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CULTURE JAMMiNG
ОглавлениеOne of the most exciting and ingenious elements of street culture is culture jamming. Culture jamming is what people turn to when they have had enough of the more popular forms of mainstream culture — shopping, movies, the media, advertising. It is a healthy reaction to the propaganda and bullshit that is fed to us 24/7 through the media, and is manifested in street action (hijacking advertising or shop fronts), media action (using Internet and traditional media to raise awareness) and events I can’t even categorize (using a giant projector to beam out anti-consumer messages on to a building). It could be a protest about how big business rides over the lives of humans in the cause to make even more money, or the way that a lot of advertising billboards are actually illegal. On the road writing this book, I spent time with two serious culture-jammers, Okat from areyougeneneric.org and Jordan Seiler, who’s the mastermind behind the New York Street Advertising Takeover.
areyougeneric.org, the US-based website has been ‘Giving brand-America the finger since 2001’ and links the protest with creativity. Areyougeneric is a group of artists that seeks to protest, to question and to disprove. Its nemeses are unethical corporations, censorship, the biased media, hypocrisy, excessive advertising and plain stupidity. Its heroes are art, discussion, independent thought and creation.
‘At first the site was nothing more than a place for us to show off a culture jam or two (such as stickering the front of certain fashion magazines that are totally controlled by their advertisers) that we pulled off. It has now evolved to be much more than that. It’s become a resource library of street-art photos from all over the world. It also houses our catalogue of clothing and print art intended to critique and reclaim our social and mental environments.
‘Our shirts promote a concept, not a name (not even our own), and are intended to provide an alternative to big business and small thinking. The shirts have no label, no logo, and are printed on sweatshop-free tees. We’ve also shared all our culture jams in the public domain and are constantly supporting and encouraging others to pursue their concepts in the public arena.’
As I helped Okat sticker up a shop that was being converted into yet another Starbucks, I asked him to define street culture.
‘In the most simple terms, I define street culture with the word “raw”. The street is where everything is born, where it lies before the mainstream gets its hands on it and refines it to something tolerable. Street culture embraces the unfinished, the pure, the work that was improvised without the intention of ever getting noticed and that is why it so beautiful’
The first of Jordan Seiler’s seriously ambitious New York Street Advertising Takeovers (NYSAT) took place on 27 April 2009, when over 120 illegal billboards throughout the city of New York were white washed by dozens of volunteers and then turned into works of art. NYSAT was a reaction to the hundreds of illegal billboards that are not registered with the city. Even though these adverts are illegal, the violators are rarely, if ever, prosecuted by the City of New York, allowing the billboard companies to make some serious money by cluttering the outdoor space of NYC with some seriously shit adverts. Jordan tells me what it’s all about.
‘Outdoor advertising is the primary obstacle to open public communication. By commodifying public space, outdoor advertising has monopolized the surfaces that shape our shared environment. Private property laws protect the communications made by outdoor advertising while systematically preventing public use of that space. In an effort to illuminate these issues, I illegally reclaim outdoor advertising space for public ideas and visual forms. Through bold acts of civil disobedience I hope to air my grievances in the court of public opinion and witness our communities regain control of the spaces they occupy.’
How has your work evolved?
‘Today I try to make work that not only uses outdoor advertising space but also announces itself as doing so. This means if I am making personal work, I use tactics that allowmy work to stand out from inside the advertising frame. Things like giving physicality where one expects two-dimensional prints, being quiet when someone would expect images to be loud, breaking the frame, and always trying to create honest personal interactions that are so rare in commercial messages. As well the work has embraced a sense of activism and the organization of events has become a part of my art.’
