Qinrou (Tracy) Zeng
Introduction
Image settings
What is Kissing Coppers?
Kissing Coppers is one of the most famous street artworks in the UK. It was created by Banksy, an essential figure in the field of contemporary art, whose graffiti usually uses the stencil technique and is praised for having an ‘extraordinarily powerful message’ (Wicaksono, 2020, p. 10). This characteristic is intimately connected with political satire and human rights, as shown in Kissing Coppers. More specifically, the life-sized black-and-white graffiti work features two British policemen kissing passionately, accompanied by some distinctive status symbols (e.g., police caps, uniforms, and truncheons), from which whether observers or just passers-by can be effectively drawn and get a strong homosexual and political shock. Of course, the shock here is not pejorative, but the most striking feature and expressive power of Kissing Coppers have made it so well received. For instance, it was selected as the most iconic British work of art at The Other Art Fair in 2012 (Emin, 2012).
Kissing Coppers and Creative Urbanism
It is also worth noticing that Kissing Coppers’ charm and its urban positioning complement each other. According to a news report, it was ‘spray-painted on the side of the Prince Albert pub on Trafalgar Street in Brighton in 2004 (BBC News, 2014). With a unique radical politics identity, Brighton has a massive gay population, long LGBTQ+ history and relevant commercial service; it is also proud of its special status of homosexual affirmative action (Browne & Bakshi, 2013). Thus, this graffiti work not only creates an intimate scene in keeping with the socio-cultural dynamics of the city, but also establishes a flowing space where urban marginalized groups can gather and talk about the work's contents. It, therefore, provides us with an opportunity to utilize the theory of ‘the right to the city’ to explore its deeper connotations and social value.
Image settings
Theory
The notion of the right to the city gained popularity for a special period background of urbanization, gentrification, and the threat from commercial capital.
Lefebvre, 1996
The right to the city is 'an integrated theory of the city and urban society'. Using science and art as a renewal strategy, social groups especially working class can fight against dominant order and further make the oeuvre (i.e., creative activities not only of 'products and consumable material goods', but also of 'the need for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play').
Harvey, 2008
In the era with the harmful effects of consumerism and capitalism in urbanization, a global struggle under the guidance of citizens’ rights is necessary.
Zielenic, 2018
Lefebvre's 'production of the space' is the inclusion and empowerment of the meanings, values, hopes and imaginations of urban citizens for whom the city is lived within and through more than merely the designed intentions of planned space.
What does Banksy mean to us? - Triple attributes
Firstly, kissing coppers acts as an ‘alternative aesthetic adornment’ (Zieleniec, 2016, p. 13) to elegantly fight against dominant hegemony in urbanization – commercialization and apparatus of the state. As Zieleniec argues, graffiti ‘confronts and resists the restrictive political regulation and imposition of the spatial order of commerce and (local) state authority’ (2016, p. 13). Banksy’s work was quickly painted opposite a pub – a commercial operating location. In a capitalized urban setting, profitable spaces are always tightly regulated; consumers can pay for service but are not usually able to act freely in them. Thus, Banksy, through an unauthorized graffiti work, easily changed the space, and broke the rules set by capitalists, ultimately, created a decoration originating from inhabitants’ culture. Without confronting the commercial order, it effectively satirizes political privilege. In contemporary society, being a policeman is an official career which always represents the execution of state/government authority. However, Banksy cleverly uses this icon in kissing coppers, where ‘cops’ no longer stand for the restriction of citizens; on the contrary, they embody eroticism and homosexuality – an ordinary sentiment. Therefore, it reveals ordinary people’s right to the city, as an alternative toward a ‘mean and selfish’ order – ‘advertising agencies and town planners’ (Banksy, in Zieleniec 2016, p.12).
Secondly, Kissing Coppers is also an appropriation of flowing space that creates communications and conveys an equal and positive social outlook from sexual minorities (the figures on the wall) to majorities, thus proclaiming LGBTQ+’s right to the city. Lefebvre claims art brings pleasure and dramatic significance to the oeuvre (Lefebvre, 1996). Although a single graffiti work, Kissing Coppers stimulate happening conversations. After it became the pub’s icon, visitors were willing to gather around and enjoy it together, while the changing identities of consumers give the space a fluid property. They become part of the artwork and the artwork becomes part of live urban life, a claiming of the right to the city in Harvey’s collective sense.
