Church, Empire & Divine Violence to Ungodly Systems

'Distressing': Reverend reveals what

evangelicals say privately about Trump

Reverend Rob Schenck, a former evangelical activist, discusses

President Trump's photo-op after police forcibly moved protesters

and what evangelicals are now saying about Trump.

​Donald Trump’s Photo-Op and

the Essence of Christianity

by Hunter Bragg

​The problem with Trump’s publicity stunt is not that

it is unfaithful to the essence of Christianity; it’s that

it too perfectly encapsulates that essence.

While Donald Trump’s photo-op outside of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. on June 1 has been criticized by Christians on the right and on the left for its infidelity to Christianity and its sacred scriptures, the problem with this publicity stunt is not that it is unfaithful to the essence of Christianity; it’s that it too perfectly encapsulates that essence.

Trump’s photo--taken after police forcefully cleared Lafayette Square in front St. John’s of peaceful protestors—was condemned by church leaders across the theological spectrum. The progressive Disciples of Christ minister  Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II wrote in a Washington Post op-ed with the author Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove that what is most outrageous about the image is that “Trump and the religious extremists he appeals to have turned Christian faith against itself.”

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopalian Church, Michael Curry, echoed a similar sentiment in a Tweet, suggesting that the meaning of the Bible is antithetical to Trump’s symbolic use of it: “The bible the President held up and the church that he stood in front of represent the values of love, of justice, of compassion, and of a way to heal our hurts.”

The conservative religious position, at least the position of those not blindly beholden to the president, was likewise concerned with what it deemed an inappropriate use of the biblical text. The Southern Baptist seminary president Al Mohler claims the Bible’s sacred status means that it should remain above political theater. He writes,

“…Christians have to be particularly clear that the Word of God, the Bible is not an instrument of political symbolism. It’s far more than that…And Christians must be concerned when the Bible becomes an issue of political controversy…”

To be clear: I’m a Christian who thinks that the combination of religion and violent force made manifest in the photo is appalling and contradictory to the message inside the book Trump so awkwardly held up. I’m concerned, though, that the immediate denunciations of the image by Christian leaders across the political and theological spectrum are actually harmful to the hopes of many Christians that a more just society will emerge out of the political unrest of the present. By distancing themselves and the faith(s) they represent from Trump’s use of the Bible, Christians fail to account for the ways that Trump’s photo-op is Christianity.

Here’s what I mean: Denunciations of Trump’s Bible photo are premised on the notion that there’s a true essence to Christian faith and to the biblical message. Such claims presuppose that Christianity in its truest form exists independently of its historical and material formations. It’s this idea—that the true Christianity exists outside of its historicity—that gives me pause and that seems so unhelpful in this present moment. To be sure, Barber and Curry would disagree vehemently with Mohler about what the Christian essence is. Yet, whatever the essence they believe to be normative, they all agree that Trump’s stunt doesn’t measure up.

Let me focus on Barber’s and Curry’s statements, since my views are closer to theirs than to Mohler’s. For Barber, Trump’s use of the Bible is squarely opposed to the actual and true meaning of Christian faith and practice. Jesus and the Hebrew prophets before him cast a “moral vision of love, justice, and truth” while Trump uses the book that contains this vision to, well, trump up his base. For Curry, what the Bible “represents” is love, justice, compassion and healing, rather than the hatred, injustice and bodily harm that Trump, in his person and in his administrative policies, embodies. From Curry’s perspective, Trump is militantly misusing a text that really stands for justice and peace.

While I’m sympathetic to these logics, I must ask: is Christianity really anything more than its historical and material realities? Beyond the fact that the Bible is not straightforwardly a peaceful text and that the biblical witness to divine justice seemingly requires the execution of an innocent man by the Roman Empire, we might note that since at least the 4th century CE, Christianity has been bound up with political power.

Eusebius of Caesarea

The 4th century Roman emperor Constantine’s famous (and probably mythical) vision and his subsequent post-conversion military victory under the banner of the Chi-Rho bound Christian faith and military might. His house-theologian Eusebius makes Trump’s resident evangelical theologians look tame, cleanly merging the emperor with Christ such that the rise of Constantine, in all his military power, was the advent of the Kingdom of God (See, Eusebius, “The Oration of Eusebius Pamphili In Praise of the Emperor Constantine”).

