The GOOD Guide to Culture Jamming

The Street Artists

Matt Schwartz — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 06:24:39 PST

Sometimes "street artists" are fine artists gone wild, having fled the sterile confines of the gallery to apply their work directly on the urban landscape.

Sometimes they are graffiti artists who have outgrown writing and rewriting their own names. The canvas in both cases is the same-walls, tunnels, bridges, street signs, or most any other stretch of drab concrete that is technically private property but actually up for grabs. The best known of them all is Shepard Fairey's OBEY campaign, a series of stickers and posters that presented wrestler André the Giant, his fictional "posse," and the word "Obey" in Soviet propaganda style. Over the last ten years, Fairey's project has grown from a few Rhode Island art school students to Fortune 500 clients willing to pay the Obey team handsomely for advertising work done in their trademark style. That's the trouble with many street artists-too often the message is "look at me," "here's a joke you don't get," or even worse, "I'm for hire." The best street artists have the power to change the pedestrian experience of the city, like Swoon, who humanizes blank walls with life-sized posters of children at play. Street art is at its best when it's humorous, novel, mysterious, and coy. When it comes with its own excessively theoretical online manifesto, it can get annoying pretty quickly.

	For Example: BanksyBristol-based street artist Banksy began humbly, making anti-authoritarian stencils, but soon raised his sights to the global stage, covertly installing his own paintings into prominent museums in London and New York and painting ladders and holes onto the side of the Israeli West Bank barrier wall. His first U.S. art show, in Los Angeles, featured a live painted elephant and reaped more than $1 million in sales. That's a lot of cash to spend on his next stunt.
	Here's a tip:The ol' smile and wave.If some passerby catches you red-handed, don't let them know it. Pretend you're official. You'll be surprised how often they play along with you. Remember, it's guilt that gives you away.
	Risk: 4 Cost: 5 P.R.: 7 Cred: 6 Coolness Factor: 6.5

Culture Jamming: An Introduction

Yes Men — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:47:20 PST

Jagannath ("master of the world" in Sanskrit) is an odd but kind little god from the Hindu tradition. Once a year, statues of him and his two siblings are mounted on 18-wheeled contraptions nearly five stories high. Row upon row of devotees perch on the different levels of these mobile thrones as they lurch through the streets of Puri, India, the ceremonial home of Jagannath. The dangerous devices have been known to cause accidental fatalities as they roll through the crowded streets, but a 14th-century European priest who witnessed the ceremony erroneously told of the devout flinging themselves in the chariot's path; that's the story that stuck.

Today, we have our own odder and much less kind Jagannath-"Juggernaut," as the priest wrote it-and its fatalities don't often hew to the priest's early version; those it crushes aren't normally devotees. The 20,000 victims of Bhopal, the estimated 650,000 victims of the Iraq War (according to one study), or the unknown toll at the hands of impending climate calamity all just happen to be in the path of pan-national greed (or the global free market, as we hear it called), sometimes accidentally fulfilling its dictates, but never with any special enthusiasm.

A number of decent people defend our modern juggernaut, noting that it has produced some wondrous things. Sure, they say, India's transformations in the global free market have produced millions of unemployed farmers, but it's also producing a flourishing middle class, thanks to the Bangalore phone banks and tech joints. And, though it's now bringing on the death of the planet, the free market has also brought unprecedented luxury and mobility. Even Nero couldn't eat kumquats in December!

Yes, these folks say, this thing we call "the free market" may well be a hurtling, death-dealing entity, but it really doesn't mean you ill-you just have to get to know it, like a big clumsy pet, and it will respond with love instead of death. Buy a Prius. Invest ethically. Show Coke how to live.

The problem is that our juggernaut is a force against which a few concerned citizens becoming vegetarians, planting trees in the Amazon, or riding bicycles are no match at all. And despite the almost psychotically sunny predictions of corporate seers like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, the global free market doesn't want much besides profits and growth-its own survival comes in a very distant third.

That's why we think this culture of death needs to be jammed. The way to jam it is by taking action like withdrawing corporate charters after their very first mass murder (no second chances!) or imposing a 1,000 percent tax increase on gas to make its price reflect its true cost to the world. Maybe then we'll have a hope of stopping the juggernaut from crushing us all.

The trouble is, these actions require a government to enact them, and here in the U.S. we have somehow elected a government that, like the free market, is disinterested in our survival. Until this changes, our options are limited. We can throw hundreds of dollar bills onto the New York Stock Exchange floor, revealing the "profit motive" for the rooting of pigs that it is (Abbie Hoffman). We can make billboards that tell the true story about corporate caring (Billboard Liberation Front). We can simulate billionaires (Billionaires for

Bush) or fake our way onto television in a pantomime of what's wrong (that one was us). We can even demonstrate that we already have the technology we need to solve it all, as do the people behind WorldChanging, though they don't ever mention that what's essential and missing is a government that's up to the task.

