Rats in the Bathoom: Banksy

Hakim Bishara  in Hyperallergic reports on international art trickster figure Banksky's latest Instagram piece, a photograph allegedly (one never knows with Bansky) of his/her/their bathroom during shelter in place, festooned with images of rats scurrying about. One rat glimpse in the mirror, is counting off the days like a prisoner scribbling tally marks ("the five bar gate") on a cell wall. Aother rat, standing on the toilet seat seems to be peeing into the bowl. Still another is racing over a precious roll of toilet paper. Banksy;s accompanying texts:"my wife hates it when I work from home."   As of yesterday, something like 2.3 million viewers had "liked" the image, which is I suppose a testament to how so many of us are spending our time these days, perhaps catching up with Banksy's Instagram posts while seated on the toilet.

One never knows if Banksy is ever actually worth writing about, but here goes, briefly: As Bishara notes, Banksy has long used the image of the rat (an anagram for 'art') in his continuing efforts to lampoon, and milk (for every cent it is worth) the art world.  In the current context, rats may allude to the long believed role (now disputed) of these creatures as transmission vectors of the Black Death across the centuries.  There may also be a reference to the uncounted legions of rats that notoriously occupied the sewers of Victorian London, immortalized in Henry Mayhew's masterpiece "London Labor and the London Poor," who terrorized low income 'toshers' (sewer hunters) as they made their dangerous living reclaiming scrap items from flooded sewer tunnels. The rats in Banksy's supposed WC could be read as the return of the repressed, scrambling up out of the metropolitan sewer system during Lockdown, playing havoc in our most private remaining sanctuary, where we can't even, on our modest thrones, "shelter in place" in peace.