client: Levi’s
improvement: Charlie Manson
date: September 1, 1997
San Francisco Examiner
November 12, 1997
FAUXVERTISING: THE REALEST THING
by D.S. Black
Charlie@levi.com was the macabre address given on the billboard. At the bottom of a red, psychedelic vortex, the coolly deranged face of Charles Manson surveyed eastbound traffic approaching the Bay Bridge.
The BLF (Billboard Liberation Front) had struck again, performing a “signage improvement” on a high concept cigarette ad peddling jean-o-cide on the largest billboard in the City. This culture-jamming, guerrilla organization has provided Northern Californians with “truth in advertising since 1977.”
By using the jailed cult leader and celebrity-slayer as a corporate spokesconvict, the BLF linked the selling of 90s lifestyle accessories with the dark and killer side of the 60s–a far cry from woozy summer of love nostalgia.
It might seem a bit extreme until one realizes that the parody could almost pass for a real advertising campaign in this day and age. In the 60s Warhol used images of Chairman Mao to sell mass-produced art. In the 90s, Stalin appears in display ads in slick lifestyle magazines aimed at the moneyed digerati.
Can Hitler and Pol Pot be far behind? Why not have Lee Harvey Oswald or Charlie Manson, two of America’s most notorious killers, pimping blue jeans? The logic of the market place has never been strong on taste.
When Calvin Klein packed all the downtown Decaux kiosks with bulemic, Heroin-chic models and the words JUST BE–was that in bad taste? It prompted one ad hoc group to fire up the laserprinter, roll out the office labels, and change every one of them to JUST BUY.
Direct action–vigilanteism–is a time-honored San Francisco tradition. Instead of lynching suspected killers and crooks, as the Committees of Vigilance did in the 1850s, today’s outlaw activists don’t shoot the messenger; they mutate the message.
The French call this act of subversive appropriation detournement. A lively and ironic genre, we might call it fauxvertising, where a message is creatively falsified to reach a higher truth or deeper meaning. It takes an unacceptable sales pitch and turns it into a provocative statement. Instead of selling something one may or may not need, the idea is to kill your television and start thinking about issues that concern all of us. Which is the last thing advertisers want us to do.
Situationist writer Guy Debord described our modern world as “the society of the spectacle.” For many of us, bread and circuits are not enough.
Beginning with futurism and dadaism, the avant garde movements of this century have frequently employed cutup methods, from collage to “found” artwork, as a means of disclosing dreams and teasing truth from the dark matter of everyday life.
Some ads have recently absorbed the graffiti style, leading one billboard for a new car to look as though it had been altered in ways that burnished its message. From a welcoming “Hi,” the car’s greeting was crudely spraycanned by the advertising company to read “Hip,” which prompted a further correction by a disgruntled member of the public: “Hype 666.”
When Billy Graham came to town, the faithful were summoned by ads in windows and the dirigible-sized broadsides we call billboards. One clever group of media heretics inserted by the words “Do You Know Where You’re Going Tomorrow?” the upraised hand with beckoning finger used by Microsoft to sell its web browser. Only something was different: instead of a come-hither, the finger pointed upward, an F-word to the pious.
“A gesture which is certainly in line with how many either view their computers, or the people who peddle them,” wrote a friend in an email after spying this altered billboard.
Fortunately she snapped a picture, as the form is ephemeral. Corrections usually last mere hours before a new paid message is slapped over them.
We live in a market society. Increasingly this commodity culture is abuzz of sales activity. With consumption the engine of the economy, that vast sucking sound–the noise of “progress”–is so taken for granted it gets to beg some awfully big questions.
Public space has been carved up and sold to the highest bidder. Our attention and interest as consumers is itself a resource to be exploited, and to this end we see media collaborate in evangelizing a mindless and voracious way of life.
Do we live to buy, or buy to live? Given the struggle to survive, it’s small wonder the expression “bought it” used to mean killed in action.
“The only war that matters is the war against the imagination,” chanted Diane di Prima at the recent Summer of Love commemoration.
In this time of toxic information overload, our real heroes are cut and paste warriors like the BLF, who put themselves on the line to make us smile, and give us something to think about. A pause for reflection: a gift of the realest thing.
D.S. Black is a San Francisco writer who will be observing “Buy Nothing Day” the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Published in a slightly edited form by the SF Examiner on November 12, 1997.