References

http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320Hist&Civ/chapters/15CRUSAD.htm

https://cmsmcgregor.weebly.com/the-crusades.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

Medieval Christendom likewise utilized Christian theology to motivate the crusades that unified Christians in their opposition to Muslims. Modernity was no better. Christianity was crucial to the legal formation and subsequent enslavement of the very black life that we now insist, many of us on Christian grounds, matters (see, for instance, Willie James Jennings’s The Christian Imagination). In early 20th century Germany, the Christian doctrine of divine sovereignty played a crucial legitimating role in the rise of Hitler to power in Germany (see Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology). And let us not forget that America, according to some, is a Christian nation. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan thought of itself as a Christian organization.

Amazon Link

Amazon Link

Now, to be sure, Barber explicitly acknowledges the deep complicity of the Christian heritage in the racist and militarized history of Europe and America. However, he and his co-author do so only by maintaining an ideal form of Christianity not equivalent to any of its historical instantiations. They juxtapose, in Frederick Douglass’s words, “The Christianity of [the United States] and the Christianity of Christ” between which is “the widest possible difference.”

I want to suggest to you that Christianity is no more than what it has been historically. Christianity is the Constantinian nexus of faith and power; it is the Crusades; it is settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK and the police force that cleared the way for Trump and his Bible.

I admit that I want quickly to add, “but that’s not all it is…” There’s a sense in which Curry and Barber and Douglass are correct. Indeed, Christianity is a multi-faceted movement that encompasses numerous organizations and individuals with irreconcilable commitments. If slavery is Christian, so too is John Brown. If the KKK is a Christian organization, so too are the innumerable black churches worshipping a black Christ.

But, this mode is precisely the one I’m resisting: of course there are other Christianities, other modes of engaging Christian symbols, of doing Christian practice, and of forming Christian community. However, these alternative formations don’t have any greater claim to being the ‘true’ form of Christianity than do Trump and the Christian right. In fact, given the constant intertwining of Christianity and power throughout Christian history, I’m making a case that, if anything, Trump’s version may be the ‘truer’ one.

This doesn’t mean that this is all Christianity can be. Christian symbols, like all symbols, exceed our ability to grasp and control and so can take on new meanings and give rise to new possibilities for human and nonhuman life. We—we Christians, we American Christians, we white American Christians—need the outcries of Christian leaders like Curry and Barber pointing us to a different, though still not normative, form of Christianity.

The material and discursive witness of minority and oppressed communities, like those informed, for instance, by womanism and black feminism, who have shaped their individual and communal spaces in defiance of the dominant white Christian model, gives hope that Christianity can be something other than what it has been and what it remains to this day (see, for instance, Kelly Brown Douglas’s What’s Faith Got to Do With It?: Black Bodies/Christian Souls or Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle). Likewise, the vibrancy and creativity on display in LGBTQ-affirming churches suggest to us that Christianity’s resources for forming lively Christian community are not exhausted.

Even still, these possibilities won’t come to prominence apart from the death of Christianity as it is. This would entail Christianity’s rejection of its alliances with political power, with military might, and with extractive empire. As we’re seeing in the weeks following George Floyd’s murder, this rejection, this death, will not be a peaceful one. Like it’s life, Christianity’s death will be violent.

The Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his famous “Critique of Violence,” envisions a divine violence that negates and destroys all law-making and law-preserving violence, including and especially that of the police. Unlike Trump’s police, divine violence strikes at systems, not at individuals, for its violence is “for the sake of the living” (297). It destroys these systems, but it doesn’t create the inevitably violent foundations for another system that would take its place.

Might it be that Christianity itself—in its historical formations and material concretions—is precisely that system that needs to be exposed to divine violence? And indeed, if Christianity is the interlocking systems of injustice that are on display in June 2020, then are not the protestors whom the police removed from Lafayette Square, not to mention the scores across the country confronting police violence, participating in a divine violence of this sort? Benjamin, if he were here, would not tell us for sure, for he warns that divine violence is never clearly identifiable as such. I’ll take his advice and refrain from drawing the connection between divine violence and the protests too strongly, but not without noting the possibility.

