»Artists steal or borrow things from other artists and shops all the time, it’s part of the evolution of ideas and normal practice./ […] If you see something in this book you think belongs to you … get over it./ If you see something you want … feel free to borrow it.« (James Cauty, Stamps of Mass Destruction and Other Postal Disasters Vol. II, London 2005)

If only it were that simple. The British Royal Mail, at least, had its problems ignoring James Cauty’s production of stamps, and had 150 products made by his guerrilla company »Cautese National Postal Disservice« confiscated on 5 November 2003. The date was well-chosen, seeing as »5-11« is printed in the upper left corner of the stamps instead of their value: an allusion to Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated annually on this day in England (»Remember, remember the fifth of November«). In the so-called »Gunpowder Plot« of 1606, Fawkes planned to blow up the English parliament building to draw attention to the oppression of Catholics in England. Parallels to radical Islamism and September 11 are of course obvious, and the stamps thus show, in three versions, gigantic clouds of smoke coming from a hole blown through Big Ben at the level of the famous clock face.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. The art department also demanded the surrender of the originals from Cauty’s gas-mask version of the usual stamp showing the Queen. But here, things got complicated. For, how can you hand over the original of something that has no original, because it has emerged from the digital processing of a basic model in Photoshop? So Cauty gave the post office a CD with jpegs of his stamp motifs and, lo and behold, it was completely satisfied. Which puts us slap bang in the middle of the eternal abyss of original and copyright in the digital era. Not even the art department of the Royal Mail was certain whether the fact that Cauty’s stamps could theoretically be used made them a copyright offence, and thus an economic crime, or whether they constituted an offence against artistic »decency« because of the insult to the Queen.

For Cauty, however, copyright conflicts like this one are nothing new – on the contrary, he is always provoking them and making them the conceptional focus of his work. His successful music project The KLF, with which, together with Bill Drummond, he swept the board in the hit parades in 1991, characterised his clever sampling and collaging procedures used to produce a bombastic potpourri of sound whose sole ambition was to achieve high sales figures. A cunning manipulation of the sensation-seeking media helped greatly to this end. When, for example, ABBA complained about the use of one of their pieces without permission, Cauty and Drummond got into a car with a journalist from the English music magazine »NME« and drove straight to the ABBA office in Stockholm, where they met with closed doors – which, of course, heightened the media impact no end. After KLF disbanded in 1992, the two men wrote their handbook »The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)« before publicly burning a million pounds in a spectacular action in 1994.

This radical gesture could of course be seen as an ironic, retrospective »payment« of the various copyrights, even if KLF’s juggling with the music industry naturally aimed at the destruction of copyright and of the music industry in general, as Cauty admitted recently in an interview. Many of the guerrilla tactics of »culture jamming« that are currently so popular, be they adbusting, media hoaxing or hactivism, are subject to megalomaniac illusions of this sort. The widespread practice of adbusting, that is, a sort of critical anti-advertising that uses minimal shifts in meaning to subvert existing advertisements, is itself quickly becoming a fashion or, even worse, plugs for the respective companies. This can be seen on T-shirts on which the Puma logo is changed into a fish and accompanied by the word »Tuna«. And even displaying the once-so-effective transformation of the Shell logo into a skull with »Hell« written next to it has degenerated into an empty gesture of hipness, since the Shell cooperation with Nigeria’s ex-dictatorship has long since disappeared from the media. But the way adbusting gets entangled in its own power of attracting attention can be seen in its most flagrant form in the rip-off culture of the skateboard scene. For, from the moment in which the variation of logos itself becomes the trademark of expensive designer skateboards, meaning that existing advertisements only serve as a reference and are no longer transformed into counter-advertisements, adbusting loses its credibility as a critical medium and is in danger itself of degenerating into an all the more effective form of image cultivation.

The football world championship has recently again shown how comprehensively and cynically corporate advertising uses the subversive strategies of adbusting. Coca Cola’s »It’s your Heimspiel« campaign simulated the growing protest of fans against the complete commercialisation of football, and proclaimed the return to the basics and essence of the game in good old »reclaim the streets« manner. However, Coca Cola was beaten at its own game by Puma’s shamelessly cynical Africa advertisement, which simply packaged the heartless practices of the player-marketers – and thus also the production of its own products in sweatshops - in ironic (and racist) manner.
Adbusting is so susceptible to such treatment because it itself is only based on logos and does not really engage with its targets or intervene. The strategies to fight copyright are much more effective because of the difficulty of controlling the exchange of data in open-source, open-content and peer-to-peer forums. However, even here, the problem of their having any real political effect remains, especially with regard to the exchange of music and film on the Internet. There is no question that Napster and all its successors have shaken the music and film industry more massively than the KLF could ever have imagined. But it is only a weakening that results less from a change in political awareness, which KLF were aiming at with their exposure of market mechanisms, than from the hedonism of the consumers, who simply take what they can get.
So, although it would be naïve to glorify adbusting and downloading per se as subversive actions, for example, in the sense of Michel de Certeau’s creation of free space by means of everyday appropriations and practices, culture jamming does still contain a subversive potential. However, such strategies must be connected with lengthy processes of clarification and analysis if they are to have a more sustained and profound impact. Here, the Internet, with its possibilities for free exchange of opinions and information in blogs and open-content forums like MySpace, is almost ideal. But James Cauty’s guerrilla post also makes a small contribution here, simply because it does not stick simply at pirating, but also provides a stimulus for more profound engagement, as with the »5-11« motif.

http://www.cnpdonline.com/home.htm
http://www.adbusters.org
http://www.myspace.com

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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