Culture Jamming

At the Woodly Park/National Zoo metro stop in DC, as you descend into the first sub-level, hung on either side of the tunnel walls are advertisements.

A few months back, one advertisement pictured an African-American man and women in an embrace. He was wearing a tuxedo and she had on a wedding dress. Under the picture, words read: "Marriage. It Works." Just below these words, in black marker, someone scribbled: "Yeah, let gays do it." It hung this way for several weeks.

A new series of advertisements have since been hung. Recently, one was advertising an aircraft manufacturer. The image was of a military plane--perhaps a C-130--flying high over a jagged moutian range. Words read: "We Make it Happen." In black marker, beneath the plan's belly, someone drew a line of bombs being dropped. The poster still hangs there.

Both of these instances can be seen as a kind of "culture jamming," where corporate sponsored advertisements are tactically turned, by some fast writing, into a counter-message. The counter-messages use the corporate sanctified images and their (often mystified) political positions, to make a subversive political statement that operates within a broader context. In the above examples, "Yeah, let gays do it" was written during the recent national debate over the meaning of marriage and the right of same sex partners to be legally joined. The bombs beneath the plane were scribbled there in the context of the Bush administration's current "war on terrorism." Together, these small acts of everyday resistance can be seen as attempts at prying open a rather closed interpretation. They probe at the predominate political and corporate arrangements that decorate the urban American landscape, and they attempt to reassert a marginalized reading of the events onto the public transcript.