In any case, a negation of Christianity in the name of Christianity. Perhaps surprisingly, this would not be new. Negative theology—the practice of unsaying and unlearning what one says and knows about God—has a long history dating back to interpretations of the cloud that descended upon Moses on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20). The 13th century mystic theologian Meister Eckhart enjoins his listeners to “pray to God that we may be free of ‘God’” (200). Getting free of “God”—God, as we have conceived and named ‘him,’ God, as we have used ‘him’ to legitimize all sorts of ungodly powers—is perhaps the work of the present, of this present.

Like Benjamin’s divine violence, the negation of Christianity and its God offers no concrete system, no positive conception of God to take God’s place. However, the process theologian Catherine Keller reminds us that a de(con)struction of the kind I’m envisioning does not limit the possibilities for who or what God might be; it infinitely expands them. Indeed, negative theology [sic, post-structural theology - res] destroys what we think we know to be ‘true’ and ‘essential’ only to open the way for other, ever mysterious, life-giving possibilities. For Keller, this entails the awakening of what she calls, drawing from William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe, an “amorous agonism” that ties us all—human and nonhuman—together in relations of cooperativity and solidarity (155).

Let me affirm Keller’s negation. And let me add that in this this particular moment, “keep[ing] faith” with Christianity’s failures, as Keller puts it, requires those of us who come from majority white Christian traditions to keep a literal silence as well. This silence is not an apathetic disconnection, but a pathos-filled connection both to the pathetic failure of Christianity and to the immensely creative black and indigenous formations of theology and politics that have arisen from its margins. It’s a silence that allows the voices most necessary for the present to come in loud and clear.

The divine violence is one in which Christian claims (even, I admit, my own) about what Christianity is are negated—destroyed. Such a negation opens us to listen to others for guidance on a new possibility of life and politics. But first, Christians must own up to the reality of what Christianity has been. Trump’s photo-op lays this bare for us. So, before we Christians distance ourselves from Trump’s photo, perhaps we ought to recognize that it’s a photo of ourselves. 

*  Hunter Bragg is a Ph.D. student at Drew University in Madison, NJ. He works in the discourse of political theology and explores its intersection with American criminal justice. He currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

** res - Addition by R.E. Slater

 

Banksy - Tearing Down Walls of Oppression, Part 1/2

Across America's political landscape, and throughout the GOP/Republican Party's 2015 campaigning season, we are hearing messages of "Building Walls of Separation and Discrimination." Messages of societal molding and conformity to a public rhetorical platform that is being hotly debated from the diatribes of the infamous Donald Trump stigmatas to an entire stage of right-wing conservative candidates looking to lead America to its "glory lands of peace and lauder" through building better walls, greater military budgets, and an expanded prison system already too full.

Might we suggest to these candidates - as well as to any of the American public gullible enough to actually believe that walls do actually bring unity and security that this is but a fictional dream - or nightmare - of your own incredulous making. No wall, budget, or system, anywhere, will bring to a people or a country the security it longs for. Or, the peace-and-unity it seeks, simply by banishing its enemies to the outside of its own severe political and religious boundaries. It has been done - and failed - too many times down through the history of the world to believe that it can be incorporated successfully as a final strategy.

And since this is a Christian website let us also observe that we see this same kind of energy being expressed time-and-again within conservative Christian theologies as well. Theologies that would raise dogmatic walls ever higher against the torrents of progressive rhetoric blowing against it as if "the higher the wall the more secure and at-peace its people will be within." People desiring to be protected against an outside world full of evil, forment, and unrest. Certainly this is a desirable goal but a goal without sufficient means of attainment when driven by isolating its own people from harm while excluding others longing from the very same needs of peace, rest, and harmony being sought.

Hence, the artist Banksy points out this sublime fact time-and-again that "walls do nothing if but divide people from one another." That they provide a false security, an enforced segregation to injustice, and do nothing to resolving the differences between the "haves" and the "have nots." In the long view of things, the only healing which may occur within a walled society is the fantasyland of belief that one is safe and secure from "those meanies and hate-mongers" on the outside of our concrete or theological boxes.

So excuse us once again if we plead for some semblance of sanity amongst the conservative circles of the Christian faith to remind each other that strong doctrines, strong positions, and strong belief systems do nothing but weaken that very thing you wish to protect. Weaken it by isolation and exclusion rather than strengthening it by allowing its faith assemblies to be intimately involved with a hard-bit world of turmoil and oppression. To be involved through the hard work of activism, advocacy, and petition. One cannot expect walls to inform a people held by fear within. Nor do walls encourage involvement. They are separators that create calloused societies focused on themselves and their own needs while using others to support those needs and wants. Walled societies are places of injustice, inhumanity, and oppression. Walled societies cannot be supported. They are built upon their own unworthy foundations of sand while giving the deceptive impression of solidarity, control, and imperviousness to all onslaughts against it.

