The Medium Is the Message
A new generation of Bay Area "culture jammers" manipulates media manipulation
By Sam Williams
It's a late afternoon last summer, and a crowd of weary
commuters is standing on the platform of the Montgomery Street BART station,
avoiding eye contact and glancing occasionally at the overhead monitors.
Between train destination announcements, the perfect faces of KGO-TV newscasters
Terilyn Joe and Dan Ashley beam down.
Suddenly, a gust of wind indicates an imminent arrival.
The crowd looks up to the monitors in unison, checking the train's destination.
The Channel 7 ad then switches over to the characteristic lettering of
a BART destination message -- only it reads, "Capitalism Stops at Nothing."
The message blinks twice before giving way to the train's
destination. And for a few seconds, hundreds of people scratch their heads
and wonder the same thing: "What the hell just happened?"
Welcome to the next generation of Bay Area culture jamming.
Coined by the Berkeley art-rock group Negativland in
the early 1980s, the term "culture jamming" -- aka "media hacking" --
refers to the deliberate disruption, distortion, or subversion of mainstream
media messages, primarily advertising. Or, as Mark Nery, author of Culture
Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs, describes
it: " 'Jamming' is CB slang for the illegal practice of interrupting radio
broadcasts or conversations between fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities,
and other equally jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed
against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose operant
mode is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols."
According to Nery, culture jamming can trace its roots
to the carnival traditions of medieval Europe, dada, and the Situationist
International movement. But in the Bay Area, culture jamming began with
groups like the Billboard Liberation Front, ad-defacing vandals whose
pranks date to 1979, and Negativland, whose recomposition of a U2 song
led to a well-publicized legal battle with the band and its label, Island
Records.
Lately, a new guard of culture jamming artists has been
creeping out of the corners of San Francisco's urban landscape. Where
artists in the 1970s and '80s sought to add "noise into the signal," altering
existing public works, their '90s progeny generally avoid head-on confrontation
and make their own signals, setting them free to sink or swim in the great
American mediastream.
Andy Cox, the artist behind the short-lived "Capitalism
Stops at Nothing" campaign, is a civil engineer with a master's of fine
arts degree from San Francisco State University. He says he came up with
the idea for the "ad," predictably, while waiting for a BART train.
"I was just standing there, and I noticed that two things
were going on with the signs," Cox recalls. "The train destinations were
coming up all the time, and they were asking people to advertise. They
put up a phone number, and I thought, 'Why not?'"
Cox, who doesn't advocate any particular ideology despite
the tone of his work, says he paid roughly $800 to New Jersey-based MetroChannel,
which eventually pulled the ad citing rider complaints. He says he was
surprised they accepted it in the first place.
"I tried calling other people before, like ad companies,"
Cox says. "I said I wanted to put the ads on taxis and was willing to
pay for it. They told me to call the Art Commission instead."
Filmmaker Craig Baldwin, a San Francisco filmmaker whose
credits include Sonic Outlaws, a documentary about audio jammers such
as Negativland, the Tape-beatles and the Barbie Liberation Organization,
has been a student of the culture jamming phenomenon since it first appeared
on Bay Area billboards in the mid-'70s.
Although Baldwin cites the work of multimedia artist
Jenny Holzer as a precendent to Cox, he says the "Capitalism" campaign
signifies a new attitude among culture jammers. With its vague, almost
defeatist, tone, "Capitalism Stops at Nothing" stands in direct contrast
to the highly-focused outrage of earlier works.
"People now are even more resigned to the pop culture
world in general and advertising in particular," Baldwin says. "I think
the utopian belief that we could just join together and get rid of it
has come and gone."
Baldwin's comments extend to the work of Gordon Winiemko
and Julie Wyman, creators of the short film Enjoy. The film, a satire
about the huge neon Coca-Cola billboard at Fourth and Brannan streets
South-of-Market, is less about lashing back than about acceptance.
"We referred to it as 'post-rage' when we were making
it," says Winiemko. "When I look at billboards in the city, I don't see
these corporate representatives. I see the art work of our culture. Just
like any artwork, it expresses values, for better or for worse."