These are small, desperate measures, no better than saying "ride a bike." But there is hope. Unlike Jagannath, our own lumbering monster is not a god, but a flimsy and absurd little notion, summed up in one short phrase: Let the rich do what they want, and things will work out wonderfully for everyone. It isn't very hard to help others see this as the nonsense that it is, which is one reason that the outraged will soon be numerous enough to bring the chariot to a halt, just as they did with segregation, the Vietnam War, and other stupid, suicidal constructs that were once thought inevitable.

Culture jamming is an attack on the authority of the dominant culture. Some culture jammers trick the mass media into passing subversive messages. Others construct new canvases to broadcast their ideas outside of the old structure.

Culture jamming is not undertaken to promote a brand or any other commercial interest. There's another term for that: advertising.

A Brief History

GOOD — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:42:23 PST

15,000 B.C.

First known form of graffiti: cave paintings in Lascaux, France.

1535–1541

Michelangelo, while working on the Sistine Chapel, subverts the work by putting patrons' faces on the damned. He also depicts genitals, which are later covered up by Daniele da Volterra, "The Breeches Maker."

1773

Boston Tea Party. This direct action protest puts "Buy Nothing Day" to shame.

1800

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes paints "The Family of Charles IV"-controversial because none of the people are made to look attractive. Rather, he paints them as unattractive as they actually appear.

1890s

Wheatpaste is widely used as an adhesive for posters, especially posters of Toulouse-Lautrec paintings. The paintings are so popular and so frequently torn down that they come with instructions on how to remove them without ripping them.

1916–1920

Peak era of the Dada movement.

1938

Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" is broadcast, convincing many listeners that an actual Martian invasion is underway.

1949

Edward H. Seymour, on the suggestion of his wife, Bonnie, invents the modern aerosol spraypaint can in Chicago, Illinois.

1957

The Situationist International (rooted in Marxism) forms in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia. Guy Debord is the most prominent French member.

1960

Jørgen Nash and Asger Jorn form the Situationist Bauhaus.

1966–1971

The first modern graffiti artists, "Cool Earl" and "Cornbread," begin work in Philadelphia.

1968

In May, students in Paris occupy the Ecole des Beaux Arts to produce posters that "give concrete support to the great movement of the workers on strike."

1969

John Lennon and Yoko Ono spend their honeymoon in Amsterdam in bed, performing their "bed-in" in the name of peace.

1970

Abbie Hoffman writes Steal This Book, a manifesto and instruction manual that advises readers on topics like growing marijauna, living in communes, pirating radio signals, stealing food and credit cards, making pipe bombs, and obtaining a free buffalo from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

1977

Billboard Liberation Front "improves" its first billboard, Max Factor 26.

1981

Jean Baudrillard publishes Simulacra and Simulation.

1981–1983

Parisian Blek le Rat begins a stencil street-art campaign (the stencils being a means of differentiating himself from New York graffiti artists).

1982

Jay Conrad Livingston writes Guerrilla Marketing.

1985

Negativland coins the phrase "Culture Jamming" on the collective record JAMCON '84.

1989

Shepard Fairey begins the OBEY GIANT campaign, what he calls "an experiment in phenomenology," and it proves to be just that: 13 arrests and 17 years later, his is the most recognizable

street-art campaign in history.

Barbie Liberation Organization is formed. Thanks to similarities in the vocal hardware of Teen Talk Barbie and the Talking Duke G.I. Joe, BLO is able to swap the voice boxes of the toys.

1989

Adbusters launches.

1991

Negativland releases fake U2 single by sampling parts of U2 songs. U2 sues (and, ironically, later uses many samples on their POP tour).

1992

Members of Negativland conduct an (ambush) interview with The Edge, who, once they reveal their identities to him, stutters and bumbles his way through the rest of the interview, claiming U2's label (not the band) pursued the lawsuit.

1994

Justin Hall creates his "Links from the Underground," the internet's first self-published home page, for which the New York Times Magazine later hails him as "the father of personal blogging."

1997

The Activist Cookbook: Creative Actions for a Fair Economy, by Andrew Boyd, is published.

1999

The Yes Men create www.gwbush.com in preparation for the 2000 presidential election. Bush, when asked about the defamatory site, says that the site went too far and that "there ought to be limits on freedom."

