Comment from Mary Dery

Cited in my NYT article on culture jamming, Johnson was, in fact, an example of jamming at its most innocuous, a benignly “transgressive” public artist who painted anachronistic ads, done in a convincingly anachronistic style, on New York buildings. Some were for actual clients (such as the cable TV network Nick at Nite, others were for nonexistent, genially parodic products. Folder contains postcards of his work.

Comment from Mary Dery

Articles about the radical environmentalists Earth First!, who often used culture jamming techniques (“media monkeywrenching,” etc.) in their eco-guerrilla campaign against the logging industry, corporate polluters, and the establishment media (which, in their eyes, often engaged in both-sides-ism in its narrative framing of environmentalist critiques of the corporatism and capitalism). Also includes material related to Dave Foreman, the group’s founder and an uncompromising advocate of what ‘60s radicals called “direct action.”

Comment from Mary Dery - Correspondence, calendars, media coverage, booklet of essays related to 1996 film and video series on culture jamming presented by the Toronto-based Pleasure Dome, “an artist-run presentation organization and publisher dedicated to … fostering a culture of artists’ experimental media, including video, film, and other forms of moving image. … Pleasure Dome is mandated to: … present a variety of different genres, styles, and approaches from historical to contemporary strategies of cinematic spectacle, disruption, and other attempts to re-imagine the experimental media tradition…” (https://pdome.org/about/). - “Jam What?” Printout of Video Vault essay on CJ - “Subvertising: Culture Jamming Reemerges on the Media Landscape,” Naomi Klein, Village Voice, May 6, 1997 - Poster, correspondence, booklet, flyer, articles about Channel Zero (Stephen Marshall, Sarah Aston, etc.), a Canadian group of media-activist filmmakers, “guerrilla television” exponents, and...

Comment from Mark Dery

Contains correspondence, pre-publication critical response from a colleague, early version, and catalogue listing for my Open Magazine Pamphlet Series broadside, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs.

Comment from Mark Dery Uncategorizable acts of everyday absurdism or prankishness with a socio-politically satirical edge, including mock tracts by culture jammer Kembrew McLeod; a listing for Static, a ‘zine devoted to “poetic terrorism, work & media sabotage, pranks, and scams”; postcards for the tongue-in-cheek morality squad, The Upright Citizens Brigade; hoax newspaper, the Seattle Post Intelligence; NYT magazine item on Shephard Fairey’s Andre the Giant graffiti meme; “88 Ways to Sabotage Your School”; High Times magazine item about underground campaign to rubber-stamp word balloon saying “I grew hemp” on George Washington’s portrait on one-dollar bills; Fa Ga Ga Ga bumper sticker reading, “I’m an anarchist and I vote!”; “The American Dream Vest,” a “do-it-yourself paper [bulletproof] vest” produced by Friendly Fire, under the auspices of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; promo materials for Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of...

Comment from Mark Dery

File contains articles on pranks to play in your local supermarket;
“philosophical” signs covertly posted in New York subway cars;
Christmas pranks; anti-telemarketer telephone pranks;
prank involving fake state stationery for California governor Pete Wilson;
prank involving covert insertion of naked Jessica Rabbit into laser disks of Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?;
profile of pie-throwing Belgian prankster-protestor Noel Godin;
“rogue computer programmer” who secretly added images of men kissing men to a computer game;
prankster who critiqued Jonathan Borovsky’s public sculpture, “Hammering Man,” by adding a ball and chain to it;
“The Fine Art of Pranking” by Reverend Ivan Stang, founder of the Church of the Subgenius;
The Jerky Boys, who parlayed their phone pranks into a career;
publisher’s catalogue page for Wicked Acts of Sacrilege: The Book of College Pranks.

Comment from Mary Dery File contains general overviews of the culture jamming phenomenon, from newspaper, magazine, and ‘zine “trend pieces,” interviews with jammers, novels about jammers or media guerrillas (Norman Spinrad’s Pictures at 11), books on jamming (Jamming the Media by Gareth Branwyn), a photo spread in The Face that captures a highly mediated “postmodern moment” of the sort that jammers liked to expose (and which The Face’s narrative framing—in the best British comment-by-not-commenting manner—transforms into an act of deadpan culture jamming); another copy of that Ant Farm “Media Burn” postcard; promo card for Sabotage in the Amweican Workplace; Simon Frith Village Voice item on Dirty Dancing’s “rewriting of pop history,” another instance of the Baudrillardian replacement of the Real by ideologically slanted media simulacra, a cultural dynamic jammers often critiqued; review of Brian Fawcett’s Public Eye: An Investigation into the Disappearance of the World, which...

Comment from Mark Dery

File contains articles about growing corporate concentration in the media, specifically the newsmedia, industry.

Comment from Mark Dery

Folder contains articles documenting the tactical use of the smear tactic (“liberal media bias”) by the Right to demonize journalists and the newsmedia in general; articles on media bias as demonstrable fact; direct-mail marketing by Republican politicians, GOP organizations, conservative and far-right publications and organizations (such as the Cato Institute) weaponizing the charge of “liberal media bias”; less frequent instances of liberal/Left/progressive outlets such as The Nation and Steven Brill’s Content using the charge of conservative/establishment/corporate media bias to solicit subscriptions.

Comment from Mark Dery

File of articles, website printouts (including statements from the group’s own website) about the Australian billboard subvertisers B.U.G.A. U.P. (Billboard-Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions), a pun on the Aussie slang phrase “bugger up,” meaning to foul up something, hopelessly botch a task, etc. (Note: Clippings, mostly photos of BUGA UP’s work without editorial comment, are from unidentified sources clipped and photocopied by Craig Baldwin and given to M.D. during interview in S.F. in the 1990’s.)

Comment from Mary Dery Promotional materials, correspondence, media coverage of “billboard bandits” such as The Billboard Liberation Front (BLF), Cicada Corps of Artists, BUGA UP (Australian), Ron English, etc. whose guerrilla media criticism takes the form of clandestine, illegal alterations of billboards (and other advertisements in public spaces) to subversive effect, often in the service of anti-advertising or anti-consumerist agendas. - Smashing the Image Factory, user’s manual on the theory and practice of billboard banditry. - Notes for, and final typescript draft of, my seminal essay on “subvertising,” which includes a mention of billboard banditry. - “The Billboard Jungle,” Mother Jones, May/June 2000 - Publisher’s catalogue page for Advertising Outdoors: Watch This Space! - Utne Reader article, “The Billboard Commandos,” about billboard banditry - “Billboard Corrections,” article on BB by noted art historian and scholar Douglas Kahn (author of a respected study of proto-jammer John...

Comment from Mark Dery A Jersey City-based group of culture jammers closely associated with Cicada Corps of Artists (with whom they had many members in common), Artfux was founded on October 31, 1990. “The ARTFUX founders and team of artists were Ray Arcadio, Orlando Cuevas, Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, Mirta C. Del Valle, Fred Gaston, Tony DiRobertis and John Santerineross. They were the pioneers of Culture Jamming, the practice of parodying ads and hijacking billboards to drastically alter their messages. They pushed the boundaries of collaborative art making, where artworks were created by two or more of the members, sometimes the entire group. They developed street and gallery performances that received international coverage. The most famous being ‘The Trial of Senator Jesse Helms,’ performed on the steps of Capitol Hill. Artfux also created numerous posters that received international acclaim for their design and message. They also appeared on the Jerry Springer show and were featured on a PBS...