Banksy goes underground with virus art
BANKSY has sprayed the inside of a London Underground train carriage with messages about the spread of coronavirus.
The Bristol-based street artist uploaded a 59-second video captioned “If you don’t mask – you don’t get” to his Instagram and YouTube pages yesterday afternoon.
It begins with a laptop playing PA Video footage showing the London Underground being deep cleaned in May.
Banksy, wearing a white boiler suit, mask, goggles, blue gloves and an orange hi-viz jacket with the message “stay safe” printed on it, is then seen posing as a Transport for London worker.
He makes his way to a Circle Line train, carrying a yellow pump action spray bottle and stencils in cardboard on board.
As an announcement states that “the next station is Baker Street”, the artist sprays blue droplets from the face of one of his famous rats, which has been stencilled on the carriage.
Banksy indicates for another masked passenger to move back, before stencilling a rat using a blue face mask as a parachute.
Another rat has a blue mask over its face, while one holds a bottle of hand sanitiser.
The video finishes with a message sprayed on the wall of a Tube station reading: “I get lockdown” with the doors of the Tube carriage closing to reveal the message “But I get up again”.
Chumbawamba’s song Tubthumping – also known as I Get Knocked Down – plays as the doors touch together.
There are two rats, one on each of the carriage’s doors, looking at each other.
middle-class pretension and expectation. It was the dawning of tourism.
The second blue plaque will commemorate the visit of Dwight D Eisenhower to Weston Woods water tower. It will be unveiled on Thursday, August 20 at 2pm.
Eisenhower is the only American president to have set foot in Westonsuper-Mare. As Supreme Allied Commander Europe, he arrived in the town towards the close of the Second World War and stayed one night in 1944, en-route to the D-Day landings.
The town was filled with American servicemen. Officers were billeted in hotels while other ranks slept under canvas in Ellenborough Park.
Far from throwing around his status, ‘Ike’ opted to sleep in a caravan parked near the water tower in Weston Woods, in the midst of military vehicles huddled under tree cover and along the Toll Road.
Following the war, Eisenhower became Nato’s first Supreme Commander and then President of the United States from 1953 until 1961.
A gentle stroll through Weston Woods to where an American president once slept under the stars will help shine a light on this fleeting moment of world history.
A spokesman for Weston Town Council said: “Both of these plaques allow for social distancing as one is in a park with plenty of green space around and the other has the same benefits in Weston woods. An audio tour of the town’s blue plaques is now on our website written and narrated by councillor and local historian John Crockford-Hawley.
“The idea is that as you arrive at a plaque you can use your phone to access the page on our website – https://wsm-tc.gov.uk/our-services/ blue-plaques/ – and play the film that gives you the history of the plaque. This is the first stage of what we hope will become a digital walking audio guided map app.”