2001

January 5 Jonah Peretti orders a pair of custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" embroidered on them. Nike refuses. The email dialogue circulates around the internet.

January 15

Wikipedia launches, inspiring debate about authenticity of and authority over information.

2003

Bar code artist Peter Coffin starts distributing downloadable, printable bar codes that, once adhered to a product and scanned, display a word ("want," "take," "give," "lose") on the register, instead of a price.

2004

Adbusters sues six major Canadian broadcasters after they refuse to air "subverstisements" for which Adbusters purchased airtime. This same year it launches the Blackspot Sneaker Campaign.

2005

Bansky places his works in the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and The American Museum of Natural History.

Google Bombing: Yooter reports that "The Presidency of George W. Bush" is the first link that appears for the search "failure" or "miserable failure."

Marissa Mayer from Google responds: "We don't condone the practice of Google Bombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission."

The Politurgists

Matt Schwartz — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:33:33 PST

Politurgy uses the principles of theater (usually comedic) to mess with the news.

The skilled politurgist invites us to imagine a different world, or at least to take this one a little less seriously. Sometimes politurgists manufacture phony news events, sometimes they use symbolic gestures to reveal the inherent phoniness of the news itself. This is a game of deceit, bluffs, disguises, and access, the object being to make the headlines of tomorrow's morning paper as laughably true as The Onion is laughably false. At its most basic, politurgy can be the simple mischiefs of Belgian prankster Noël Godin, who has hurled cream pies into the faces of Bill Gates, Jean-Luc Godard, and other overstuffed shirts. Even Stephen Colbert is something of a closet politurgist, holding the president hostage with his own good manners at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last spring. Finally, there are the more elaborate hoaxers, like Joey Skaggs, who feeds the media fake narratives (dog brothers, fish condos, cemetery theme parks, etc.). Politurgy and Street Art intersect at a few points, like Banksy's makeover of a statue of blind Justice into a slatternly tart. The formula in all these cases is the same: Feign legitimacy. Gain access. Commit unforgivable breaches of decorum and/or fact. Wave to the cameras. Tell the judge it was satire.

For example: The Yes Men

Not content to merely heckle their chosen targets, The Yes Men actually become that which they hate, impersonating spokespeople for such "criminal" organizations as Halliburton ("Save corporate executives from global warming!") or the WTO ("Coca-Cola can save a thirsty world!"). Fake identities firmly established, the Yes Men then set about their real work as freelance whistleblowers-forcing the companies to deal with smoldering P.R. ruins. When a Yes Man-as a Dow Chemical spokesman-promised to compensate victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak, Dow's stock value plunged $2 billion in less than half an hour.

Here's a tip: LOOK THE PART

Be prepared for anything. Keep your clothes quiet and let your actions do the talking. Use paper shopping bags instead of backpacks and wear comfortable shoes, in case you need to run. Also, ties look official.

Risk: 5

Cost: 3

P.R.: 8

Cred: 7

COOLNESS FACTOR: 6.75

The Mob

Matt Schwartz — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:30:38 PST

As long as there have been streets and crowds, there have been occasional angry mobs, waving torches and bellowing demands.

But it wasn't until Harper's senior editor Bill Wasik summoned his acquaintances to the ninth floor of Manhattan's Macy's that the modern mob-a less purposeful, more cheerful, and more easily dispersed creature dubbed the "flash mob"-appeared on the world historical scene. What began as a magazine article in New York soon caught fire around the world, as bored salarymen and college students from Brazil, China, and Europe assembled in parks, train stations, and hotel lobbies to utter nonsensical phrases, sing songs, pillow-fight, wear outrageous costumes, or simply burst into self-congratulatory applause. What was normal was temporarily flipped on its head-those dignified fuddy-duddies who hadn't received the cell-phone communiqué were left on the outside of the joke. Whereas the revolutionary mob is centered on a common desire for bloodthirsty revenge, the flash mob often seems to want nothing more than a few minutes of juvenile kicks, a temporary disruption of the public order. Perhaps these events are a rehearsal, but if so, for what? More effective is Critical Mass, where bicyclists gather monthly for group rides around urban centers, temporarily letting drivers know what it feels like to be in the minority.

