Why Marcus Rashford's mural gives us hope
Street art is religious as well as political, write George Pitcher. And it reminds us of who we are
It’s touching in the digital age how the old-style wall-painting by a street artist can occupy the mainstream of public discourse. In 2012, for the aspiring Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn it was a grotesquely anti-semitic mural in east London by the US-based Mear One.
Today, it’s a mural by French-born graffiti artist Akse of Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United and England striker who missed a penalty in the Euro 2020 final against Italy.
What both these public murals shows is not only that there’s nothing more potent politically in the public square than a work of art – just recall those murals in Derry’s Bogside during the Northern Ireland conflicts – but that it’s racial slurs that really kick off the rage in street art.
In the first instance, the East End mural played a significant role in finishing Corbyn’s political ambitions. He was said to have “endorsed” and “supported” a mural that depicted hideous anti-semitic tropes. A moment’s google search shows that he did nothing of the sort – he made a point about free speech (incidentally quite the darling subject of the anti-woke right wing these days) without, idiotically, having looked at the mural.
Shameful desecration
In Rashford’s case, his entirely beautiful mural was vandalised with racist graffiti after his shot hit the post in the Euro final’s critical penalty shoot-out. This shameful desecration was joyfully redeemed by garlands of support and love to hide the hate until the painting could be restored.
Public art – and its vandalism – can be political or tribal or about territorial turf wars. Catholic streets on Bogside would be marked by wall portraits of republican heroes. Anti-semitic wall art has a dark history beyond political toxicity. A footballer is defined as to where he’s “from” by responses to his portrait on a wall, situated ironically enough in Withington, which is exactly where he’s from.
Street art such as this stakes a claim. It’s about ownership of place and people. It states that this person and personality is ours, our champion, our hero, our leader. Or it makes the opposite claim: These people are our enemy, the alien others who must be driven from this place.
The graffiti that is daubed on such art invariably aims to counter one of these claims with the other. Rashford is our son, says the Withington mural. No he isn’t, scrawls the racist. We re-affirm love’s triumph, respond those who eclipse that hatred. A version of this drama was played out when the statue of the slaver Edward Colston was torn down and thrown in the dock in Bristol last year.
These are unquestionably political as well as artistic acts. Racism, or the claim of it, is always political because it seeks to place the interests of one population over another. To dismiss it as cultural is to accommodate it within human nature and that way lies the madness of fascism.
But racism, in its creation of and response to street art and graffiti, is also religious, in that it defines who we are. It stakes a claim for what we worship and what we condemn. It summarises our moral values and points to the source of them.
And much of that will be rooted in the territorial too. Religious faith, at its worst when it’s politically manipulated, will make claims of territorial exclusion. So the land of Israel promised to the descendants of Moses and those he led from Egyptian captivity becomes somewhere from which Palestinians must be driven – and ultimately blinds Corbyn to the horror of racism in a piece of street art.
The Islamic doctrine of jihad – its historical struggle for conversion to the faith – was necessarily territorial in the first and early-second millennia of the common era during its first caliphate. And Christianity’s bloody history of anti-semitism and imperial colonialism used its tenets of religious faith to conquer empire.
Deeply manipulated
All three Abramic faiths have been deeply manipulated and corrupted in the process. In doing so, they misrepresent not only their creators but their current adherents. Jews have no more responsibility for the domestic and foreign policy of Israel than I have for that of Uzbekistan. Islam’s jihadist campaign is not a Koranic call to arms.
And Jesus Christ’s commission to us to make disciples of all nations was firmly set in an example of loving neighbours as ourselves – the despised Samaritans, Syro-Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans of his time.
These are the authentic threads that the world’s major religions run through history. Corruptions of them are deeply distressing and depressing. But from time to time a glint of their original purpose is discernible.
That’s almost invariably in statements of solidarity not division, of hope over fear and love in place of hatred. We see it in the service of the alien-other rather than their exclusion. We see it when footballers take the knee. And we see it when poisonous spite daubed on a mural is smothered with hearts and Post-it notes.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest