Comments from Mary Dery

Articles about publishers of Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, which published my Culture Jamming pamphlet. Pamphlet Series catalogues and flyers, including a listing for their culture-jamming/media activist pamphlet, Seizing the Media: Treatise of the Immediast Underground. Review of Seizing the Media by guerilla media aficionado Gareth Branwyn. Announcements of my Open Magazine pamphlet. Announcement of “Seizing the Media: A Networkers’ Congress.”

Comments from Mary Dery Cartoons by Tom Tomorrow; book excerpt on feminist artists who culture-jam; parody ad by Komar & Melamid; New Yorker article on Mel Chin, whose work critiques the media and consumer culture; NYT article on art and politics that touches on works and issues related to CJ; article on “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation” at LA MoCA, “the first significant overview of the strain of 1980s art derived from the style and substance of the media and popular culture”; slides, letter sent by artist Naomi Lazard in response to my NYT article on culture jamming; announcement of exhibition by Jaime Davidovich, whose work engages with issues related to CJ; article on artist Marilyn Minter’s critique of “TV Food Porn”; article, “Artists of Conscience”; J. Hoberman article in Village Voice on “Image World” show at Whitney; call for contributions to anthology about “agit-prop, theory, disinformation,” and other issues...

Comments from Mary Dery

Various articles, a few pieces of literature from the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) itself.

Comments from Mary Dery

Various articles about the parade, whose carnivalesque (in the Mikhail Bakhtin sense) spirit and use of the archetype of the holy fool/mad clown to subversive, socially satirical ends makes it a subcategory of culture jamming, and its organizer, Ed Holmes.
File also includes Saint Stupid buttons produced by the parade’s organizers; a vinyl single (“St. Stupid Wrap” [sic] b/w “Stupid Marches On”;
posters/flyers for the parade.

Comments from Mark Dery

Articles about, and by, culture-jamming activist hackers such as Anonymous,performance artists who use digital media and the Internet to critique the ideologies of social media and Net culture (such as Critical Art Ensemble; Ricardo Dominguez and the Electronic Disturbance Theater).

Comments from Mary Dery Articles about Sonic Outlaws (a documentary about the culture-jamming collage band Negativland’s legal war with the rock group U2 over Negativland’s appropriation of U2’s music in their sociopolitical, satirical music), Tribulation 99: Specters of the Spectrum, and other works and activities of San Francisco culture jammer and self-described “cargo cultist” filmmaker Cliff Baldwin. File also contains envelope of photographic stills from Tribulation 99 and press materials for same; two handwritten notes from Baldwin; and a Village Voice feature on “fiction in nonfiction films,” which includes a section on Baldwin’s Tribulation 99 and Sonic Outlaws. Also included in file are calendar flyers announcing screenings at Marshall Weber’s underground cinema, video-art gallery, and low-cost, artist-run community video-art training and production facility, ATA (Artists’ Television Access), on Valencia Avenue in San Francisco.Articles related to CBS lawsuit...

Comments from Mary Dery

Interviews with, and articles about, the culture-jamming digital-art performance collective, Critical Art Ensemble, “five artists who are committed to establishing an alternative political and aesthetic critique in areas outside the main cultural centers by producing art, shows, and criticism…” File also includes Action is Addiction booklet against the so-called “War on Drugs”; announcement for CAE’s Autonomedia book Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Popular Ideas.

Comments from Mary Dery Adbusters is a Canadian anti-consumerism magazine in whose pages I introduced, to founding editor (and ex-ad man) Kalle Lasn and his Canadian readers, the concept of “culture jamming,” which Lasn later made the focus of Adbusters, so much so that detractors—myself among them—called him to account for (wait for the irony) commodifying anti-consumerism (through the “culture jamming”-branded merchandise he peddled). File includes a 1991 letter from the magazine’s managing editor, in response to my NYT article on CJ, asking me to contribute to the magazine, and a follow-up letter from same in response to my response; media critic Carrie McLaren’s critique of Lasn and Adbusters (“Culture Jamming™ Brought to You By Adbusters”); Village Voice advertising critic Leslie Savan’s article about Adbusters; the magazine’s 1997 “environmental calendar,” which features “the year’s best in Subvertising” (“subvertisements,” a term I introduced in the magazine’s pages, are anti-advertisements...

Comments from Mark Dery - The collage illustrator Stephen Kroninger, a fixture for years at The Village Voice, descends from sociopolitical satirists like the photomonteur John Heartfield as well as the Dadaists’ and the Situationists’ tactical use of appropriated, often desecrated mass-media imagery and therefore has much in common with culture jammers—which is why I asked him to illustrated the cover of my Open Magazine pamphlet on culture jamming. This file includes a rough transcript of an interview with Kroninger by my wife, Margot Mifflin, who was then a freelance journalist (and is now a professor of English and journalism at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism), together with a letter from Kroninger to Mifflin. It also includes articles on Kroninger, a MoMA announcement about a show of his work, postcards announcing gallery exhibitions including his art, an article on Kroninger’s video for Public Enemy, clippings from Voice, New York Observer, Entertainment Weekly featuring...