	For example: Rev. Billy TalenRev. Billy Talen's congregations have a political orientation and can easily be classified as acts of Consumer Mutiny or even Politurgy, but their spontaneous engagement of a live public makes them mobbish events at heart. Assuming the role of a platinum-haired preacher, Talen storms chain stores, Starbucks outlets, even Disneyland with a flock of his faithful in tow. He then vigorously exhorts consumers to lay down their credit cards and tote bags and join his Church of Stop Shopping, enveloping innocent passersby in his own anticonsumerist flash mob.
	Here's a tip: Liquid CourageA tipple of the hard stuff smoothes the tongue, steadies the hand, and makes the moment of crisis bearable (hey, even pleasant). Consider keeping a hip flask handy to quell that pesky fight-or-flight response.
	Risk: 2 Cost: 2 P.R.: 6 Cred: 3 COOLNESS FACTOR: 2.75

The Consumer Mutineers

Matt Schwartz — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:26:22 PST

Also known as Commerce Jammers, Consumer Mutineers are those who play with or otherwise alter commercial space.

Sometimes this means subverting advertising, like the graffiti artist KAWS adding his own ghostly characters to bus shelter posters, or Ji Lee's Bubble Project, wherein blank speech bubbles are added to public advertising in hopes that passersby will fill them in. Other Mutineers operate directly on the retail environment, like Whirl Mart, which create flash-mobbish in-store traffic jams by slowly pushing empty shopping cartsthrough the aisles of Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us. Shopdropping - a form of Consumer Mutiny that grapples with the product itself-entails buying or stealing something, altering the packaging or the contents, and then replacing it on the store shelf. There it sits, until an unsuspecting fellow consumer happens upon it and has his or her mind totally blown. The Barbie Liberation Organization is among the most gifted of the shopdroppers, switching the electronic guts of gendered action figures so that Barbie growls about Cobra and G.I. Joe swoons in falsetto over Ken. As much as these mutinies succeed in scraping away a bit of retail's dissent-proof veneer, they can be bewildering to your average shopper, who sees only a defective product rather than a cultural critique.

For example: J.S.G. BOGGS

For twenty years, the artist James Stephen George Boggs has been practicing a very arty, risky, and politically volatile form of Consumer Mutiny. Boggs makes his own currency, drawing whimsical banknotes and attempting to exchange them for goods and services as if they were real money. In revealing that cash is nothing more than a pretty piece of paper made by someone we trust, Boggs has shaken the everyday acts of buying and selling to their very foundations. No surprise, then, that the Secret Service has contended that Boggs Notes are illegal, even though they look nothing like the real thing.

Here's a Tip: Bring a Lookout

Constantly looking over your shoulder makes you seem shady. Bring along a friend whose sole job is to observe the scene and give you a pre-arranged signal if the heat decides to show up.

Risk: 2

Cost: -

P.R.: 5

Cred: 3

COOLNESS FACTOR: 4.25

The Hacktivists

Matt Schwartz — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:22:11 PST

As online shopping, snooping, and socializing gradually reduce us to a nation of shut-ins, the Hacktivists are bent on showing how rebellion can even be found in virtual space, without ever leaving one's bedroom.

The media has lately found the Google Bomb the most newsworthy act of online disobedience. Google the words "miserable failure," for example, and the first link is to George W. Bush's official biography page. Google "Santorum" and you'll get sex columnist Dan Savage's sophomoric attempt to turn the Pennsylvania Senator's last name into a slang term for a byproduct of anal sex. Google Bombing is possible through the organized manipulation of Google's PageRank system. The more web publishers who link "elephantiasis" to "GOP," the higher the Republican National Committee's website will appear in the search results for "elephantiasis," whether or not the two terms actually have anything to do with one another. This may seem like preaching to the choir, but some political operatives say Google Bombing could tilt elections by boosting the rank of certain news articles the night before Election Day. Also of interest is the Institute for Applied Autonomy's GraffitiWriter and StreetWriter robots, remote-controlled protest units that spray text messages onto the street sort of like a printer on wheels. The IAA has also devised a friendly-looking "propaganda robot" that claims to "capitalize on the aesthetics of cuteness" to hand out pamphlets more effectively than your run-of-the-mill Birkenstocked activist.

	For example: GREY TUESDAYOn Tuesday, February 24, 2004, the old civil disobedience met the new creative disobedience as music fans around the world asserted their inalienable right to download Danger Mouse's Grey Album-a mash-up of the instrumental tracks of the Beatles' White Album and the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album-copyright be damned. More than one million individual tracks were downloaded, despite music label EMI's assertion that sampling even the smallest sliver of the White Album was intellectual property theft.
	Here's a Tip: Make a RecordMake sure you record your bravery for posterity-and for the blogs! Post digital files to websites and email them to friends. The more people who can be energized by your example, the better. Just look out for Big Brother.
	Risk: 4 Cost: 5 P.R.: 7 Cred: 6 Coolness Factor: 3.5