CULTURE-NORTH AMERICA: Here Come the Culture Jammers

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jun 27 1995 (IPS) - The advertisement is like hundreds of others on billboards throughout the United States and the world: waif-thin British model Kate Moss peers out at viewers, draped in loose, chic black clothing from the Calvin Klein company.

What makes the advert different is the bold caption above Moss’s seemingly hungry face: “Feed Me.”

Calvin Klein may not approve, but “corrected” adverts like that one are becoming more commonplace as groups in the United States and Canada take aim against advertising itself.

From Vancouver’s Media Foundation to New Jersey’s Cicada and New York’s Guerrilla Girls, a movement sometimes called “culture jamming” is surfacing.

The culture jammers use the very techniques of the advertising world against what they deem is an overly commercialised climate, obsessed with consumption.

To take on the multi-billion dollar advertising world, they often act as real guerrillas, altering billboards in the dead of night to warn viewers about the lies of consumerism.

Cicada artists superimpose spoof adverts over real ones to play upon viewers’ shock at the disparity between a familiar or famous advert image and the colder visions attached to it.

In one Cicada spoof, a New Jersey billboard featuring the simple Kool Cigarettes logo, “Forever Kool”, is juxtaposed against a visual showing the feet of a body lying in a morgue. A tag on the toe of the corpse says the victim died of lung cancer.

“Seizing a billboard is like the Boston Tea Party,” said Cicada member Adam McGovern, referring to the 1773 symbolic rebellion when U.S. colonists dumped British tea into Boston Harbour. “It’s like a little revolution.”

Some actual revolutionary groups have jumped on the bandwagon. The Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party last year countered a series of public New York adverts condemning panhandling by beggars on the subways with a set of stickers to be placed on the offending adverts.

The stickers offered a nice blend of Marxist dogma and advertising-world sloganeering: “The Homeless Are Not Criminals … The System Is!”

Other culture jammers take on the world of images that advertising suggests is reality: a world in which people are young and beautiful, and live to consume. (MORE)

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