“If you take a can of Campbell's soup and repeat it fifty times, a retinal image doesn't interest you. What interests you is the concept of putting fifty Campbell's cans on a cloth”, said Marcel Duchamp about one of the works that would most define Andy Warhol's gestures as a representative of Pop art far from his apparent ease . In the same sense, we could paraphrase: “If you take an image of a girl releasing a balloon and destroy it, it means that the image of that girl with that balloon does not interest you. What interests you is the havoc..."
Banksy's career is traversed by an impulse to undermine institutions from a paradoxical position: he does not keep his criticism apart from those institutions, but infiltrates them, preserving an identity that he mutated from an anonymous graffiti artist from the south of England whose date of birth is assumed to be around 1974, a registered trademark capable of issuing certificates of authenticity from his own studio, Pest Control, and with productions that alternate different techniques not exempt from the performative element. "Love is in the bin" is the last work produced by the artist that seems to continue this line of complexity.
The biography of the piece begins on October 5, 2018 when Oliver Barker, auctioneer of the Sotheby's house, lowered the hammer for the third time and gave up the work "Girl with a balloon" for a sum that was just over a million of pounds in the framework of the traditional auction of contemporary art of the house. At that moment, a hidden device in the golden frame of the work was activated that began to move it downwards and cut the lower half of the canvas into strips before the gaze of those present. That is the fiction of havoc.
We use the word havoc because of its double condition. Havoc is synonymous with damage, like that irrevocably caused in the materiality of "Girl with a balloon”. However, the term also responds to a certain attraction, admiration caused to a group of people. And it is that far from generating the rejection of an art market that saw the offer of a lot under the conditions stipulated by the catalog impacted, the result was the reverse: according to a statement from the Sotheby's house, the buyer, whose identity is maintained In reserve to date, he believed that he saw in that act a singular moment in the history of art, he kept the piece and made his bet: on October 14, again as part of the auction of contemporary art of the same firm, he presented the one now re-titled by the author "Love is in the bin", lot 7 of the corresponding catalog, and he sold it for a total of sixteen million pounds that exceeded the initial estimate of four million, aroused ten minutes of bidding among nine bidders in the room and interested on the phone, and made it the new record price of the artist.
And on October 5, 2021, it was again offered for sale, already with the performance bonus. Always at Sotheby's. This time its value climbed to $ 25.4 million.
What, then, is "Love is in the bin"? The question does not have a direct answer, although we can try an alternative and propose what it is not simply: a residue. What that girl had apparently transformed into with the balloon released to the wind became a new work product of a performative act that built a new horizon of meaning from a destructive appearance that forces us to return to Duchamp: it is not the materiality of the Destroyed work is the one that gains prominence but rather the gesture of destruction as a productive moment. "Love is in the bin" is, then, at the same time, a piece with specific materiality that owes its status to conceptual art, a vestige of the previous "Girl with a balloon", which far from being annulled, nests "transfigured" in this new identity; it is a historical document of a performative act and is testimony to the unpredictability of contemporary art.
But also, recovering that paradoxical vocation attributed to Banksy, "El amor es en el tacho" is evidence of the market's ability to absorb complex corporalities in which the symbolic plays a decisive role, and to function as a scene in which art and his shows are superimposed with the history of art playing with its certainties, flirting with its fictions and ravaging its protagonists on both sides of the stage.