Price Tagging

Logo-Centricity

In the beginning there was the word. Then the word became a picture, Written on a rock, then the carved hearts and initials, Kilroy peeking over, to "F**k You." In 1968, when the world was shrugging off the old bosses, the name of a kid, Julio 204, was showing up on subway walls from Times Square to Wall Street, having ridden in from 204th Street. Now, a quarter of a century after Keith Haring chalked his humanitarian messages on blank NYC subway ad panels, a major corporation has been driven underground to the subway walls of San Francisco's shopping district. We see pictograms of kids alongside Sony's tag, "PSP," (Play Station Portable) occupying prime advertising wall space after San Francisco City officials barred them and other corporations from co-opting public walls for its faux graffiti ad campaign.

The San Francisco Examiner wrote, "In recent years, The City has caught NBC, IBM and the makers of 'Zorro' resorting to such advertisements, [Department of Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru] said. NBC and IBM both paid The City more than $100,000 to clean up street stencils for a Linux program and a science fiction miniseries that appeared on the USA Network, which is owned by NBC."
That $100,000 is chump-change in the pockets and margins of those corporate advertising budgets.

Back in the early daze of the Graffiti age, Keith Haring appropriated blank advertising spaces on the walls of New York City subways and drew chalk drawings on them. Today, in San Francisco's subways we have text-free panels with images of graf-style kids playing with digital media games. They are sanctioned and legal; nobody chased Sony out of the subways like they did Haring. Sony was, however, chased out of low-income neighborhoods like the Mission District, and others in large cities when they hired spray can artists to paint their stealth ads on buildings. Sony paid the wall owners but did not bother to get city permits, which are needed for advertising (and conversely - or perversely as it may be - media giant Clear Channel recently waged a battle in Portland, Oregon to create legislation such that murals would be subject to similar permit fees...).

In some sort of semiotic mobius strip, logo becomes tag becomes simulated fringe becomes logo, all within a particular class context; Sony wouldn't even dream, let alone scheme, of spray painting ads on the sidewalls of upper crust neighborhoods or business districts.

Now they are relegated to printed posters of the faux-graf art comprised of a wood-grain background to indicate a fence or wall, adorned by the sprayed figures. It could have all been digitally created for print, a simulation of a simulated counter-media guerilla communique taken, not borrowed from the prolific and popular current visual voicing of disenfranchised youth.

Keith Haring's chalk drawings on the black paper panel demarcations of subway advertising space have been likened to school room blackboard lessons. They depicted, among other things, people being irradiated by TVs--the media. His was a voice of the young in us, warning, instructive. Sony and other corporate giants who employ the technique of street/graf messaging subvert this type of identity expression into capital
directives. Whereas graffiti is employed by those who do it as a way of voicing their existence to one another and claiming visual real estate, corporate graf and stencil ads employ that need for identity to garner sales.

The co-opting of counter-cultural art is nothing new; it has long been done by mass culture with music, film and fashion, a built-in way of controlling society through culture. This is not necessarily a planned, implemented conspiracy but rather it is a systemic mechanism of our capitalism; revolutionary thought and expression is simultaneously co-opted and marginalized. The main reason for this is because it is so very lucrative. It just happens to support the system. Occurring ever more rapidly, brazenly and on a widespread scale, it is probably successful because the members of mainstream society are enamored with rebels as long as they are safely contained. It resonates with the natural wish for expressiveness, and for the freedom lost with the imposition of adult, social decorum. Aimed at children, or the child within, these images have a logo tag, "PSP" for Play Station Portable, but the distinctive shape of the digital game devices is probably more than enough information for the target audience. Sony's simulated co-opted graffiti ads that eat kids, show kids who are playing with and even eating media.

c 2006 Claire Bain

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