More the rather, to strengthen what you wish to protect is to expose that society's foundations and structures to the very criticisms being levelled at it. That in the strangest of paradoxes the things we wish to protect must become exposed and weakened in order to show the strength within that very thing you seek to cling to in the desperate hours of darkness.

What this means is that God and His Holy Word, the Bible, will never crumble to the fears of His people attempting to "honor" Him by "prophesying in His Name" of His salvation to mankind by excluding those outside the faith from the faith within. But must dutifully crumble to those same fears which would "wall out God's people" from those same dark forces that must be exposed, contended with, and vigorously protested against.

If anything, the Christian faith, if it is true, must become an "unstructured wall exposed" if it is to confront the ungodly on both sides of the religious wall of faith. Both the ins and the outs. The haves and the have nots. For the Holy God of the Bible is not a Redeemer who is in the business of building walls but of tearing walls down so that both the world of faith and the world of unfaith may collide and learn from one another. Teach one another. Learn to listen to one another.

America cannot be a nation on a hill whose light shines brightly if it hides the light of its liberty from the very ones desiring this thing both in their hearts and in their societies. There can be no one economic system. No one political system. But from across the spectrum of capitalism to communism, from a society built upon republican virtues to socialistic virtures, God reaches out to one-and-all irrespective of our belief systems, our cultures, our economies.

If anything, the need for walls should tell us that we must go to the ones shouting the loudest to listen so that we might humble ourselves, repent, and repair the damages caused by our vigor and protest. Areas like Ferguson, MO, cry out for the servants of the Lord to restore civility to the crimes committed for too many years and too many decades of exclusionism. Crimes of negligence. Crimes of over-zealous protection. Crimes of unjust civic law creating discrimination, racism, fear, and pride. Not simply there but everywhere we look in our cities of industry, progress, and means.

Walls do nothing if but illuminate ourselves to the world. They do not bring justice but injustice to those walled out. And to the political and religious demagogues and their foolish public who think otherwise remember God's very own Holy Personage as example who did not wall out a sinful humanity but suffered Himself to come into its manic folds:

Who did not think it "unpolitic" to humble Himself and come into a creation full of sin and

ruin. But made of Himself a part of this holy creation that He might take the form of a

servant and serve. Even to the point of dying to that very thing He created and loved."

Walls destroy. Walls bring death. Let us learn to live without walls in our lives. Let us seek to be "agents of demolition" to all that would wall ourselves out from one another. To seek peace and unity without the necessity of building higher, greater, deeper, walls. Whether in our political beliefs. In our theological beliefs. In our personal lives. Let us learn to live as exposed people. As weak servants of the living God. As people whose faith is real enough to allow it to examine ourselves first even as it will our "enemies in the lands of the living" whom we hate and fear.

And finally, should this be a plea for pacifism or for some kind of militant pacifism (an oxymoron if ever there was one)? When fighting injustice it must be one that loves our enemies but seeks to fight for those who are oppressed with crimes intolerable. Love is both weak and strong, wise and fearless. Perhaps rather than building walls we learn to re-build relationships with our enemies who are themselves as much in the business of wall making as we are by their own crimes of terror and oppression.

The most recent public example is President Obama's removal of the political walls between America and Cuba; with Iran's nuclear program arsenaled off from the contemporary world; and his visit of peace and respect to the nations of Africa. To hear his message that Muslims everywhere must be valued and not hated. But to also stand against the oppressions of all criminal groups - whether it be ISIS or that of an injust American system disempowering the disenfranchised. To recreate justice for all and not for some. To recreate community relations to every person of race, creed, or color, and not just to those we feel most welcomed within its boundary lands of oppression, hate, and discrimination.

If one is to lead a nation as a GOP candidate than one must be above the protocols and restrictions of one's own ideals if to serve and to bear the wounds of many. Any who would be a candidate for presidential leadership must be a candidate for all people everywhere and not simply to their own party of beliefs and ideologies. This takes a great wisdom of which only some have been successful at throughout the history of the world. But it is a wisdom from above. A wisdom that we pray and seek daily to honor from the God of all love, authority, and forgiveness, who is both our example, our Spirit-power, and our Lord and God who desires mankind to be at peace with itself.

