Culture Jamming

At home being an outsider
September 23, 2005
Sydney Morning Herald

Cultural jamming has developed artistic as well as political elements, writes Sharon Verghis.

Meet Xavier Cha, the "guerilla gardener" who makes artistic and political statements not with a paintbrush, but a pair of garden shears: she hacks her name into the manicured hedges of the super-rich in Beverly Hills. Then there's the Sydney artist Mickie Quick and his altered traffic signs, and Lonely Station, practitioners of billboard alteration.
They are culture jammers, activists who have targeted the mass media through alteration - often with humour - of everything from billboards to magazine advertisements. Culture jamming has its roots in the politics of protest, but it is increasingly attracting the attention of curators.
Featured at such festivals as Tilt and This Is Not Art, as well as in shows at Stephen Mori's Day Street headquarters, culture jamming is also the theme of an exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, entitled Disobedience. The exhibition features South African artist Kendell Geer's radical reworking of the iconic "love" poster to say "bomb", and Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz's 2000 work, the cartoony F--- All Forms of Political and Cultural Discrimination. It highlights works that traverse the grey area from politics to art, says co-curator Zanny Begg.
There are Raquel Ormella's photographs of Che Guevara that document how the revolutionary's image has popped up on everything from Zippo lighters to ice-cream flavours. And there are images by Dean Sewell, a former Herald photographer who has documented the work of Lonely Station, perhaps the city's most audacious culture jammers, who have scaled smokestacks, highway billboards and buildings to rework images. He has captured figures imposing an image of an Abu Ghraib-style hooded figure on an advertising billboard near Sydney Airport.
In Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs, the cultural commentator Mark Dery describes one form of it as "an act of sympathetic magic performed in the name of all who are obliged to peer at the world through peepholes owned by multinational conglomerates for whom the profit margin is the bottom line". Billboard alteration began appearing in the US in the 1970s as a protest against corporate advertising, with the McDonald's golden arches, and later, the Nike swoosh, popular targets.
The phrase "culture jamming" is most commonly attributed to the college band Negativland. North American practitioners range from the veteran Adbusters, home of Buy Nothing Day and Unbrand America and led by the hoary culture jammer Kalle Lasn, to the Billboard Liberation Front, the legendary billboard bandit Ron English, and now, newer disciples such as Cha, who calls her covert topiary-trimming "tagging, Martha-Stewart style".
In Australia, groups such as BUGA UP, which was founded in 1979 and targeted the tobacco industry, have influenced such contemporary groups as Squatspace and the Network of Uncollectable Artists. The Sydney artist "Keg" was one of the latter's founders and argues that culture jamming, with its zines and websites, now has artistic as well as political elements.
Culture jamming taps into the notion of raw or "outsider" art or "art brut" expounded by the painter Jean Dubuffet - art created by society's misfits. Mickie Quick says there's even a kind of canon: "People are definitely responding to it as part of a history of street art. If you really like an artist's style or stencil, you imitate it. It's a definite subculture."
There are a number of factors driving this subculture, says the Sydney artist Zanny Begg, who co-curated Disobedience. Artists' disgust with Sydney's blue-chip art market, their exclusion from its glossy galleries, the city's prohibitive rents, and the closing down of artist-run spaces have fuelled a growing movement which sees any blank wall as a potential canvas, not just for traditional graffiti-style murals, but elaborate, sophisticated imagery which in effect allows them a viewing space, and exposes them to an audience.
It's also driven by less pragmatic factors: identity politics, the increasing interest in the anti-globalisation movement and a backlash against the frenzied commodification of visual images. Begg says it's certainly fed by disgust with Sydney's overcommercialised art market, and the tyranny of "rich people buying pretty art to stick on their walls". This way, artists are doing damage to the tight links between the creative and commercial spheres. No price tag - like Naomi Klein's no logos - is one way of flipping a finger to the art market's whimsies and fashions.
Culture jamming can be an illegal activity that costs councils and businesses thousands of dollars. But Begg asks why is it OK to plaster an ad for a product on a blank wall, but not if you're not flogging a product?