Banksy Caged:The London artist’s latest show in NYC

From the outside, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill in the West Village looks like it has always been there, but it hasn’t.  The “shop” is the shell holding the latest work by the British graffiti artist Banksy.

A sandwich board standing on the straw covered sidewalk out front reads, “Open for rare breeds, pet supplies, mechanically retrieved meat.” The last phrase  most accurately describes the main theme of the controversial exhibition inside the pet shop: processed meat pets.

This isn’t the first time Banksy has created a politically charged piece of art, but, the execution of his art, which normally revolves around graffiti – spray paint, stencils and cut outs, is new.  By having an actual show, with a press release, web site, and location, Banksy deviates from his classic presentations. Also, by displaying his art legally, in a building, Banksy has put his creativity in a box, which juxtaposes his exhibit of fake animals in their pens and cages.

Using animatronics, Banksy has created a world of mechanical animals and moving food inside the pet shop.  Placed in a large fishbowl, two giant fish sticks swim around a plastic plant like a pair of goldfish.    Six glass tanks line the wall next to the fishbowl; their inhabitants, consisting of a series of sausages, move as if they are alive.  A mustard adorned hotdog “drinks” from a stainless steel dish in one tank, while below him, a tube of baloney squirms in its plastic casing.   To the left of the baloney, a group of cocktail weenies wiggle on a rock, a container of toothpicks resting near by.

The most striking of the six are the salami, which resemble a snake emerging from its skin in slices, and the tank included a feed dish filled with olives.  While it’s unusual to see processed meat displayed in this way, this is exactly how you would expect to see turtles, fish and lizards for sale in a pet shop.  Though in a pet shop, the lighting wouldn’t have had the fluorescent glow of a grocery store.  Because Banksy showed these pieces this way, he made the impression what if we bought our processed meat the same way we bought a gerbil.

The wall-mounted shelves behind the tanks are  filled  with Swanson’s TV dinners, cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, and other meaty human food, none of which  you would feed a  pet.  In this way, Banksy relates humans to pets, and pets to the animals we unconsciously eat.  The feeling of watching a hot dog come to life was more comical then disgusting, lending humor to the way we view our food.

The most disturbing part of the show is a pen of chicken nugget chicks feeding from a classic McDonald’s style sauce container, while a more naturalistic sculpture of a mama hen dozes in her roost.  Even more unsettling than the nuggets dipping themselves are the series of eggs on the other side of the coop. One of the eggs has “hatched,” an un-battered nugget with its resin afterbirth puddled around the shell.  These images invoke the idea of what if our meat was born the way we eat it.  If an egg looked like a chicken nugget, would we have a different attitude about consuming the chicken?

Banksy also looks at animal exploitation beyond factory farming, which is in stark contrast to his last New York show where some viewers chastised him for animal abuse after he painted and displayed a live elephant.   In this section of the exibit, Banksy focuses on the idea of manipulation of animals for human benefit.

In a pen viewable from inside and outside the shop, a white rabbit sits on her hind legs filing her nails with an emery board, the scritch-scratch of her grooming barely audible, but distracting, above the Johnny Cash and classic country music playing in the shop.  She wears a pearl necklace, blush, and eyeliner, and her automated head tilts seductively.  Her vanity mirror is laden with makeup by Cover Girl, which is made by Proctor & Gamble, a company that commonly uses animal testing for their products.  By displaying the rabbit with animal tested makeup on, Banksy draws the viewer to question if beauty is important enough to destroy another being and what if we tested on humans, would we still wear the eyeliner?

A chimpanzee sits in a cage on the other end of the shop.  He wears large DT770 Pro headphones and watches chimps having sex on the Discovery Channel while breathing heavily and rubbing his crotch.  In his foot he clutches an empty Budweiser can, and on his right, sits a local pizza box scattered with crusts and a pack of Marlboros. On the left side of him rests a National Geographic magazine with the cover article, “Who Killed the Mountain Gorillas?”  But, he remains fixed and glassy eyed as the chimps copulate on the screen.  By this image, Banksy makes a statement about how Americans ignore what’s going on in the animal kingdom by drowning it out with booze, porn and food.

The last in this trio is the leopard.  From the outside, it appears to be a  asleep on the style of branch you would usually see in the zoo.  Its tail swings in rhythm, and you can almost fancy it breathes.  But enter the shop  and  cross to its other side and the leopard turns out to be a coat, positioned to look like a gutted animal with the brass buckle doubling as the wild cat’s balls.  How could anyone want to skin a leopard from the zoo?  It makes wearing fur look truly cruel, without the in-your face tactics of PETA activists who throw paint on rich women in Manhattan.

Banksy’s show poignantly comments on our view of animals as products, without chastising viewers for their  choices.  Rather, he simply illustrates some of the current issues relating to animals.  The show directs the viewer to ask the question, “Hey, did you ever look at it this way?”  And, based on the disgusted and intrigued reactions of the people in the Village Pet Shop, they haven’t, which makes his show a success.

More pictures here.