For instance, Charles Manson's image, the ketchup of ad alteration, is imposed on both Levi's and Apple billboards. (The BLF's online how-to-parody manual lists ad-buster chestnuts like so many household spices: "Some ads lend themselves to parody by the inclusion of a small image or symbol in the appropriate place [a skull, radiation symbol, happy face, swastika, vibrator, etc.].") Well, we all know Manson is way transgressive. But what statement does this make, exactly? Levi's and Apple have used dead historical figures to plug their products. Some dead historical figures were good. But others -- aha! -- were evil. And ... and ...? In the San Francisco Examiner, D. S. Black called it a reaction to Calvin Klein's heroin chic, a Debordian detournement. It comes off, though, as frustrated flailing at monoliths -- at just everything, you know, that everybody's always trying to sell you.

The show's best exhibitor, actually, is a media artist who doesn't work in billboards: hoaxster Joey Skaggs, who in 1994 passed off a press release claiming to be from a Korean company canning dogs for food ("Dog no suffer. We have quick death for dog") and in 1995 burned CNN by posing as a scientist who had invented a computer program that found O.J. Simpson guilty -- playing into whites' longing for a bloodless rebuttal to the "irrational" Simpson jury. Skaggs shows a complex understanding of the workings, assumptions and prejudices of modern media and society, something a "Got Sperm?" billboard just doesn't quite nail. (Today, some online sites like Chickenhead are also doing especially sharp parodies.)

But if some of the liberations are old hat, two decades of plugging made them that way. Hammering Big Tobacco is pretty much a two-foot putt now, with everybody from advertising pros to schoolkids getting into the act; with the New York Times announcing last week it would refuse tobacco ads; with state-sponsored anti-smoking messages indistinguishable from counterculture pranks (one shows a cowboy telling another, "I miss my lung"). It wasn't so common in 1977, when the BLF targeted the weirdly named Fact cigarettes, changing a billboard's text from "I'm realistic. I only smoke Facts" to "I'm real sick. I only smoke Facts," with an arrow pointing from "Facts" to the Surgeon General's warning.

You could perhaps see the mixed results in the CBGB crowd, which was mostly in Garanimals back when the BLF started out and has since absorbed commercial skepticism like many Americans have: which is to say, kind of. Lingering around the walls full of doctored booze ads and defiled Joe Camels, the young rebels with thick-framed glasses -- just like admen wore in the '60s -- flirted, drank beers and smoked, one cigarette after another after another after another.

"The Billboard Liberation Show" is at CBGB's 313 Gallery, 313 Bowery, New York, though May 21, 1-6 p.m.
salon.com | May 3, 1999

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