R.E. Slater

August 13, 2015
revised August 24, 2015

Phillippians 2.1-11

Christ's Example of Humility

1 So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, anyparticipation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, 2 complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,[a] 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,[b] being born in the likeness of men.8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

* * * * * * * * * *

Brian Sewell Art Directory

BANKSY

http://www.briansewell.com/artist/b-artist/banksy/banksy-palestinian-tag.html

We couldn't work out if Banksy's taging of the Segregation Wall Palestine was 'Cheap publicity from other peoples misery' or 'Publicity for Palestinian misery'? So here is a review from the Intifada.

Well-known UK graffiti artist Banksy hacks the Wall

Nigel Parry, The Electronic Intifada, 2 September 2005

The Wall around Qalqiliya. A twenty-five foot high concrete cage cuts residents off
from their agricultural land, necessary for their survival, and prevents you from traveling
even 5 minutes out of the City. A single gate, open at the whims of the occupying army,
controls 100,000 residents. | Photo: StopTheWall.org

Whitewashing the Wall

In June 2003, I received an e-mail in EI’s inbox from a Nathan Edelson, who introduced himself as “a design critic whose features on architecture have been published in major U.S. newspapers,” which a Lexis-Nexis newspaper database supported. He was writing a story “about architecture in Israel, with emphasis on the new security ‘fence’ which you rightly call a wall.” His request was for larger images of the Israel’s West Bank barrier for study, and explained that “the premise of my article is that one can argue about the desirability of a wall, and certainly where it runs, but if it is going to be built it should not be an aesthetic monstrosity.”

As you can imagine, we get a lot of crazy mail at EI, ranging from the fundamentalist who has for years been weekly mailing Zen-like one-liners such as “Biblical Christianity will one day return to the Holy Land,” to the ex-Israeli soldier who sent photos of him in service across the occupied territories with accompanying narratives of how much he enjoyed mistreating the Palestinians he came across. But somehow, this e-mail from internationally-respected design critic Nathan Edelson won my vote for the most clueless communication that info@electronicIntifada.net has ever received.

Usually, all correspondents to EI receive a polite response with links to more information. But when a clearly educated person tries to get you to swallow soup with a turd in it, there’s got to be a cut-off point for pleasantries.

“That's a little,” I replied, “like arguing for nice faux painting on gas chamber walls or calling for Martha Stewart torture chamber bed sets. Clearly ethics play no part in your school of design criticism.”

Edelson’s reply was truly surreal. “I could accuse you of having no ethics because you want the security wall to be as repulsive as possible so it will stir up the maximum possible resentment, which will translate into more violence.”

“I care very much about where the security wall runs,” he continued, “as well as how it looks. My upcoming article will hopefully elicit meaningful conversation between the sides based on a joint desire to make a bad thing better, and this can help create the trust which can change not only the look but the routing of the barrier.”

Of course, the second the beautification of the barrier is complete, the Israelis, who bulldozed and confiscated countless acres of Palestinian land to build the wall, cut off thousands of farmers from their sole livelihood and, in one example, surrounded a single Palestinian family home in a mini-wall, will sit down for a meaningful conversation with their new Palestinian friends about the route of the finished barrier! I was also chastised by Edelson for being less than “civil” in my response to him.

“There is nothing you can do aesthetically,” I wrote in my reply to Edelson, “which will make this wall benign. There is no making it ‘better’. Want a big picture of the wall? Here's one attached. Do you think a nice mottled green would help it blend in to the indigenous landscape nicely? Or perhaps some arches and battlements for a more traditional medieval flavor?”

This satellite image of Qalqilya and Israel's West Bank Barrier surrounding the city
was taken on 7 June 2003. The progress of construction of the barrier can clearly be
seen, ultimately cutting off residents from their surrounding agricultural land. See
here for before & after images. (Photo: Space Imaging/NTA Space Turk)

“If you actually intend to actually write an article arguing for this monstrous whitewashing of a visible human rights violation -- and it says so much about the state of ignorance in America that you are even thinking of it or if indeed there is any likelihood any serious newspaper would print it -- I would suggest you first get on a plane and go visit Qalqiliya and Rafah and see the reality for yourself. Speak to the people who live there. See how the thing plays out on the ground.”

