Culture Jamming (Helter Skelter magazine August 2010)

The phenomenon of mass globalization and profligate spending as we know it really took shape in the early part of the 20^th century. Many of the marketing campaigns and techniques of major corporations, in the early years, ideologically corrupt as they might be, were essential to generate a well-off economy. However in the following years, holding that almost utopian image of a better lifestyle as ransom and avoiding intervention by governments and law makers, the idea of globalization ran amok, filthy with fraudulent practices.

Corporations soon discovered that profits lay not in manufacturing and marketing of products, but in selling branded identities people would adopt in their lifestyles. Products would become secondary to an idea, itself devalued by losing an essential connection to a belief or action. The measure of a successful brand became not a mark of quality of the product but rather how far it could permeate the culture creating a stratosphere of the super brand. Brands like Nike, Coca Cola, Tommy Hilfiger and McDonalds, became revered symbols worldwide accomplishing an assault on the public sphere in form of corporate sponsorship, bombarding potential consumers with images, with a blatant disregard for decency or the sanctity of personal space.

In the current climate, despite the promise of choice and interactivity, there in reality has been a drastic reduction in options as it goes, with the rise in corporate consolidation and a corporate monopoly of the market. Increasing number of companies have begun to adopt what can be best described as Nike’s ‘paradigm of sweatshops’ company model, involving outsourcing to low-wage workers in developing countries further contributing to the diminishing global job quality.

In spite of the fact that several of these multimillion dollar corporations appear to be concerned with the uniqueness of their customers, in reality they tend to paint every customer with the same brush, exploiting the media to instill into the public minds carefully selected messages of globalization and mass consumerism, using advertising to inform values and assumptions of the cultural system while determining social standards and equating personal happiness with accumulation of materialistic possessions. Corporations detest citizens thinking outside the box seeing that ideas of individualism and distinctiveness are considered to be the enemy given that by their thought process, freedom of choice should be restricted to in essence choosing from several predetermined options.

It can be largely agreed upon that the prevalence of these voracious practices at present poses a legitimate threat to the overall authority of the public good. These corporations unmistakably invade people's privacy; manipulate politics and governments creating unduly false needs in people, who are in more and more numbers acting out against this almost imperialistic rule. This backlash against the increasing economic and cultural reach of multinational companies has taken the form of a cultural movement consisting not of intellectuals, politicians or even musicians that are no doubt indebted to these corporations themselves, but rather independent, free thinking artists who still possess the creative license to point out the discrepancies and more often than not unlawful practices of these corporate giants.

The movement of ‘Culture Jamming’ is designed as a means to force a dialogue with an agenda of altering globalization practices. Culture jamming baldly rejects the idea that because marketing buys its way into our public spaces, it must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow. A consumer’s response to corporate restraints within a capitalist society, this activist movement involves the act of transforming existing mass media such as billboards and logos, hijacking these images to produce commentary about itself using the original mediums communication method. Playing with these heavily circulated images that are already infused into the public’s general consensus, it aims not only to expose corporate agendas with government propaganda along with seizing back commercialized private spaces, but also to enlighten the public and provide them with knowledge to make informed decisions and possibly even change consuming habits. These jammers have the ability to raise issues that are purposely kept out of public knowledge; environmental issues, child labor and exploitation, health issues and the driving of small businesses into bankruptcy, all issues that jammers bring to the foreground which corporations would most likely suppress. Repeated instances of cultural jamming have dealt a heavy blow to corporate giants, adversely affecting both public approval and more importantly customers.

Although in practice since the 50’s with the Situationists in France, the term was reportedly coined by obscure experimental band Negativland who championed it to become a catch all word for modern day anti globalization practices such as billboard alternations and other forms of media sabotage. Media and economic theorist Noam Chomsky has been highly influential along with ‘No Logo’, the best-selling book by Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein acting as almost a manifesto for anti globalization resistors on its release in 2000.

Ron English has been a prominent figure in the culture jamming movement since the 80’s with his brand of satirical and subversive ‘popaganda’. His formative work in billboard subvertising or changing advertising was extremely significant in establishing and changing the radical ideas of corporate speech and individuality. Roaming the streets with a bucket of glue, a set of rollers, and a few trusted collaborators he plastered his work in broad daylight on billboards he didn’t own changing meaning in a matter of minutes, intent on stimulating curiosity, forcing people to question the system and often having to incur the wrath of law enforcement.

