Lipstick Traces and Kalle Lasn's Contemporary Fluxus Text Essay

Lipstick Traces and Kalle Lasn's Contemporary Fluxus Text - Essay Example Culture jamming seeks to raise the power relationship in the object, situation, or discourse to the clarity of immediate criticism, Lasn's conception is highly flexible, which consists of nearly any project or performance that welds art, protest, and humor. It includes a wide array of activities, from counter-surveillance to illegal computer hacking to ad busting. The term â€Å"culture jamming was coined by Kalle Lasn in the book Culture Jam. Lassn , the founder of the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, is on a mission to intervene in the media spectacle and work against our habits of blind consumerism. Dyke Action and the Guerrilla Girls are actually more militant than traditional culture jammers. Dyke Action, along with groups such as Gran Fury, Fierce Pussy, Lesbian Avengers, and ACT UP confront serious lesbian and gay issues. The Guerrilla Girls have become renown not only for posters and slogans, but for lectures, public appearances, and books protesting women’s repre sentation as both artists and as subjects. Their work touches on global issues and is concerned with the oppression of women worldwide. What is the spectacle? It's everything - humor, advertising, television, and so forth - comprising today's "spectacular level of commodity consumption and hype," as Kalle Lasn wrote in Culture Jam. And to show how deep the spectacle's recuperation has penetrated social life, successors of situationist theory have been absorbed into the spectacle they fought against. Having become marketing experts, advertising consultants, and advanced campaign managers, many of the culture jammers are now the prizes and trophies of capitalist domination. Not just an accessory source for marketing gurus, radicalism and rebellion are the dialectical anti-thesis of capitalism and thus the perfect synthesis for "post-ideological", late capitalist domination. This Jack in the Box advertisement that I photographed is a perfect example. Culture jamming gets our initial at tention mostly because of the innovative way in which they use imagery, striving to shock and provoke. In this way they are actually enlarging the amount of expressions that are deemed acceptable by the public. What was once provoking, like billboards of Marlboro Country superimposed on images of urban decay, now forms the common element in Diesel's Brand 0 campaign. The use of the original technique by culture jammers consecrated it as cool, and Diesel can now use this to their own benefit. Seen from this angle, culture jamming is working against itself. According to du Gay, meaning is created in dislocation. Dislocation is inevitable, and occurs in our case when a projected brand identity is unable to represent itself entirely objective. In order to be constituted as such, the brand depends on a constitutive outside, the consumers. Put simply, a brand identity must be accepted as such by consumers for it to be perceived as real. Du Gay calls uses the notion of vectors pulling in d ifferent directions. This creates a dynamic process, where meaning and perceived reality is the outcome. I have argued that the massive presence of promotional messages can be seen as part of our perceived realities. Thus, producers and consumers of brands