Overview

 

In Banksy’s Love is in the Air, a masked man, dressed as a militant, prepares to throw a bouquet of flowers with mercurial vigour. As he aims towards a direction unknown — located outside of the viewer’s field of vision — it becomes apparent that the man himself is the object of an imminent attack, the tip of his bouquet being prey to a large orange target. Typical of Banksy’s socially charged imagery, Love is in the Air demonstrates the artist’s sustained interest in the absurdity of war, as well as the arbitrariness that can derive from unequal power dynamics. Indeed, while the spraypainted protagonist is armed with blooming plants and nothing else, the forces surrounding him seem to operate from heavier weaponry, placing him in a position of immediate danger. Existing as part of a larger body of work commonly referred to as Love is in the Air or Flower Thrower or LIITA, the present work was executed in 2003, shortly after Banksy had produced the image’s first iteration as a large format stencilled graffiti in Jerusalem, which itself closely followed the erection of the West Bank Wall. Today, Love is in the Air is recognised as one of Banksy’s most iconic and most sought-after artworks, existing not only in the realm of fine arts but also as the graphically powerful subject of numerous commodified goods, including posters, phone covers, t-shirts and other types of merchandise all over the world.

 

Love is in the Air

 

Reminiscent of late-1960s images of students protesting the Vietnam War, Love is in the Air shows the figure of a young man leaning back with an arm stretched outwards, as if winding up to throw something aggressively. Yet, instead of being seized in an act of violence that one would assume involves a bomb or a grenade, Banksy’s subject carries a symbol for peace and beauty — a bouquet of flowers. Extracted from a presumably chaotic and violent context and standing alone, poetically resilient in a sea of nothingness, the man is disconcertingly removed from the situation of unrest that his movements and attire suggest. With its riotous imagery, Love is in the Air is namely redolent of Andy Warhol’s Riots series, similarly focusing on the timelapse of violence — the pause and silence that separates a violent act from its fatal consequence. Equally, the picture’s pardoxical sense of quietude evokes Cady Noland’s striking sculptural manifestations of punctured silhouettes, which, despite indicating inherent violence, exude the similar sentiment of a deadly occurrence’s eerie aftermath. Her human silhouettes, often hoisting to the viewer’s size, suggest both the life and death of their bodies, just as Love is in the Air’s character is at once alive and inevitably obsolete, powerless against the force of the central orange target.