Dissidence in the city as an ideological position: semiotic analysis of Banksy

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of dissident art in public spaces, which denounces the hegemonic ideology and is countercultural. Understanding by ideology, the forms that sustain the production system, and that, at present, is the capitalist system. We also understand by “dissident” the forms of thought and participation, in this case artistic plastic or visual arts interventions, which, being countercultural, are left without space through the legitimized mechanisms of exhibition in the city, but which, nevertheless, as a resistance strategy, they find their place in the city within the framework of illegality. A semiotic analysis of the urban artwork of the British artist Banksy is made, trying to read in some of his works, his dissident proposal, as well as the background of the forms of intervention of public and private space, which occur without agreement or consent informed between the artist of the works (an anonymous individual, who uses a pseudonym, with which he signs the work) and the owners or managers of the buildings; and how this intervention strategy is part of that dissident resistance proposal. This analysis allows us to understand how public space becomes the support for the work of some individual artists, who find immense potential in the use of the city to communicate their politically countercultural ideas or ideological positions. Thus, the phenomenon of "artistic vandalization" of public space is analyzed as a "positioning" to shape an art of social denunciation.