Cuban-born artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada based in New York began injecting art into the urban landscape and changing billboards in order to bring attention to the problem of disproportionate advertising in minority areas and transforming legitimacy and so called good intentions of the corporations in the eyes of the consumer. He believes staunchly in reclaiming the public spaces that have been snatched from our hands by advertisers and corporate manipulation while cementing the fact that our identity should come from within and not from the brands we wear.

Creating an altered sense of the original content, refiguring iconic imagery, and making us rethink the way we interact with dominant cultural figures isn’t restricted to billboards alone. Cult graphic artist and one of the most visible practitioners of guerrilla-style art, Shepard Fairey achieved notoriety with his ubiquitous Orwellian posters of Andre the Giant, featuring the nonspecific command to “Obey.” A star in the world of street art for nearly two decades, Fairey has nurtured a reputation of a heroic artist single handedly waging a war against the corporate powers, producing works usually displayed illegally on buildings and signs.

Another anti consumerist organization exploring ideas about corporate control over information flows is ‘Adbusters’ who literally deconstruct corporate culture with a waterproof magic marker and a bucket of wheat paste . The encroachment of big-name brands on the daily lives of citizens has led to an array of in-your-face counter-measures by members of this group witnessing the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. Such ‘adbusting’ practices have been carried out against a number of major corporate entities, Levi's, Ford and Apple among others.

Some of the most notorious events include turning cigarette mascot Joe Camel into Joe Chemo, hooked up to an IV machine or sabotaging Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign featuring dead famous figures by replacing them with the face of serial killer Charles Manson or Stalin and the altered slogan of ‘Think Really Different’ accompanying the apple logo which is morphed into a skull. Street theatre and public pranks carried out on the expense of major corporations by artist collective’s such as ‘The Yes Men’ and the ‘Cacophony Society’ hints at the movement once a grass roots movement now gaining momentum and public support.

Cyberspace has been a godsend to most culture jammers with endless possibilities. The intensification of individual expression and anonymity across the internet has led to a remarkable increase in communication of the idea across the world, free of censorship by both state and corporation. This homemade media bashing has obliterated what the corporations have fought so hard to establish, a corporate rule by granting a certain notoriety to hackers, who have hacked time and time again into websites of major corporations such as Nike, defacing logos with anti globalization messages or redirecting visitors to a site exposing the inhumane practices being observed in the company’s sweatshops.

Though many conservatives and high powered executives regard the practice of culture jamming as futile vandalism, the movement has acquired an almost quasi-revolutionary following with average citizens taking to the streets, striving to uncover the truth hidden beneath layers of advertising euphemisms and the selling of mass produced lifestyles.

Anti Art (Helter Skelter magazine June 2010)

“Sometimes when a piece of art draws cries of ‘this is random, anybody could do this’, its goes back to one of the earliest arguments, as soon as people started to make a break from any sort of representational art, anywhere. In cases like this you cannot argue about quality of technique, you have to acknowledge that this has a theoretical presence and an intellectual basis for it; it has nothing to do with a measurable technique. It has to be recognized that art is being done here which is not representative, and it’s not supposed to beautiful or attuned to any sort of standard in commercial sense.” – Byron Coley.

So what exactly is worthy of being called art? What distinguishes an ostensible piece of art from an everyday artifact? What is it that allows us to construe an idea with artistic merit as opposed to an outlook of triviality? The fact that there has never been, and probably never will be a strict definition of the word should be proof enough that the word holds innumerable dimensions. While some see it is an expression of human endeavors in its most primitive form, others believe it to be the true idiom of a rich and multi layered emotional being. With such an extensive and subjective description of this universal word, most modern day art connoisseurs don’t dare fathom the convolution of the term that is ‘Anti-Art’. But it is in the context of this idiom that art may truly be appreciated in all its variable forms.

Simply put, anti art is a long lineage of counter movement ideas designed to kick out against the complacency that the art world has a tendency to settle into. Originating with the Dadaists in Europe following World War I, it represented a new generation of artists who shared a nihilistic outlook toward the standard expectations of arts and literature. Removing themselves completely from intellectual analysis, they employed anarchist ideas generally unheard off at the time, to undermine the ruling establishment by employing outrageous tactics in the vein of demonstrations, manifestos and heavily absurdist art critiquing social values and providing an alternative to the constraints of 1920’s art.

