“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.” (Banksy)
Here’s a little tribute to adbusting!
A billboard in Berlin which someone has adorned with photoshop-type editing windows, wheat pasted over the image of a woman’s face. More here.
A busted Fox news ad reads “we deceive. you believe.”
This amazing project, entitled American Able, addresses the sexist, ableist and heterosexist attitudes in American Apparel’s ubiquitous ads by spoofing them. These attitudes are a common problem in advertising and are most certainly not unique to the company, although their ads are widespread and easy to recognize. Some images from American Able made it onto Toronto Transit Commission station screens in 2010, and were published in a new edition of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves. Awesome. This image portrays a model who has a visible disability wearing a black dress and assertively straddling another model, who has an androgynous look, dressed in jeans and a grey sweater and who does not appear to be disabled.
Not exactly street art, but The Current’s Target Women segments are pretty badass (and hilarious)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLBA9B461FCAEA913F&feature=player_detailpage&v=gWLu6gJHTbo]
Thanks to A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World for the quote. More Guelph street art coming soon.
Guelph Graffiti Blog 