It even reduces confrontation and brings about social consensus. Banksy reconciles the manager with the governed, achieving social recognition and pursuing beauty. In addition, it combines urban culture with work. The equality of LGBTQ+ has been an essential mass movement in Britain in recent decades. In 2004, the Civil Partnership and Gender Recognition Act legitimized sexual minorities’ rights of marriage and appropriate gender (Stonewall, 2016). It the same year, Banksy chose Brighton, a most representative gay city (Browne & Bakshi, 2013), to express his imagination. This move supports the continued growth of the LGBTQ+ movement, making diversity visible and beautiful as well as ordinary.
Image settings
Image settings
Lastly, Kissing Coppers is a far-reaching urban strategy because of its potential social impact. In the beginning, it was more like a personal movement, and after being sold by the barman at US auction at a high price ($575,000), it lost the attribute as an embellishment of the city. However, luckily, Kissing Coppers’ social influence is greater than the value of the work itself. Until now, people remember and recreate this spiritual picture of modern art. Manchester’s Finest tweeted a video on 13 October 2022 that they found Banksy’s most iconic artworks’ re-enactment by spotting Girl with Balloon [another famous Banksy graffiti] and Kissing Coppers at Piccadilly Gardens.
Banksy’s fandom and other artists continue his spirit of attempting to reconstruct social space with creatively reproducing those artworks up for auction, one of which is Kissing Coppers. Those actions move the original artworks from individual creation to collective one, by re-creating their display spaces in the city and giving them a new social connotation. Therefore, it finally become a long-term urban strategy to unify art, knowledge, and human rights, operated by a larger-scale social force (Lefebvre, 1996).
Image settings
Conclusion
Image settings
To sum up, in an era where neoliberal urbanization and liberal-democratic citizenships are at odds (Purcell, 2002), it is vital for us to value ‘the right to the city’. Kissing Coppers, as an excellent example of shaping inhabitants’ and the city’s oeuvre, has triple creative attributes to construct the right to the city. For the right of the governed, it utilizes graffiti as a contemporary art style to elegantly confront dominant order; for sexual minorities’ right, it acts as an appropriation of space, delivering the right values to diversity and supporting the equality movements claimed by not only LGBTQ+ groups but the inhabitants of Brighton as well; for a more universal right, it has become a social group’s active strategy for urban renewal. However, although it is not a grand narrative of urban reform, Banksy’s work remains effective in proclaiming the power of the common people. While art as an artist's work is certainly niche and noble, this courageous expression of the realities of society is perhaps its actual relevance to the urban age.
Bibliography
1. BBC News. (2014). Banksy’s Kissing Coppers sold at US auction. BBC News, 19 February 2014, Available at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26254509 [Accessed 14 November 2022].
2. Browne, K. and Bakshi, Leela (2013) Ordinary in Brighton? : LGBT, activisms and the city. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
3. Emin, T. (2012). Banksy Tops Poll As Most Iconic British Artist. Artlyst, 7 May 2012, Available at:
https://artlyst.com/news/banksy-tops-poll-as-most-iconic-british-artist/ [Accessed 14 November 2022].
4. Harvey, D. The right to the city (pp. 23-40). In The City Reader. London: Routledge.
5. Lefebvre, H. (1996), The right to the city (pp. 147-159), in Kofman, Eleonore; Lebas, Elizabeth, Writings on cities, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell.
6. Purcell, M. (2002) Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant, GeoJournal, 58(2/3), 99–108.
7. Stonewall. (2016). Key dates for lesbian, gay, bi and trans equality. Stonewall, 26 July 2016, Available at:
Key dates for lesbian, gay, bi and trans equality (stonewall.org.uk) [Accessed 14 November 2022].
8. Topping, A. (2011), Brighton kisses goodbye to Banksy's kissing coppers. The guardian, 21 April 2011, Available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/21/banksy-kissing-copppers-sold-america [Accessed 14 November 2022].
9. Wicaksono, S.P. (2020) VISUAL STRATEGIES OF CONTEMPORARY ART: A Case Study of Banksy’s Artworks, Journal of Urban Society's Arts, 7(1), 9–14.
10. Zieleniec, A. (2016) “The right to write the city: Lefebvre and graffiti”, Environnement Urbain / Urban Environment [Online], Volume 10. Available at:
http://journals.openedition.org/eue/1421 [Accessed 14 November 2022].
11. Zieleniec, A. (2018) ‘Lefebvre’s Politics of Space: Planning the Urban as Oeuvre’, Urban planning, 3(3), 5–15.