“What you propose -- using art to serve the interests of what is a dictatorship for the 3.2 million Palestinians who didn't vote for the system that rules over them -- follows in the footsteps of Leni Riefenstahl and Richard Wagner. While I totally concur with your point about the need for civil responses to civil questions, there was nothing "civil" about your enquiry. It was a perfect example of 21st century barbarism.”

“Hats off to Nathan Edelson, the man who came up with the wonderful solution to a century of conflict: simply paint the cage a new color and watch the prisoners dance.”

Hitler with Leni Riefenstahl (R), an otherwise brilliant 

film maker who made propaganda films for the Nazis.

Edelson didn’t give up, and responded one last time, expressing hope for a resolution to the conflict, making a final statement about the aesthetics of the barrier. “I also believe, however, that given any particular routing decision, it is immoral to create any more ugliness than is absolutely necessary.”

Enter Banksy

When I first encountered some of the graffiti art and sculpture of “Banksy” in London several years ago, I was struck by the importance of where his pieces were located. In Banksy’s work, location itself is a large part of the message, a key component of the resulting metaphor. Whether he’s hanging a fake rock pictogram of early man pushing a shopping cart in the British Museum, or installing an amalgam of the Statue of Liberty and Statue of Justice clad as a prostitute at the site of his last arrest, the environment is usually part of the message.

The “Manifesto” on Banksy’s website contains only a diary extract from Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945:

“It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”

 

The Holocaust Lipstick motif in Banksy's art (see above right), which accompanies the text on his website, has also appeared on the streets of the UK and aptly captures the deliberate incongruity of his large body of public work, which highlights and satirizes the dehumanizing impact of modern society and government by disturbing our sense of place and appropriateness.

Familiar images -- the Queen, smiling children, policemen -- are given a dark twist designed to wake observers up from the 9 to 5 rat race -- also a common Banksy theme, typically delivered in person by talking rats -- a rat race that literally itself streams through Banksy’s borderless gallery of streets to make you reassess the structures and symbols that form the backdrops to our lives.

Banksy hacks the Wall

Whereas Nathan Edelson wants to create no “more ugliness than is absolutely necessary”, Banksy’s the kind of guy who prefers to draw a 20 foot high arrow pointing at the ugliness to encourage us to ask why the hell it’s there in the first place.

When I first learned of Banksy's summer trip to the route of Israel’s West Bank barrier, which the artist describes on his website as “the ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti writers” -- I knew even before I saw the first image that this was going to be interesting.

“How illegal is it to vandalize a wall,” asks Banksy in his website introduction to his Wall project, “if the wall itself has been deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice? The Israeli government is building a wall surrounding the occupied Palestinian territories. It stands three times the height of the Berlin wall and will eventually run for over 700km - the distance from London to Zurich. The International Court of Justice last year ruled the wall and its associated regime is illegal. It essentially turns Palestine into the world’s largest open-air prison.”

Much of the art he produced on the Wall visually subverts and draws attention to its nature as a barrier by incorporating images of escape -- a girl being carried away by a bunch of balloons, a little boy painting a rope ladder.

Other pieces invoke a virtual reality that underlines the negation of humanity that the barrier represents -- children in areas cut off from any access to the sea playing with sand buckets and spades on piles of rubble that look like sand, and corners of the wall peeled back to reveal imagined lush landscapes behind.

Banksy's site offers two snippets of conversations with an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian who happened upon him while he was in the process of creating the series of nine pieces on the Wall, in Bethlehem, Abu Dis, and Ramallah.

Soldier: What the fuck are you doing?

Me: You'll have to wait til it's finished

Soldier (to colleagues): Safety's off

Banksy is the anti-Leni Riefenstahl and anti-Richard Wagner, reclaiming public spaces as a space for public imagination and enlightenment where they have become propagandistic barriers to thought and awareness, as is the very terminology for Israel's West Bank barrier itself. Banksy's summer project on Israel's Wall stands out as one of the most pertinent artistic and political commentaries in recent memory.

Perhaps the last word, perhaps the clearest answer to the Nathan Edelsons of this world who wish to whitewash all that is ugly rather than change its basic nature, should come from another conversation Banksy reports having with an old Palestinian man:

Old man: You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful.

Me: Thanks

Old man: We don't want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall, go home.

* * * * * * * * * *