The Billboard Commandos
(Page 2 of 2)
January/February 1996
Keith Goetzman
'Seizing a billboard is like the Boston Tea Party,' Cicada member Adam McGovern tells the magazine. 'It's like a little revolution.' The Cicada group has produced a video documentary about billboard liberation; it's available for $30 from Harvest Moon Productions, 307 Stegman Parkway, Jersey City, NJ 07305.
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If billboard alteration represents culture jamming on a physically large scale, photocopied flyposters are its featherweight -- but equally influential -- opposite. We're all familiar with those hundredth-generation jokes and cartoons, many of them sexist, racist, or just plain dumb, that perpetually infiltrate our offices. But the tactic can be used to disseminate more provocative, subversive bits of dissent and satire, as Alternative Press Review points out in 'Flyposter Frenzy' (Spring/Summer 1995). Author Matthew Fuller, who has written a book with the same title, explains the populist appeal of the medium: Most people have access to a photocopier; very little skill or training is needed; copies can be made as they're required; and 'what is... sweeter than company time... spent producing weirdo literature using the company's paper?'
The flyposter examples accompanying the article range from whimsical to ominous, artistic to amateurish. A blocky graphic of a wrench dropping between meshing gears bears the message 'Work rate too fast (apply resistance).' A row of graves accompanies a deadpan caption: 'We have found new homes for the rich.' And McDonald's logo and clown mascot, Ronald, are co-opted in a shrill mock ad that urges a boycott of the fast-food empire.
Fuller, a member of the British-based poster collective Anticopyright Network, views the flyposter in an analytical framework: 'The flyposter's intervention in public space -- in physical terms, disruption -- is minimal. It is gone almost as soon as it is placed... The flyposter formalizes a necessary impermanence -- its brief presence attempting to stimulate the viewer into self-activity by denying itself fixity, interested in diffusion and not central points. The flyposter asks of itself: 'What is it? Who made it and why?''
The next time you head toward the Xerox machine like a technodrone, spreadsheets in hand, consider Fuller's call to action: 'We want more posters, we want better posters, we want more people getting involved. Let's wallpaper the world.
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