A group of musicians/visual artists called Negativland are said to have coined the term "culture jamming" in the 1980's.
Culture Jamming is a practice in which activists subvert mainstream cultural icons as a form of social commentary. A lot of these efforts seek to reclaim public spaces.
Over the years Negativland's "illegal" collage and appropriation based audio and visual works have touched on many things - pranks, media hoaxes, advertising, media literacy, the evolving art of collage, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, creative anti-corporate activism in a media saturated multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, and artistic and humorous observations of mass media and mass culture (from negativland.com).
Here is a famous piece from Negativland entitled Gimme the Mermaid. In this piece,music and images from Disney's The Little Mermaid are juxtaposed with dialogue from a phone conversation and the song Gimme gimme gimme by the punk band Black Flag.
Ron English
Self described "popaganda" artist Ron English likes to make waves. His work provides a constant flow of social commentary. English makes controversial art in the studio and as graffiti. Frequently English (illegally) commandeers a pre-existing billboard as his canvas. Here is an example in which English "borrows" not only a billboard, but also the materials and style of Pablo Picasso's Guernica.
English's work frequently uses humor
to dampen (or sometimes exacerbate)
the controversial aspects of his work.
What is English trying to say in this piece entitled "cloud?"
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