Notes

No stranger to biting irony, Banksy’s Happy Choppers is another astute image, laden with antiwar sentiment. The artist deconstructs the arrival of menacing stencilled helicopter gunships by merging them with a cheerful comic-strip blue sky with stylised clouds and subverted by festooning the leading craft in a Minnie Mouse-esque pink bow. The image’s tragicomic message of impending destruction tempered with innocence, combined with a multiplicity of cultural and political readings, provides the image with its lasting appeal.

Banksy’s criticism of power structures is reinforced by the fact that this work formed part of ‘Santa’s Ghetto’ an exhibition intended to draw attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2003.

Happy Choppers first appeared in 2002 as a sprayed mural at the Whitecross Street Market in central London.

Exhibited

Pictures on Walls, an abandoned store just off Carnaby Street in London, Santa’s Ghetto, 2 December 2003.