Abstract

The relationship between media control and political power is a long-standing – and often frustrating – convention in North America. However, dissenting voices have always found ways to circumvent the dominant model and express their views through alternative media, guerrilla graphics, ‘do-it-yourself’ grassroots processes and technological subversions.

The papers presented by the three panelists address how the designed political statement (or gesture, or experience) can both contest the status quo of political power, and galvanize core constituents to influence mainstream voters. By communicating at the margins of society, the panelists’ examples advocate for a more expansive notion of participatory democracy, whereby action at the edges redefines the middle.

Whether revolting for people’s civil rights, harnessing new media to build empowered virtual communities, or creating handmade expressions of political sentiment, the panel’s topic coalesces around the value of the marginalized in the political process.

+ + +

First, some definitions must be provided. By margins, I refer to both political sensibilities and communications media; their seemingly irrevocable confluence makes it necessary to discuss how designs are political and how politics are designed.

Marginalized viewpoints, at least within the context of a modern democracy, are those which often have little voice and even less political power. It is presumed that because the populace embracing those views lacks the sheer numbers to bring about change, they are simply out-voted by a more centralized majority. Labeled as ‘radicals’, ‘extremists’, ‘subversives’, ‘anarchists’, etc., their agendas are rarely advanced in a direct manner. The perception that people with progressive views are small in number is only part of the challenge; decentralized organization, lack of financial resources, and little play of their messages in mainstream communications media relegate these views to the margins of society.

North American communications media are dominated by corporate interests with a strong desire to preserve the political and economic status quo. The relationship between political power and capitalism is cemented by the role of advertising in television, radio, print, electronic and environmental media. Essentially serving as commercial delivery systems, programming content of a political, cultural and social nature is subjugated by mainstream media’s economic model. In this model, wherein good soundbites are good business, the proverbial opiate of the masses, or as writer George Duhamel put it: “a kind of masturbation of the eye” occurs. Corporate donations to political parties and individual candidates insure compliance with the capitalist agenda, while company employees are subtly – or overtly – pressured to cast their voting allegiance with the corporation rather than their own conscience.

Examples abound, but I’ll provide just a couple of notable ones here.

Fox News, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, promotes its TV news coverage with the registered trademark “Fair and Balanced”, while overwhelming evidence to the contrary exists that it is neither fair nor balanced. Studies of its content reveal a strong bias to conservative causes and the Republican political agenda and are outlined in a formal complaint against Fox submitted to the United States’ Federal Trade Commission. However, while defending their own claims to the American Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech, Fox is suing liberal author Al Franken for his book title: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

Clear Channel, a media conglomerate with vast holdings in radio and outdoor advertising, recently denied a group called Project Billboard the ability to place an anti-war message on a billboard in New York City, even though the organization had signed a contract and was willing to pay $368,000 for three months of placement. Clear Channel attempted to force Project Billboard to redesign its message into an innocuous, meaningless compromise, but instead Project Billboard justifibly filed a lawsuit. Clear Channel is a known supporter of George W. Bush through large campaign contributions and the personal relationships between Bush and the corporation’s top executives are well-documented.

Kalle Lasn, of Vancouver-based Adbusters Media Foundation, has long attempted to have the organization’s Buy Nothing Day messages played on Canadian and American television, not as free public service announcements but by paying full commercial advertising fare. Only CNN aired an Adbuster’s ‘uncommercial’; yet in the context of the Moneyline show it was possibly aired more as editorial content than as anti-consumerist message.

Shut out of both the political process and the communications media, how do marginalized voices find their audiences, and what is the role of design, especially graphic design, in this effort?

The discipline of graphic design’s historical canon of is sexed up with numerous posters expressing political dissent, and mention of some memorable ones will bring instant recall: the many dynamic designs of Russian Constructivists engaged in post-czarist social change, John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi photomontages from the 1930s, Lorraine Schneider’s iconic anti-Vietnam war statement “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things”, and the innumerable parodies of James Montgomery Flagg’s 1917 finger-pointing Uncle Sam in “I Want You For U.S. Army”. The activist designs of Gran Fury regarding the AIDS crisis, and the darkly humorous posters of James Victore continue to raise consciousness in recent years.

The current interest in politically activist graphic design is both a reaction to these volitile times, and a trend which will play itself out in next year’s design annuals. Many designers do seek meaningful engagement with the political process, and express their views in self-authored works. Non-designers also employ graphic methods to render their messages; use of color, type, image, symbol and scale enable the lay person to give visual form to their opinions, sometimes with strikingly pleasing results.

Numerous recent books, articles, conferences and exhibitions are a testimony to this:

Graphic Responses, an online exhibition of activist graphic design, was hosted by Colorado State University last year.

Graphic Agitation 2, the sequel to Liz McQuiston’s original book, has been published.

Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated, by James Mann and Howard Zinn, allows readers to copy and distribute the posters therein.

The Art of Resistance, a Political Artists’ Conference was held in Seattle this past May.

And, in a recent New York Times article, design critic Phil Patton claims that “protest graphics [are] one of the oldest art forms in the United States….”

It must be asked, however, if mainstream corporate media doesn’t accommodate many messages of dissent, how and where are they disseminated? Before attempting an answer, an obviously successful example of the ability to generate mass appeal without compromising the artist-author’s vision, is the film Fahrenheit 9/11, directed by Michael Moore. After Disney’s Miramax refused to distribute the film, it went on to the win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and has since grossed over 168 million dollars. So dissenting messages can achieve mass appeal; whether or not the film sways public opinion in the upcoming American election remains its largest challenge.

Because television, national newspapers and magazines, environmental advertising and other mainstream venues aren’t available to most messages of dissent, new media for communicating and unexpected locations for placement are emerging. Independently produced posters, bumper stickers, yard signs, t-shirts, web sites and short films are injecting themselves into society’s in-between spaces – the margins.

Besides being innovative in form and content, the new political graphic activism has harnessed mobility as its ally. Reading a newspaper, listening to the radio or watching television is a relatively passive act; designs aimed at motorists, pedestrians, neighbors and interactive media users require a kind of kinetic viewing, a participatory engagement.

The four zones of communication at the political and social margins that I have documented this American election season are: the mind (interactive computer screen-based experiences), the body (buttons, t-shirts, and other apparel), the house (flags, banners and yard signs), and the street (bumper stickers, posters, and other public graphics). As with mainstream imagery, the ubiquitous red, white and blue of the American flag, and the symbolic elements of stars and stripes are recurring. However, the use of nationalist visual rhetoric is seemingly subverted to say: “hey, dissent is patriotic, man” as when 1960s Yippie Abbie Hoffmann made a shirt out of an American flag. George Bush’s portrait is fodder for ridicule, and the many word plays on Bush’s name range from clever to the obvious. Examples from these zones are shown in the next column.

In conclusion, the primary shift in communication spaces seems to be more about how the messages are generated, and where they’re placed than what they say, or why they’re being expressed. Of course, this is in response to both opportunities and limitations, inventiveness and exclusion.