On 11 November 2008, a fourteen-page special edition of the New York Times mysteriously appeared on the streets of New York. Its headline, “Iraq War Ends,” introduced a collection of articles under the rubric of “All the News We Hope to Print,” an alteration of the paper of record’s actual motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Among the many organizers of the special edition spoof was Steve Lambert, who sat down with Fillip to discuss the project.
Read the piece at Fillip Magazine
The Spring 2009 (#107) issue of Bomb Magazine includes an interview I did with Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonano of the Yes Men. You can read the whole interview on Bomb Magazine‘s website, but it looks nicer in the magazine.
Here’s an excerpt:
SL So, when you two are doing these speaking gigs, do you basically play the same character each time? I know for each one you have to use different names, but as “actors” do you imagine them to be the same people? What goes into creating these businessmen characters?
MB If you look at someone like Jack Nicholson, he always seems like he is sort of the same even when he is playing different characters. I think we must be something like that.
AB Except that we can’t act.
MB Right. What I meant was that if we were actors, it might be like that. The fact is that we have no clue what we are doing when we are up there. Luckily, the audiences think we really are who we say we are, so there is no need to act at all. And our character development has no particular method. It’s there in some intuitive way, but we don’t think too much about it.
SL Are the projects that have been big in the media—Dow Chemical and New Orleans, most obviously—are those working against a secondary message you are trying to communicate to activists? Which is that this strategy might be worth considering, and that it’s totally within reach? Neither of you have any real formal training as “imposters” and from what I have gathered hanging around y’all for the past year is that this is very much a seat-of-the-pants operation.
MB Yeah, we barely have pants at all, really. Anyone could do stuff like this, and in our movies that comes through, I think.
AB Which encourages a lot of activists, not necessarily because they want to use the same methods, but because they see how the world of big business is not a fortress . . . it’s a house of cards.
Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City included Add-Art is her Best of the Web 2008!
Thankfully Steve Lambert’s Add Art shows look a lot better than some red square with the words “Art” on it. Every two weeks Lambert invites a curator to select art his firefox extension will use to replace website ads. I’m probably biased about this project — I curated a show — but I really like seeing weird shit replace the ads on the front page of the New York Times every two weeks. Add Art insures I see something I couldn’t have possibly imagined appearing on that website (and others) on a regular basis.
The January 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine featured an editorial listing several headlines from The New York Times Special Edition.
On Tuesday December 23rd IFC’s “Media Project” wil have a four minute segment featuring The Yes Men’s role in the New York Times Special Edition.
Issue 3 of Proximity Magazine includes an interview with Steve Lambert by James H. Ewert, Jr.
JHEJR: What was the first prank you ever pulled off?
SL: In 8th grade, I realized that if I ran for class president, I got to give a speech in front of the whole school, and they had to listen to me. I ran really just so I could have a couple minutes to talk to the whole school with a microphone.
Read it all at the Proximty Magazine site.
“Jane Velez-Mitchell talks with her guests about how they published a hoax version of The New York Times.”
Andy Bichlbaum and Steve Lambert on Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell regarding the NY Times prank. November 13. 2008
Jason Chan wrote an editorial on Add-Art for Good Magazine in the November/December 2008 issue.
Drawings by Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings are in the October 2008 issue of The Believer Magazine. The drawings are excepted from Wish You Were Here: Postcards From Our Awesome Future.
The San Francisco Chronicle included an image of “Will You Marry Me?” in a story about Invisible Venue on the front page of the Datebook section.
In October 2008′s Dwell Magazine there’s a short Q&A with me. I sat down and answered these in about 10 minutes after they sent them over. One question they asked didn’t fit in the magazine, so I’ll include it here:
Where do you see your profession in twenty years?
2028: We won. I’m retired. The debate centers around the following: it takes more than 24 hours to be seen by a doctor in the National Health Care System, many still have to use public transit instead of walking to work, and the dividends aren’t higher at their Food Co-op.
I must say I do enjoy this drawing of me. I think I look like some kind of hippy outlaw on par with Michael Reynolds.
Dwell Magazine, October 2008, pg 64
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This morning Chicago Public Radio’s show Eight Forty Eight did a piece on the Anti-Advertising Agency’s Foundation for Freedom.
The promise of cable TV all those years ago was that by paying for the service, you could avoid the commercials. That promise has faded, with most cable and satellite channels carrying just as many ads as regular TV. Besides television, those advertisements find their way onto billboards and magazines, trailed behind airplanes and stamped on pieces of fruit. Much of the work that goes into these ads is done by creative types. And it can be a lucrative career move for work-starved artists, writers and musicians. But one organization wants those folks to quit their jobs and use their talents elsewhere. Eight Forty-Eight’s Michael De Bonis has the story.
See the transcript here or download a mp3: AAAFFF on WBEZ
Marisa Olson wrote about Add-Art on the Rhizome website. In her article, Olson talks about Add-Art’s relationship to the Anti-Advertising Agency, and goes into detail regarding the Add-Art shows thus far: Charles Brokoski’s monochromatic boxes, Sarah Cook’s curation of Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg, Bennett Williamson, and our opening show curated by Joan Cummins of the Brooklyn Museum.
On June 30th, Andrew Adam Newman wrote a profile of me for Adweek Magazine. The article talks about Add-Art and other past projects that deal with advertising.
Stephen Duncombe wrote one of the catalog essays for “Wish You Were Here: Postcards From Our Awesome Future” and Packard and I both thought he did a great job pulling out ideas we had embedded in the beginning of the process. After reading Duncombe’s book, it was a great honor that he wrote this piece for the catalog.
