Propaganda of the Deed

“Advertising Shits in Your Head – Strategies for Resistance,” by V. Raoul and M. Bonner, 2019

This is a mostly anarchist and artistic take that pushes back against the omnipresent advertising in public and shared spaces.  Sort of like Adbusters but on the street level.  As Baran and Sweezy’s book “Monopoly Capital explained in 1966, the ‘sales effort’ is a key part of capital’s attempt to not only increase ‘market share’ but also to increase new desires and new markets.  If advertising was stupid and useless, capital would not spend any money on it.  But it works and so they do.  It is one of the fundamentals of a pure and destructive consumer society.

These activists, mostly from Europe and New York, have found ways to cover urban advertisements with street art, with blank whiteness, with political comments and political art, with humor and in the process slyly removing and undermining the sales effort.  They consider it a way to take back public and shared spaces from the privateers.  The various action groups of ‘subvertisers’ and ‘brandals’ also advocate banning outdoor advertising, as some cities have done.  Advertising, as Bernays pointed out years ago, is propaganda.

Some groups or individuals replace ads with non-political graphic art. Others create political art that covers police violence, war profiteering, sexism, climate change, toxic food, homelessness, the Catholic Church and deportations.  Some is anonymous, others are signed. The book contains many color pictures of the installations, which are mostly in covered ad boxes in London or covered ad boxes on phone booths in New York.  The groups distribute tools and keys that will open these large rectangular boxes to anyone, along with instructions on how to jam the ads.  Many of these people grew out of the street art movement led by Banksy and Fairey.         

The book contains pictures of the various installations, which are also posted on-line.  It has detailed instructions on how you too can become a ‘subvertiser.’  And definitely many of these efforts are funny.  I think anarchists have a better sense of humor than Marxists, whatever their other problems.  

My one issue is that many of these subversions will not be noticed by the general public, as the ‘ad boxes’ themselves announce that this is an ‘ad.’  “The medium is the message,” as McLuhan pointed out.  And in this case it is the box.  Some of them could come across as really subtle ads that barely say who is sponsoring them, or as some kind of jokey or ‘woke’ branding, or even part of a city beautification project.  Anyway, even if you’re not an artist, keep your heavy black marker on you and the next time you run into an easily marked ad, fuck it up.  That one over the urinal?  The one at the train station?  The one at the bus stop?  Or if you’re in a rural area, your chain saw!  That is until advertising as a whole is ended, since these efforts only have a small effect on the smothering sales behemoth that surrounds us every day.

Adbusters is carried in May Day’s periodical’s section. 

Other prior reviews on this subject below, use blog search box in upper left:  “Banksy,” “Propaganda” (Bernays), “Monopoly Capital” (Baran & Sweezy),“Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” “Ways of Seeing,” “Salt Sugar Fat,” “Bullshit Jobs” (Graeber), “Doublespeak,” “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky), “The Truth About the Drug Companies.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 7, 2020