Photo-montage’s and collages made of trash and refuse material were premeditated to scandalize the general public opinion while perhaps the most famous and controversial Dada artwork, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain,’ consisting of only of a urinal set on its back raised a powerful question on the validity of art. It also attacked the ideal that art takes time and effort to create, establishing the concept of ‘readymade or found art’, something the pop art movement would borrow heavily from.This granted artists such as Duchamp along with Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann recognized as famous Dadaists, a place in art history as conveyors of the first anti art movement influencing surrealism, punk rock and avant-garde music akin to the experimental band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum named after a small group of Dadaists.

By 1920, the blatant politicization of art began with the rise of communism in the Soviet Union and along with an expressive break from Dadaism in the form of Surrealism and later Abstract Expressionism. Although by no means as outrageous as the radical Dada artists, the leftist ideas soon manifested themselves in emotively conceptual works of famed artists Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollock respectively.

Arguably the most politically charged movement in the 50’s came in the form of the Marxist inspired Situationism based around the ideas of an international group of artists, the Situationist International. Melding art and politics into a single concoction for the purpose of overcoming the forced suppressions of a capitalist rule by using moreover eliminating Dadaist and Surrealist ideas through calling for a cultural revolution was the basic concept. Although largely overlooked, the Situationists were solely responsible for the trouncing the notion that art exists as a separate entity and integrating it into the fabric of daily life influencing not only music but also the application of graffiti and street art in reclusive underground artists like Banksy.
Fluxus, a global movement which embodied the true essence of the avant-garde took form in the 60’s retaining the anti art and anti commercial spirit of Dadaism, however with a stronger objective for experimentation, creating a socially aware population and the belief of living the art. Centered on ‘scores’, essentially a collection of works designed by an artist with prominent instructions on how to recreate and reinterpret the piece by others, thus propagating the do-it-yourself ethic, the concept breathed new life into age old concepts of sound art, visual poetry, and an amalgamation of different artistic media. Unplanned mass gatherings of people to witness improvised performance art at unusual locations termed ‘happenings’ was considered a characteristic feature of the movement, personified in notoriously controversial performances of Carolee Schneemann. With a notable alumni consisting of Dick Higgins, John Cale and Yoko Ono, the core values of the movement would prove essential to New York’s No Wave scene.

Gaining prominence around the same time, the last movement of the modern art era was a reaction against the prevalent pretentious workings of Abstract Expressionism. Born out of the enthused Neo Dada crowds, Pop Art acting as a bridge between high brow and low art made heavy use of mass culture themes and techniques such as billboard advertisements, consumer product packaging, comic strips and celebrities. Andy Warhol’s renowned painting’s of banal and everyday topics such as Campbell's Soup Cans, Coca Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis expressed a positive outlook of modern consumer culture while challenging the topical sensibilities of an accustomed art world.
The Postmodernist era continued to take its cues from the ubiquitous belief in reducing contemporary art to a derivative of intangible ideas, foregoing aesthetics in favor of concepts. Conceptual Art became the beloved stance of most artists during the 90’s chiefly led by the collective Young British Artists who offered up the notion that the deliberation of an idea was more imperative than the actual executed product. A dead tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine or a disheveled bed stained with bodily secretions and detritus objects presented by prolific conceptualists Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin respectively offered up a nonfigurative visual experience that polarized artists and audiences alike.

Refuting the notion that anything can be considered art, Billy Childish along with Charles Thomson and his radical art group Stuckists expressed an obstinate desire to lead away from the pretentiousness of conceptual art, as pop art had done against abstract expressionism decades ago, in this case however by means of manifestos and protests against postmodernist art which they believed to be a cold and mechanical view of culture. The ‘Anti-Anti Art’ philosophy of Stuckism championed realism over the deliberate abstraction of conceptual and performance art with an ideology of Remodernism, returning art back to its creative passion and clarity in age old disciplines of figurative paintings.

In conclusion the recent back and forth spat between the conceptualists and the stuckists or the basic concept of anti-artists demonstrating against anti-artists may seem trivial and a remote take on the perennial objective of the Dadaists, it is however in retrospect a representation of the new millennium’s version of the imperative question: What exactly is worthy of being called art?