Stephen Duncombe
If “politics is the art of the possible,” as the 19th century German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck once wrote, then what sort of politics are Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert proposing with their posters? Movable skyscrapers. A martial arts studio on a BART train. Public transit by elephant back. Commuting by zip line. Transforming San Francisco into wildlife refuge. Turning a football stadium into a farm (and linebackers into human plows). Every one of these proposals for our “awesome future” is patently impossible. Urban planning is a serious business: the domain of accredited academics, trained technicians and pragmatic politicians. What’s proposed by Jennings and Lambert – artists, of all things – is not serious at all.
Which is exactly why one needs to take them so seriously. Enlightenment pieties aside, politics is not solely, or even primarily, about reasoned thinking and rational choices; it’s an affair of fantasy and desire. People are rarely moved to action, support, or even consent by realistic proposals; they are motivated by dreams of what could be. This is something Conservatives understand quite well. It is highly unlikely that we will do away with income taxes or become a Christian nation any time soon, yet this doesn’t stop Republican Party standard bearers from making allusions to these futures. An Islamic Caliphate is not in the offing, but dreams of such a possibility convince a disturbing number of Muslim militants to strap bombs to their chests.
Not too long ago imagining the impossible was the job of the Left. Conservatives, after all, wanted to conserve what was, while progressives wanted to move toward the awesome future. What were democracy and socialism if not leaps into the unknown? Who, after all, is remembered for proclaiming “I have a dream”? But things have changed. Think of the Liberal uproar a few years back when Karl Rove told a New York Times reporter that the goal of the Bush administration was to “create new realities.” When this senior adviser to the president then went on to describe (and denigrate) Liberals, reporters, policy experts, and the general Times readership as the “reality-based community,” the Left, far from taking offense, adopted this appellation with pride.
As I write this essay, Democratic candidates for the 2008 presidential election are making appeals to audacious “hope” and unspecified “change,” but the past quarter century of progressive politics has been dominated by the opposite: professionalism, pragmatism, and predictability. And where has all this seriousness gotten the Left? An unprecedented rise of the Right, from Neo-Cons on the Potomac to Fundamentalists from the Bible-belt to Jihadists in the Middle East. A triumph of the dreamers. It’s true, in the United States at least, that some of these dreams are finally being recognized as nightmares, but it’s a bittersweet victory since the Left has little to offer in replacement.
The absurd proposals offered up by Jennings and Lambert have the quality of dreams. The artists explain that they asked experts in the fields of architecture, city planning and transportation for ideas on how to make a better city. These plans were then “perhaps mildly exaggerated.” It is exactly in this exaggeration that the artists’ visions have their political power, and their morality. The problem with the dreams offered up by the Right (and commercial advertisers, who share the technique) is that their fantasies are meant to be taken for reality. Vote for this candidate or buy that product and this phantasmagoric future will be yours. Since these impossibilities can never be delivered, the result is another search for a new fantasy (endless consumption), increased fanaticism in an attempt to will the impossible (terrorism), or disenchantment when the promised future is not delivered (witness the current implosion of the Republican Party).
What is so inspiring – and honest — about the visions of our future offered up by Jennings and Lambert is their transparent impossibility. A city could become more “green” with additional public parks and community gardens, but transforming San Francisco into a nature preserve where office workers take their lunch break next to a mountain gorilla family? Ain’t gonna happen. And that’s the point. Because it is not going to happen their fantasy fools no one. There is no duplicity, no selling the people a false bill of goods. It’s a dream that people are aware is just a dream.
Yet at the same time these impossible dreams open up spaces to imagine new possibilities. The problem with asking professionals to “think outside the box” and imagine new solutions is, without intervention, they usually won’t. Their imaginations are constrained by the tyranny of the possible. By visualizing impossibilities, however, Jennings and Lambert create an opening to ask “what if?” Standing in front of one of their posters on the street you smile at the absurd idea of practicing Tae Kwon Do on your train ride home. But you may also begin to question why public transportation is so uni-functional, and then ask yourself why shouldn’t a public transportation system cater to other public desires. This could set your mind to wondering why the government is so often in the business of controlling, instead of facilitating, our desires, and then you might start to envision what a truly desirable State would look like. And so on, ad infinitum. Jennings’ and Lambert’s impossible solutions are means to imagine new ones.
There is an important place in politics for the sober experts and bureaucrats of the “reality-based community.” These people take the impossible dreams of artists, visionaries and revolutionaries and bring them down to earth, transforming them into something possible. But you cannot start with the possible or there is nothing to move toward (and nothing to compromise with). Otto von Bismarck was famous in his own century for his practice of realpolitik, a hard-headed style of politics that ignores ideals in favor of what’s possible given the real conditions of the times. Our times, defined by the ubiquity of Las Vegas style spectacle and “Reality TV” entertainment, where the imaginary is an integral part of reality, necessitates a sort of dreampolitik. Conventional wisdom may insist that “politics is the art of the possible,” but Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert make a much more inspiring and, ironically, serious case that politics is the art of the impossible.
My collaboration with Packard Jennings, “Wish You Were Here: Postcards from Our Awesome Future”, has been chosen as the “Best Public Art of 2008” by the San Francisco Weekly. The project, which ran from November 12, 2007 to March 14, 2008, installed visionary illustrations on utopic futures on Market Street kiosks in San Francisco.
