“They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted, and persecuted.
They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved the rats are the ultimate role model.”
—Banksy Amongst Banksy’s familiar menagerie of animal avatars, no other creature reflects the furtive, underground activities of the street artist more than the much-maligned rat. Fundamentally urban, rats, like graffiti artists, move through the city largely unseen, attracting derision and penalty from a society that looks at them with a mixture of fear and loathing. Despite being forced underground, as products of these modern, urban societies, the rat also reflects certain unpleasant truths about the endless competition and consumerism that characterises late-stage capitalism, and those that are oppressed and exploited by such systems. Here, the titular rat has gnawed away at the board ground to reveal the shape of a heart, a metaphor perhaps for the love and kindness that we could all find if we looked below the surface, and a reminder that even the most unloved and misunderstood are deserving and capable of affection. Given the long-standing association between the rat and contagion we might even interpret this gesture as a call to arms, to let this more positive, affirming message of love and reconciliation spread through all levels of society. 

Appearing in a range of different guises and often under slogans such as ‘Welcome to Hell’, ‘Tonight the Streets are Ours’, and ‘Get Out While You Can’, Banksy’s rats are messengers from the underworld, carrying stark warnings about the injustices and exploitation of modern life, felt especially keenly by those at the margins. In this respect, they also belong to a longer history of social critique, notably evoked by Albert Camus as carriers of a deeper, moral malaise in La Peste and as a vehicle for exploring humanity’s capacity for brutality in H.P. Lovecraft. For psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, they presented a compelling model for psychodynamic feelings of gnawing guilt and shame provoked by displaced but intrusive taboo thoughts in one of his more famous case studies. In all cases, it is the rat’s uncomfortable proximity to us that makes them such powerful carriers of our repressed fears and desires. 

 

Tellingly, in the context of street art, the rat has also been a prominent motif for French graffiti artist and ‘Father of stencil art’ Blek le Rat since the very outset of his career in 1981. Credited as the first artist to develop stencil graffiti away from basic lettering to incorporate more complex imagery, it was the rat - ‘the only free animal in the city’ - that the artist first took to the streets of Paris.ⁱ For both Banksy and Blek le Rat the rodent personifies the covert operations of the street artist, working under cover of darkness and under constant threat from authorities who deem them to be a public menace, associations compounded by the appealing wordplay existing between ‘art’ and ‘rat’. The rat, like the street artist can expose uncomfortable truths about the world we live in and the systems that structure it, and yet Banksy’s stencilled rats also represent a playful and mischievous aspect of the artist’s guerilla activities, appearing frequently in dialogue with existing street furniture and signage, even making a chaotic and light-hearted appearance in the artist’s own home during the throes of the various pandemic lockdowns.

 

Collector’s Digest 

 

• Amongst the earliest and most prolific characters in Banksy’s repertoire of stencilled animals, the rat sits in a playfully allegorical relationship with the anti-authoritarian street artist. 
• Although a familiar figure from Banksy’s Street projects, the rat is more rarely seen in the artist’s canvas or board-based works. Only two other examples of this Rat and Heart motif have appeared at auction. 

 

  

ⁱ Blek le Rat, quoted in Matt Randal, ‘Blek le Rat – Pioneer of Street Art’, Widewalls, 5 October, 2014, online.