Jamming signals. Radio. Television. This is the etiology of culture jamming. But everything in our information saturated world is ripe for jamming. Culture. Constructs. Assumptions. Images. Introduce a different color of noise into the system. Tool of revolutionaries, but better yet, tool of counter-revolutionaries. Pun. Play. Invert image. Invert meaning. Deeper truth through absurd juxtapositions. Subliminal sandwiches.
Presumably in London, I'm not quite sure where these two works from Bansky are, or if they're in any spatial or temporal relationship with one another. They're both inversions. The cop frisking the necessarily darling girl, replete with teddy bear inverts notions of the police being guardians of peace into being robbers of peace. In the second picture, the girl then turns the tables on the soldier and exerts power and authority over him.
In the second half of the 20th century, institutional structures were deemed oppressive. They were subverted and dismantled. Then in their place, and supposedly as a remedy, new institutional structures were erected. These were often just as oppressive. Culture councils that wreck and homogenize culture. Human rights tribunals that take away human rights. Policies of choice that destroy choice. It's time to turn that inversion on its head.
Artist Draws 'Clean' Graffiti from Dirty Walls, which reminds me of a time when I sprayed the perpetually half-clothed, shoeless, grubby neighbor kid with the garden hose. His grandmother came running out of their house screeching, "Don't get clean spots on him. I'll have to wash the whole kid."
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