, wielding his paintbrush to capture the likeness of into two of the city's most prestigious galleries. One briefly took pride of place among paintings of Michael Collins, Yeats and Bono. It featured the Taoiseach on the lavatory, toilet roll in hand, body unadorned but for the spectacles on his nose. It was branded 'Biffo on the bog' after the Prime Minister's X-rated acronym. The other painting depicted Cowen holding up a pair of Y-fronts. Casby now faces the prospect of jail for criminal damage – for hammering nails into the gallery walls.
JAMES GILLRAY
Every irreverent work of art in Britain can be traced back to James Gillray, the son of a Lanark soldier. An engraver who studied at the Royal Academy in the 1770s, by 1782 Gillray had begun to focus on political caricatures, and everyone felt the sharp slash of his wit.
He ridiculed the French and Napoleon, and – in an echo of the Brian Cowen controversy – depicted Lord North and Charles James Fox defecating into a pan bearing the royal coat of arms. The Prince of Wales didn't think much of Gillray's L'Assemblée Nationale, thought of at the time as "the most talented caricature that has ever appeared", and paid to have it suppressed and its plate destroyed.
SHEPARD FAIREY
Remember the Barack Obama Hope posters during the US presidential election campaign of last year? They were not the brainchild of some corporate marketing team, but created by one of the most influential guerrilla artists around, Shepard Fairey, who has been operating since the Eighties, with his designs adorning skate parks across America. He was responsible for anti-Bush sticker campaigns such as 'Be the Revolution' and 'Obey'. The iconic Obama design, pictured, was initially distributed independently, but soon with official approval. He followed it up with a companion portrait inviting people to 'adopt' shelter dogs, brilliantly lampooning the historical significance of the original.
GUERRILLA GIRLS
This radical group of feminists started out in New York in 1985 with the intention of campaigning about the lack of women in the arts, pasting up posters with slogans such as 'Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?' This was famously plastered across city buses in 1989 and was a result of a "weenie count" at the gallery. This collective of guerrilla artists take the moniker a step further by donning gorilla masks for protests and naming themselves after dead women artists.
PRINCESS HIJAB
We do not know whether Princess Hijab is a woman or a Muslim, just that her guerrilla art involves 'hijab-ising' adverts in Paris. Her stencils started to spring up in Paris in 2006, around the time that discussions about whether wearing the hijab was compatible with French secularism were first taking place. She uses spray paint and a black marker to cover women up in ads – although they may be wearing mini-chadors and high heels and carrying guns – and pastes her 'Hijab Ads' everywhere she goes. We don't know much else, which is just as it should be in the guerrilla art world.
BANKSY
The most famous guerrilla artist of them all (if he can be famous when no one really knows who he is or what he looks like, despite tabloid newspaper attempts to unmask him), Banksy is either the anti-capitalist artistic conscience of the streets or the sell-out who panders to the establishment he once provoked. He is now revered enough that city councils keep his stencils on public buildings, and in 2007, a single work sold for £288,000, around 20 times the estimate of Bonham's. Banksy produced spoof £10 notes from the 'Banksy of England', defaced Paris Hilton CDs, and painted the Queen as a chimpanzee during her Golden Jubilee. In August 2005, he painted nine images on the concrete wall dividing Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, including a girl floating over the wall holding balloons.
POSTER BOY
Poster Boy has been slinking around New York's subways for the past year taking a razor to advertising posters. The results are simple, satirical and brilliant. He slashes a poster of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, making a ghoulish Frankenstein of two of the most beautiful faces on screen, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. He turns an Indiana Jones poster into a comment on colonialism.
Sometimes – he has to work quickly before the police catch him – he does very little at all, as in the poster of blockbuster Iron Man, which he meddled with to create new words: Iran > Nam. He has been called the "Matisse of subway-ad mash-ups" and has said he has no intention of taking his work into galleries. The real deal.
KEITH HARING
The original street artist, it was Haring's chalk drawings on the subway walls of New York that first got him noticed.
In New York, he found the art community at its most experimental outside the gallery, in the city's streets and clubs.
His outline figures did not have faces and yet expressed a range of powerful emotions. Taking a stand against capitalism and attitudes to HIV, he hung out with Jean-Michel Basquiat, who in the late Seventies began spray painting his iconic SAMO graffiti around the city, a pithy satirical series that foreshadowed the tone of much guerrilla art.
JAMES MATTHEWS
A former soldier, Matthews was taking part in a May Day anti-capitalism protest outside the Houses of Parliament in 2000 when he wrote his name in the annals of guerrilla art. He used a sod of turf to make a statue of Winston Churchill look like a punk with a Mohican haircut, and used red paint to make it look as if blood was coming out of Churchill's mouth. The image flashed around the world. The former Royal Marine, who served in Bosnia and Croatia, was later sentenced to 30 days' imprisonment and ordered to pay £250 to the Royal Parks Agency.
He told the court: "I thought that on a day when people all over the world were gathering to express their human rights and the right to freedom of speech, I would express a challenge to an icon of the British establishment."
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