Led By Donkeys: visual activism that embodies the intolerance of the liberal Left
If the post-Brexit period produced any cultural form of its own, it might have been the new wave of shrill, carnivalesque street art made by a generation of Leftists and liberals grown tired of trying to win over a stubborn public through the usual democratic means: Banksy’s mural at Dover depicting a broken ring of EU stars; top-hatted Steve Bray (the “Stop Brexit Man”), bellowing daily outside Westminster like a politically inverted John Bull; the bizarre End-of-Days rituals of Extinction Rebellion; and, not least, the straight-to-Instagram antics of anti-Brexit, Boris-bashing media-interventionists Led By Donkeys. Now the group is launching its coffee-table book with a brief exhibition in Bristol, charting their five-year spree of billboard hijacking, guerilla video-projections and pranking of hapless Right-wing politicians.
Five years allows for a little historical revisionism, and the Bristol show demotes to the stairwell walls images of the early billboards and digital hoardings which threw past quotes and tweets by Tory Brexiteers back in their faces. Instead, it opens with the lettuce banner which was used to prank Liz Truss last month at an event to promote her book, and a giant blue plaque stating “The UK economy was crashed here” that was mounted outside 55 Tufton Street, the bête noire free-market think-tank that the Donkeys, like many liberals, seem to believe were instrumental in Truss’s mini-budget, as well as being the shadowy, conspiratorial force obstructing every progressive cause they align with.
That the show’s title emphasises “accountability” suggests that the group would prefer to distance themselves from the partisan side-taking of Brexit, arguing that theirs was really always “an effort to expose the ineptitude and hypocrisy of Britain’s governing class”. It’s hard not to conclude, though, that Led By Donkeys only ever demanded “accountability” for one part of it; those politicians – Vote Leave and its allies – who attempted to follow through the Brexit vote in the face of the obstruction of the rest of the “governing class”.
Failing to shift the dial on Brexit, the Donkeys were quick to widen their targets, coat-tailing public ire: a first floor gallery focuses on photos of their 2021 Covid Memorial Wall, collaborating with Bereaved Families for Justice: the 140,000 hearts, painted on the embankment walls facing Parliament, are moving. But again, the grief is weaponised against what they describe as Boris Johnson’s “dire handling” of the pandemic, puffing up a morality tale about “the dangers of elevating to power” those reckless, incompetent, elected politicians.
Activist street art suits such morality tales, reducing big democratic issues to dumb, didactic visual “gotchas”, cast in the liberal Left’s emotions of impotence, resentment, self-pity and self-righteousness: Brexit was bad, the EU is good, Covid should have been handled by the scientists, corporations are greedy, ceasefire in Gaza now. But for all their snarking against politicians, what Led By Donkeys’s visual activism so vividly embodies is the woke reaction to populism, the veiled contempt for those who don’t agree with them, that sees so many of their fellow citizens, not as lions, but merely idiots, gulled by liars.
Until Sept 15; headfirstbristol.co.uk