So far I have read a lot of websites that when you put in a search like...origins of culture jamming you get a very specific answer about how culture jamming was coined by an Alt-rock group from Berkley California in 1984 or there abouts. This is a very simple and perfectly acceptable explaination for where culture jamming came from....but what about before culture jamming got it's name, people had to have been doing it. Culture jamming is a protest. It can be a protest about whatever the artist thinks is corrupting or leading the world astray. It's a manifest form of protesting that allows the message of the protester to be conveyed to whatever audience they choose to expose it to. I read an article online by Steve Mizrach that said some of the first culture jammers were people who practised detournement. Detournement began in medieval times with authority figures dressing up in fool's clothing to atest that their authority is socially created and maintained. It changed through time into the changing of dialogue in popular images to convey a message that is a response to the ideologies that are already appearent in mass media. Culture jamming changing from the authority figures showing or perhaps throwing in their subjects face the power that they hold is a way of showing that this authority is made by the society that existed at the time and is only upheld by the societal beliefs that exist. The switch to protesting these societal conventions is action to try to throw down these societal beliefs and change the pattern that has existed since medieval times. So as you can see culture jamming existed far before the 1980's.
Andy Warhol: An early example of culture jamming that I want to bring up is Andy Warhol, specifically his very famous cambell's soup image. Warhol's art is classified as pop art, which I take to mean as comveying whats popular in art. The cambell's soup image is a blatant comment on consumerism in the Western world. In no other nation would an image of a soup can become something that people would celebrate. It is a comment on rising consumerism in the 1960's, painted in 1968. If Warhol was making pop art and chose the simple image of the soup can it was to let the viewers know that the country is addicted to buying and owning things, hoarders of anything that will allow them to be able to say that they own the newest or latest thing. Think about how many people might have had this image hanging on their wall, further perpetuating the message. Not only is the image of consumerism obvious in image itself but the actual art is furthering the point. The point is...people will buy anything.
Abbey Road
Good work Abbey Road - although the term doesn't appear until recently, it has been around for a very long time, so that raises questions of 'is it a culture jam because it looks like a culture jam, or a culture jam because it calls itself a culture jam'?
ReplyDeleteGrassroots movements don't need a label, perhaps?
The Doctor