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Culture Jamming

From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times

Culture Jamming: Ji Lee's Bubble Project

Culture Jamming is a form of artistic intervention that involves the creative appropriation of symbols, media and technologies to reveal and subvert the dominant structures and socio-political inequities of the status quo.

Through artistic interventions, hoaxes, tactical media pranks, etc., culture jammers direct public attention to the caesura between the fundamental values of a society (e.g. justice, democracy, civil rights, security, freedom, etc.) and its normative social, political, and environmental practices, with the intention of inspiring renewed debate and meaningful social transformations.

Cultural critic Mark Derry explains culture jamming "might best be described as media hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics, all in one. Billboard bandits, pirate TV and radio broadcasters, media hoaxers, and other vernacular media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders, investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings are all culture jammers."

Contents

History

Negativland

Culture Jamming has a compelling and distinguished history and has played a prominent role in a number of artistic, intellectual and social movements during the last eighty years. The Dadaist, Surrealist, Situationist International, Civil Rights, Anti-War, Environmental, Human Rights, Culture Jamming and Anti-Globalization movements have all successfully employed culture jamming techniques in their collective struggles to engage with, and fundamentally alter, the normative practices and dominant discourses of the status quo.

Although the term culture jamming was first used in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativland, the concept itself dates back to at least the suffrage and avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. These radical artists and self-described social agitators adopted sociopolitical issues as their primary focus and challenged dominant conceptions about art and artists, directly confronting the rigidity and hierarchical superiority of the art institutions.

Groups of avant-garde artists across Europe developed ways of breaking away from the rules of compositional harmony and representation. Dada artists, for instance, embraced counter-aesthetic imagery and modern techniques like photomontage, which easily facilitated the creation of satirical forms of visual representation and which, because it didn’t require special skills to create, resisted the privileged status of the artist as a trained professional. Marcel Duchamp, the most well known of the Dadaists, has been described as a “shock artist” who used his art to confront and expose the insanity of the post war world.

From Duchamp’s perspective the world that emerged from the horror of World War I was pathological and insane. Duchamp discerned that he had to use his art to call attention to this reality. Like ‘shock artists’ before and after him, Duchamp railed against the social, cultural, political and religious restrictions that undermine our ability to cope with the derangements that confront us.

Guy Debord

The Surrealists adopted this stance of defiance towards the status quo in the 1920s by proclaiming that their aim was to overthrow capitalism through the liberation of the unconscious. They condoned political actions that were playfully absurd and purposeless, and therefore, not tethered to the utilitarian demands of the capitalism. These concepts later influenced Guy Debord and the Situationist International during the 1950s and 1960s.

Building on Marx’s theory of ‘commodity fetishism,’ the Situationists declared that our real lives had been co-opted by the spectacular media events and commodity consumption of the modern world. As a response to this ‘society of the spectacle,’ the Situationists advocated the idea of ‘spontaneous living’ as a way of reviving the creativity of everyday life. They developed the concept of detournement which, roughly translated, can be defined as a ‘turning around,’ essentially the act of pulling an image out of its original context to create a new meaning. Many culture jammers also find inspiration in Alinsky’s (1989) metaphor of “mass political jujitsu,” which Alinsky describes as “utilizing the power of one part of the power structure against another part…the superior strength of the Haves become their own undoing” (p. 152).

Klein (2000) has aptly described these and other forms of creative cultural intervention as “semiotic Robin Hoodism” (p. 280). She asserts that, as a result of newly accessible digital technologies and a steady increase in aggressive commercialism, culture jamming has experienced a revival in recent years. Klein explains that culture jammers, who are influenced by media theorists’ calls for less corporate control and more democratic forms of media, are now literally “writing theory on the streets” (p. 284). She describes culture jamming as a challenge to antiquated interpretations of freedom of expression and consumer-driven notions of public space, and provides justification for the creative tactics adopted by culture jammers by contextualizing their work within the milieu of contemporary artistic practices.

Key Concepts and Terms

Quotations

  • Artists will always make art by re-configuring our shared cultural languages and references, but as those shared experiences shift from firsthand to mediated, and the most powerful political forces in our society are as likely to be multinational corporations as politicians, a new set of issues emerges that once again raises serious questions about out-of-date definitions of freedom of expression in a branded culture. In this context, telling video artists that they can’t use old car commercials, or musicians that they can’t sample or distort lyrics, is like banning the guitar or telling a painter he can’t use red. The underlying message is that culture is something that happens to you. You buy it at the Virgin Megastore or Toys’R’Us and rent it at Blockbuster Video. It is not something in which you participate, or to which you have the right to respond. (Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2000, p. 178)

See Also

External Links

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