“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.”
—Banksy
Irreverent, bold and responsive to the ever-evolving socio-political landscape, Untitled (Fuck the Police) exemplifies the clarity and wit of Banksy’s guerilla art approach. With gritted teeth and hands tightly clasping his baton, the police officer scornfully stares beyond the borders of the picture. As if just having arrived at the scene, the perpetrator has evaded capture, leaving the bemused officer comically juxtaposed with the brazen red text: ‘Fuck the Police’.
Satirising familiar elements of popular culture to create novel, subversive imagery, the police force is among the motifs that Banksy has repeatedly returned to and ridiculed. Working under the cover of darkness and adopting an anonymous persona to avoid arrest, by its very nature Banksy’s graffiti has and continues to entangle the artist with law enforcement: a criminality that the street artist responds to with derisive irony. Executed in 2000, the present work represents an early example of Banksy's iconic policemen rendered in the artist’s signature black-and-white stencil technique: an organisation that Banksy has continued to playfully mock since Untitled (Fuck the Police). Usually caught unaware, Banksy’s police are accompanied by poodles rather than guard dogs (Graffiti Area, 2003), mocked by children with paper bags (Police Sniper and Paper Bag Boy, 2007) or most notoriously, depicted in moments of unexpected intimacy (Kissing Coppers, 2004).
Banksy came of age within the political turbulence and strong countercultural impulses of the 1980s in Bristol, a historic port town where graffiti, community activism, rave culture, and American hip-hop’s raw social critique had gained increasing popularity. Simple, direct, and carrying a deeper message about power, police brutality, and the oppressed condition of those living under authoritarian structures, Banksy’s slogan here directly echoes N.W.A’s powerful 1988 track ‘F*k Tha Police’ and its exposure of the injustices faced daily by young Black men in urban communities, and fits within a broader landscape of hip-hop’s outspoken and revolutionary treatment of these themes from artists including Public Enemy and KRS-One. Among a generation that was fundamentally anti-establishment, Banksy witnessed, alongside the Hartcliffe and Poll Tax Riots, draconian police measures like Operation Anderson in Bristol. At the time of the largest anti-graffiti crackdown, on the 20 March 1989, police conducted seventy-two raids on suspected graffiti artists’ homes. It was because of similar encounters with the police that at eighteen Banksy conceived his signature stencil method. In flight from officers, the artist noticed the stencilled plate on the fuel tank beneath the vehicle he was hiding: ‘I realised I had to cut my painting time in half or give it up altogether’.i From the very outset of his career, Banksy’s work was closely entangled with the police, graffiti - a fundamentally illegal act - offering a platform and a means of speaking truth to power and undermining the very structures that seek to maintain order on their terms.
- A cult figure in the contemporary art landscape, Banksy’s repudiation of authority, direct imagery and universal appeal has established him among the forefront of street artists today. Ingrained in the popular consciousness, in 2010, Banksy was named by Time Magazine alongside President Barack Obama and Steve Jobs as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
- Satirical treatments of the police force have been a central motif for the artist since the very outset of his career and make up some of his most iconic images.
- A medium that remains integral to his practice, Banksy’s ability to engage and disrupt through graffiti has been demonstrated most recently through his London Zoo series. Painted over nine consecutive days in August of this year, several animals were defaced or stolen shortly after their conception.
