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Culture Jammers

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‘Every joke is a tiny revolution [because] … it upsets the established order.’
George Orwell

Ever heard the story about the guy who asked to have ‘sweatshop’ embroidered on his custom made Nikes?  How about the group that registered www.GWBush.com to reveal the ‘real’ reasons why Bush was running for presidency?  Leah Craven looks at the phenomenon designed to upset the status quo, known as culture jamming.

Culture jammers are post-modern revolutionary media activists.  It’s not a particularly new trend, but it’s becoming increasingly popular amongst disillusioned people wanting to take a stance against the commercialisation of contemporary culture.  Some view it as an anti-authoritarian resistance movement against global capitalism, while others, like Dubya, see it as just plain trouble making. 

Subverting dominant paradigms

If you’ve ever seen a commercial slogan altered on a billboard – chances are you’ve seen an example of culture jamming.  It takes place in various forms, but the overall intention is to take an existing media form, and subvert it to create a message that tells the other side of the story, so to speak.

Culture jamming involves taking a “spectacle and…creatively tipping it back on itself in such a way that it becomes a counter tool,” Kalle Lasn told Washington University’s Centre for Communication and Civic Engagement (CCCE).  This, he believes, breaks people out “of their media-consumer trances”. 

Lasn is the founder of Adbusters, one of the most visible culture jamming groups, who are based out of Canada.  By reorganising or parodying existing media representations, they aim to create a new meaning carrying a political message or social commentary.  Their targets are often alcohol or tobacco companies, however one famous effort by Adbusters parodied an advertisement for the fragrance Obsession by Calvin Klein.  It used similar black and white photography to the original advertisement, but with an image of a bulimic model throwing up in a toilet.

“The logic of culture jamming is to convert easily identifiable images into larger questions about such matters as corporate responsibility, the ‘true’ environmental and human costs of consumption, or the private corporate uses of the ‘public’ airwaves,” state the CCCE.  In the case of Adbuster’s Obsession parody, they were making a fairly overt statement about the part the fashion industry plays in representing unhealthy images of the female body.

Jamming to Damn the Man
Sven Woodside from The University of Amsterdam believes that culture jamming is “a form of creative, non-violent resistance against the way we view the world”.

The CCCE state that “culture jammers play on familiar commercial memes such as the Nike swoosh, the McDonald's happy meal, or the Coca Cola polar bears to engage people of different political persuasions in thinking about the implications of their fashion statements or eating habits”.

Take Jonah Peretti for example.  He requested to have the word ‘sweatshop’ embroidered on his custom made Nikes.  He was refused, but got his point across when he circulated the email exchange with Nike all over the world.  When the issue made it into news bulletins world wide, the mass media had inadvertently become a site where, according to the CCCE, “questions about the limits of consumer freedom and the fashion statement involving expensive shoes made by child sweatshop labour” were posed.

Woodside states that “by jamming, creatively playing with well-known aspects of our cultural symbols, jammers hope to be able to point out the cracks in the facade of what our culture has become. They feel that our culture is not ‘ours’ anymore but one that is composed and prescribed to us by large money making, money generating media, advertising or other large corporations.” 

The elephant in the room
In September 2006, Banksy – a British graffiti artist, public prankster and “art terrorist”, exhibited his latest work in a show called Barely Legal in Los Angeles.  The ‘elephant in the room’ metaphor (ie. an issue that people are uncomfortable talking about) was taken to extremes by literally having a live elephant in the exhibition space, painted red and adorned with gold fleurs-de-lis.

The motivation behind Banky’s elephant was revealed in the New York Times, “1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water.  20 billion people live below the poverty line.  Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it.  Anybody want a free glass of wine?”

For several years, and without revealing his identity, Banksy has pulled various publicity stunts.   In May 2005 he placed a piece of “primitive artwork” in the British Museum amongst the existing exhibition without guards noticing, and museum goers were quite surprised to see a stone etching of a cave man pushing a shopping trolley.  In early September 2006, according to the New York Times he placed a “blow-up doll dressed as a Guantanamo detainee inside the fence of the big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland”.

Comedy as a weapon
One thing that money generally facilitates is power.  However, as John Ralston Saul writes in A Doubters Companion, in our current “technocracy…comedy remains one of the last powerful weapons we have”.

Getting a message through to a mainstream audience is a difficult, but crucial, aspect of culture jamming.  Andy Bichlebaum and Mike Bonnano, otherwise known as The Yes Men, have cleverly infiltrated several international forums, under various guises. 

In 1999 Bichlebaum and Bonnano made a parody of the WTO website (World Trade Organisation), which was mistaken by some to be the real thing.  Consequently they were invited to conferences to, as their website states, “speak on behalf of the organisations they opposed”.

