“Culture Jammers” Bring Socio/Economic Protest To UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- It's been more than 30 years since their predecessors threw verbal grenades at the military-industrial complex, and decades since environmentalists began wrapping themselves around endangered trees and laying down in front of bulldozers.

Nevertheless, the artistic end of socio/economic protest -- the culture jammers -- are alive, healthy and on campus at the University at Buffalo. The jammers have different ends to their design; different methods to their deliberate madness.

Some play naughty games with sacred corporate logos, some investigate the physical perfection of commercial icons, others note or otherwise protest the manipulation of public consciousness and values by commercial interests. Still others re-manipulate commercial manipulations in an attempt to subvert their original meaning.

A cross section of jammers and jammer-types will be presented in a new exhibition opening Sept. 17 in the UB Art Gallery.

The opening reception for "Persuasion: Tales of Commerce and the Avant-Garde" will be held from 7-9 p.m. Sept. 24 in the gallery's first-floor exhibition space in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus. The show will run through Nov. 14. Gallery hours are Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m.

In conjunction with the exhibit, a special event tentatively scheduled for 3 p.m. Sept. 24 -- titled "The Rafts of the Archetypes" -- will feature the launch onto Lake LaSalle of three 10-foot-high, two-dimensional images of major cultural icons. The artist is Swimming Horse, leader of the Hocus Focus art collective. The idea of his temporary art project, he says, is to liberate the images of Amelia Earhardt, Pablo Picasso and Samuel Beckett from their roles as pitchmen in Apple computers' "think different" advertising campaign.

"Persuasion" features work in various media by 11 artists' collectives and individual artists whose work may seem inexplicable at first. Upon further consideration, however, it cuts exquisitely close to the bone.

The presenters work in many media, from oil to video to visual "interventions" that highlight alternative implications of the commodities exchange.

The show's curator, Karen Emenhiser, says the exhibition offers an opportunity to entertain a number of questions. Such as, what is the role of the visual artist in the context of commercial advertising, what does our frenzied inflation of the "image" of someone or something mean about the value and meaning we assign to that image, and can civic discourse compete with the din produced by competing commercial pitches?

She notes that a collection of advertisements form a contextual backdrop to the artists in this show, all of whom address this spectacle of image and message.

Group presenters include Hocus Focus, The Cicada Corps of Artists and General Idea. They are joined by individual artists with similar interests.

Some of the art is purely analytical; some retaliative as well.

There's the wittily named "Vanilla Nightmares," Adrian Piper's "artistic reuse" of full-page New York Times' ads to provoke racial and racio/sexual anxiety. Jonathan Horowitz copies the logo for Maxell videotape (whose name refers redundently to "maximum excellence") onto Maxell tape itself, then copies it again, over and over, until the image completely breaks up, its static raising the question of what "maximum excellence" means, anyway.

Gareth James' offers the giddy lunacy of an ad hoc "promotional" campaign for his "product," REM or "Revolutionary Everlasting Material." A video work by Daniel Pflumm requires the AT&T logo to morph endlessly at warp speed to the strains of hoppin' industrial music.

"Their goals are varied," Emenhiser says, "to re-insert public discourse into public spaces, to insist upon personal value in the corporate state, to challenge the glossy veneer of consumerism while exploring that veneer and its potent appeal, to break the trance."

Jammers are not ideosyncratic, artistically speaking. They may not be literal camp followers of Herbert Marcuse, Guy Debord or the Situationists (who promote, among other things, a turning away from prefabricated aesthetic elements in the environment), but they would be cozy in their company.

Artist Richard Hawkins, for instance, presents selections from his "Disembodied Zombies" series. Each begins as a photograph of the exquisitely altered male body used to sell, say, Calvin Klein jockey shorts. Hawkins beheads the guy and takes his cosmetic digitization one step further -- "perfecting" the image and suspending it like the head of John the Baptist against a photoshopped background. A commercial treatment of youth and beauty turns into a zombie-emblem of the denial of decay that so marks the ad world.