As culture jams go, my favorites have always been the ones that make bold alterations to existing advertisements and billboards, taking the piss out of consumerism and Madison Avenue alike. New York street artist Poster Boy has been brilliantly and anonymously tweaking subway ads for about a year now with little more than a razor and a wicked sense of humor. And, unlike Banksy, he gives in-person interviews. Ben Walters talked to him for the Guardian:
Witty and playful as it is, there's no missing the political edge of
Poster Boy's work, rooted in indignation at what he calls "this mass
advertising always attacking people. They don't have a choice: they're
riding the subway, they already paid their two dollars. Why the fuck
should they be force-fed this stuff?" As well as consumerism, his
pieces have targeted racism, gentrification, gender inequality, US
immigration and foreign policy (for Transporter read "Deported"; for
Iron Man, read "Iran = Nam") and, recently, Israeli action in Gaza.
To see some examples of Poster Boy's adbusting, click through to the gallery here or check out his Flickr stream. I love the ones where he pixelates posters using the grids formed by the subway tile as a sort of graph paper, and I also have to appreciate a street artist who can punnily reference Rauschenberg. I'll be keeping a sharp eye out for his work when I'm in New York later this spring, that's for sure.