Bichlebaum presented a speech at the International Legal Studies Conference in Salzburg, in May 2000, posing as Dr Andreas Bichelbauer.  In his speech he presented extreme and satirical takes on WTO policies.  For example, in order to remove hindrances to free trade he suggested, among other things, that siestas be made illegal in Spain and long lunches in Italy – because they get in the way of work.  He also proposed a free market approach to democracy by auctioning votes on the internet to the highest bidder.

When explaining the intentions behind their work, Bichlebaum and Bonnano state on their website: “You know how a funhouse mirror exaggerates your most hideous features? We do that kind of exaggeration operation, but with ideas. We agree with people—turning up the volume on their ideas as we talk, until they can see their ideas distorted in our funhouse mirror.”

‘Liberating’ public space
Culture jamming embodies the ideology that the public space belongs to everyone.  In the 1970s, an Australian activist group that called themselves the Billboard Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGAUP), targeted advertising campaigns from alcohol or tobacco companies. 

They perceived their work to be in the interest of public health, and campaigned to have the advertising made illegal.  Slogans such as ‘Peter Jackson, you’re laughing’ changed to ‘Peter Jackson, you’re coughing’, and a Benson and Hedges advertisement outside a coffee shop was altered to ‘be on edge’.   

New dog, old tricks: cyber activism
Damning the man is an age old phenomenon say Bichlebaum and Bonnano.  On their website they state that “criticising those in power with a smile and a middle finger happens in literature from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, in mythologies from the Volga to the Mississippi, in movements from the Diggers to the Situationists”.

In recent years, the internet has been an effective tool to even up the power balance between resource rich corporations, and resource poor citizens.  As evidenced with www.GWBush.com (see side bar 1), the internet facilitates people without much money, connections or resources get their message into the public sphere.

www.mcspotlight.com was established in 1996 with the intention of exposing the unethical behaviour of McDonalds.  The website was initiated during the ‘McLibel’ lawsuit, in which two British activists were being sued by the McDonald’s Corporation for distributing information that was damaging to McDonald’s reputation. 

Despite the economic power and corporate influence of such an enormous multinational company, The Australian reported that McSpotlight “garnered more support and publicity than McDonalds could ever have imagined in their worst nightmares and what was worse, their high profile and expensive PR efforts to control the damage were ineffective. Negative news stories kept appearing and new information was widely distributed and picked up by global news services.”

With the internet becoming increasingly accessible, and the surge in the popularity of culture jamming – it is becoming harder for corporations to control what kind of information media consumers are accessing. 

The future of media activism
While Lasn concedes that for many people, jamming is just a bit of fun, such as “liberating” a billboard – his work has very serious intentions.  Adbusters created an advertisement that they hope to have aired on mainstream television, which asks “How much harm does a corporation have to do before we question its right to exist?”

In a world that is dominated by advertising and public relations campaigns by corporations and governments, many culture jammers see their work as crucial political activism. 

As Lasn states “we the people have the right to unplug corporations, to actually give corporations a death sentence if they have been bad, really bad like tobacco corporations have been.”

Leah Craven

Links

Adbusters 
http://www.adbusters.org/

Banksy
http://www.banksy.co.uk/

McSpotlight­
http://www.mcspotlight.org/

®™ark
http://www.rtmark.com/

The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/

The Yes Men
http://www.theyesmen.org/

University of Washington: Center for Communication and Civic Engagement
http://depts.washington.edu/ccce/polcommcampaigns/CultureJamming.htm

Bibliography

Meikle, G. (2002) Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet.  New York: Routledge

Pickerel, W., H. Jorgensen & L. Bennett (2002) ‘Culture Jams and Meme Warfare: Kalle Lasn, Adbusters, and media activism: Tactics in Global Activism for the 21st century’.  Viewed via: University of Washington, Center for Communication and Civic Engagement:
http://depts.washington.edu/ccce/polcommcampaigns/CultureJamming.htm

Quart, A. (2000) ‘Cultural Sabotage Waged in Cyberspace’, The New York Times, 17 August

Ralston Saul, J. (1995) The Doubters Companion.  Harmondsworth: Penguin

Reynolds, N. (2005) ‘Origin of new British Museum exhibit looks a bit wobbly’, The Daily Telegraph (UK), 19 May.

Rumble, S. (1997) ‘David Meets Goliath on the Web’, The Australian, 29 April

Woodside, S. (2001) ‘Every joke is a tiny revolution’: Culture jamming and the role of humour.  Unpublished Masters Thesis, The University of Amsterdam.

Wyatt, E. (2006) ‘Arty Elephant Goes Gray’, The New York Times, 19 Sept.: Arts 2

Wyatt, E. (2006) ‘In the Land of Beautiful People, an Artist Without a Face’, New York Times, 15 Sept.: 9.

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