Critters in the West Village

Banksy
The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill
89 7th Avenue between West 4th and Bleecker Street
Open 10am – 12pm daily until October 31st



An unusual pet shop has sprung up amidst the restaurants, sex shops, beautiful brownstones and expensive boutiques that fill the cozy streets of Manhattan’s West Village. The cute puppies and kittens playing together in mounds of soft paper typically found in pet shop windows have been replaced by animatronic incarnations of objects that are the hallmarks of modern consumer culture. Baby chicken nuggets dip themselves in a juicy brown sauce, and in an adjacent window little CCTV camera offspring make excited jerking movements in their nest as they look upwards at their CCTV camera mom. Aaawww.

Upon entering The Village Pet Shop and Charcoal Grill you are greeted by an aged and featherless Tweety Bird and the upbeat sounds of old country music. Hot dogs covered in mustard, some in buns and some not, wriggle around in their cages. “I want to take that adorable little squirming piece of beef home with me,” I declared to the two shopkeepers dressed in brown overalls. Neon-colored fish tank props line the walls of the shop along with sliced meat packaged like pet toys. Upon encountering the leopard, of which I will not say much more about because I do not want to ruin the surprise, I looked down and smiled at my deerskin purse, realizing that I had become part of the installation.

The Village Pet Shop is the work of Banksy, a pseudo-anonymous British multi-media artist famous for his stunning, often political graffiti art, although there is not much here that indicates so; no press release, no gallery name and only a bit of generic graffiti on the walls. "Open for Pet Supplies/Rare Breeds/Mechanically retrieved meat" reads a sign in front of the store. During my visit, when a fellow viewer asked one of the shopkeepers if the piece "is art or a real store," the shopkeeper stared blankly and then said that he did not understand the question.

The impromptu nature of The Village Pet Shop recalls when artists set up makeshift galleries and project spaces in apartments and storefronts in the East Village throughout the 1960s, 1970s early 1980s, before the area became a commercial gallery hotspot and gentrification sank its teeth into the neighborhood. Land was cheap and artists acted accordingly. Claes Oldenburg's 1961 Store installation of lusciously painted plaster reliefs of consumer goods and Alan Kaprow's Happenings are important predecessors. In the late 1950s, the West Village emerged with the Beat movement as a bohemian center for musicians, writers and other creative types. It seems fitting to encounter such a blatant critique of blind-consumerism in what is now one of the wealthiest, most notoriously gentrified areas of the City.

Yet perhaps this observation - that the pet shop amplifies the unfortunate transformation of this once scrappy, culturally diverse area and mocks the monotony and commercialism of the downtown neighborhoods - is a New York-centric interpretation. As a Brit, Banksy might not have such concerns in mind. According to the New York Times, in a statement distributed by a publicist, the artist said this about his pet shop: "I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing." The artist seems to understand that because the installation is so much fun, so kitsch and outrageously entertaining, it runs the risk of loosing its effectiveness. The spectacle can overwhelm the piece's power to make people stop and think.

What else might Banksy's piece prompt us to think about? What do we learn from caged wieners; a Louis Vuiton logoed lizard; a beer-drinking, crotch-scratching, monkey-porn-watching monkey and a narcissistic rabbit? It is tempting to read a piece like this at face value: eating mass-produced meat products, buying leather goods, treating animals poorly and using beauty products that are tested on animals is wrong. Consumerism can be absurdly mind-numbing. Yet if we do look beyond the fun, a friend thoughtfully pointed out to me, these animals, inundated with various forms of hyper-indulgence, prompt us to consider to what extent the modern world is trapped by its own cages.


Artist's Website

Exhibition Information