Appropriation: Large Scale Antics of Ron English and Banksy

As highlighted in the previous post, cultural sabotage via parody is not always the most effective strategy.  To start, consumers are smart, and they're turned off when directly bombarded with didactic messages. (Inductive marketing structure, anyone?)  So, to be effective, messages should leave a little wiggle room for interpretation.  Be clever, but try to be a bit vague, too.

(Photo credit: KTRX: Houston)

Secondly, it helps if the message is big.  Like, really big.  Ron English, the billboard liberator, makes use of preexisting public spaces to subvert corporate advertising.  He "vandalizes" billboards with surrealist art and subvertisements.  He's posted Jesus drinking Budweiser, and Hitler as an exemplar of "Thinking Differently" (mocking a recent Apple marketing tag). Like the Adbusters magazine, English makes use of culture jamming to get people to critically evaluate the messages they consume.  With advertsing a ubiquitous force surrounding us, we're not used to studying the billboards or posters we regularly pass.  By contradicting usual messages, English interrupts, or "jams" our usual processing mechanisms. "We're not used to seeing ads that aren't trying to sell anything," English explains in POPaganda.

If you don't know English (pun unintended), you may be more familiar with Banksy.  The Bristol native (yes, he actually is English) is similarly known for his large-scale, guerilla artwork.  He's scrawled graffiti art over the West Bank wall in Israel, marked up the penguin enclosure at the London Zoo, and somehow snuck an inflatable doll, dressed as a Guantanomo prisoner, into Disneyland's Big Thunder Mountain ride.  Like English, Banksy uses large, vivid, and decidedly illegal art pieces to get people to stop and do a double-take.

(Graffiti art, in which a man removes graffiti.  Photo credit: Ethur, A Polite Rebellion Against Mass Thought)

Both English and Banksy make use of cultural appropriation, or the borrowing of familiar images and symbols .  The point is to place popular, easily recognizable icons in different settings to create new meaning. Specifically, these artists reclaim public spaces from media groups and large corporations.  They enable people to, using a shared knowledge of popular characters or images, reevaluate how most people interact with media. And in this way, guerrilla artists set the stage for cultural resistance.