Still, Winiemko's stance hasn't won him any free airfare
to Atlanta just yet. In the film, he and Wyman play a pair of "cokeheads"
with an unhealthy fascination for the billboard. Half underground "stalk-umentary,"
half semiotics lecture, Enjoy deliberately undermines the Coca-Cola image
by mimicking the look and feel of a real television commercial.
For Baldwin, the key link between Enjoy and "Capitalism"
is their use of ambiguity. They leave it up to the individual viewer to
decide who -- if anyone -- is being attacked.
"There's kind of a love-hate relationship going on,"
Baldwin says. "They say we'll take this object, this crass commercial
object, and we'll make it the central piece in our video. They don't disavow
it like other artists do."
According to Winiemko, that love-hate relationship isn't
accidental. "We really do love that sign," he says. "We love it for its
beautiful monstrosity and for its monstrous beauty."
Baldwin reserves his highest praise for the group behind
the "Seismic Solution" messages that have popped up around the Mission,
SOMA, and other districts over the past two years. A sly protest of the
over-gentrification of San Francisco, the stickers and posters cheerfully
postulate what effects a repeat of the 1906 or 1989 earthquakes might
have on skyrocketing rents, sparse parking, and the city's recent proliferation
of Blockbusters and Pasta Pomodoros.
"Our messages are meant to be seen as social commentary,
meant to inspire thought about the state of the world, meant to make people
think and laugh," reads an online polemic by the group. "We are the seismic
messengers spreading the word about a city that's reached its limit."
By mating the guerrilla-art attitude of early "subvertisement"
works with the style of a legitimate public-service ad campaign, Baldwin
says, Seismic Solution has upheld the "jujitsu" aesthetic central to culture
jamming. "Basically, jujitsu is the art of using the weight of the enemy
against itself," he explains. "With corporations, sometimes the only way
to beat them is not by brute force, but by symbolic agility."
He admits, however, that it isn't exactly clear who
is being thrown over the artist's shoulder in Seismic Solution's case.
With no corporate antagonist, is the enemy city government? Society? The
reader on the street? Again, ambiguity plays a crucial role.
"It's a booby trap," Baldwin says. "People are confused
by the message, but they're drawn in by the language and style. Once they're
seduced by it, they're hit over the head by it. At that point, they have
to accept it, but the beauty of it is it calls into question the whole
frame, the whole purpose of advertising."
Winiemko says he has observed a similar "booby trap"
effect in watching audiences react to Enjoy on the film festival circuit.
"When people see it, there's a confusion at first," Winiemko says. "After
about five minutes they start asking, 'Is this a joke?' After that, they
start to put down their defenses and examine it for what it is."
Aping the style of mainstream advertising has its disadvantages,
of course, from a theoretical standpoint. Where old-school culture jammers
could guarantee viewership by, say, hijacking a prominent billboard to
critique a corporation, the new generation seems more interested, as Winiemko
puts it, in "hijacking the internal thought process that makes advertising
work." As a result, today's culture jammers have to find a way through
the conscious filters set up to protect Americans from media oversaturation.
"A lot of our culture is based on people giving something
one cursory glance," Winiemko laments, sounding like a Madison Avenue
executive. "That's hurt us a few times. People don't want to take the
extra time to look at something and find out what it's really about."
Maybe that's why the artists behind Seismic Solution,
"Capitalism" and Enjoy, along with other hard-to-pigeonhole people and
groups such as the pie-throwing Biotic Baking Brigade, collectively rely
on another tool: humor. Just as recent advertising campaigns like Tanqueray's
"Mr. Jenkins" series have co-opted culture jamming's style, it seems artists
have stolen a page from such ad agencies as San Francisco's Goodby Silverstein
& Partners, creators of the "Got Milk" campaign. Simply put, humor sells
-- even when you're selling subversion.
"A lot of artists I know tell me they can't get their
message out without some form of ironic twist," says Cox. "Unless your
work does something funny, the mainstream media isn't going to report
on it, and you really need the mainstream media nowadays to get your message
out."