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Sticking it to The Man sticks with me

by | May 17, 2013 | Art Spiegelman, Culturejammingc9d75664fd, ECUAD, Found Objects, Globalization, Portrait

Touring the Emily Carr University graduation show (aka The Show) can be exhausting. There’s work by more than 300 grads packed into those halls and classrooms — too much to take in just one visit. The best I could manage last week was a scan of the lay of the land. Among the standouts was Emily Carr University graduate Kaveh Irani‘s Politicians Can, part of his Can Series.
Because who doesn’t love finely rendered portraiture on aluminum pop cans, especially when they’re of Kim Jong-un and Stalin, wrapped up in the Coca-Cola logo?

I’m a sucker for culture-jamming, the only real sacred cow in our secular world. Quebecois may still take the Catholic Church in vain, and English Canada still swears about sex, but today’s taboos are legally protected brands.  You really want to raise some eyebrows? Use multinationals’ logos for your own unlicensed purposes. Yeah, I said it.

 PictureImage from kojitstudio.com

You can run around with hard core porn in your pocket, or post picture of priests exploring each other’s bodies but it is risky business to dis Dow Chemicals. (As a reporter I once received a warning letter from Dow legal advising me that the newspaper could avoid being hit with further action if I completed and returned a questionnaire that would indicate I understood the difference between Styrofoam and “polystyrene product.” I complied and remained employed.) 
Not surprisingly Messing with the Man (and his money and power) remains the top hot-button in these parts, which would explain why 50 per cent of Facebook activity appears to be posts of images like this one:

(The other 50 per cent is sharenting.)
PictureImage from wackypackages.org

A 1973 New York Magazine connects Wacky Packages to cynical ’70s kids.
BF (before Facebook) we had Wacky Packages. Damn I wish I still had my Wacky Packs but what eight-year-old kid could resist peeling off these sick send-ups and sticking it to the Man? We had no idea who Art Spiegelman was but the creepy graphics looked enough like Mad Magazine and Cracked that kids swarmed the corner stores for the latest gum-laced Topps packages. (Got ’em, got ’em, got ’em, got ’em, need ’em, need ’em, got ’em….)

Suddenly we held this power of counterpoint to all the commercials in our hot little hands, and the urge to disseminate that sentiment on street sign poles, all over our plastic lunch kits and the back of bus seats. Even eight-year-olds can’t unlearn this kind of early social awareness. So it is with a note of nostalgia that I gravitate toward the Art Spiegelman show currently at the Vancouver Art Gallery (CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps, to June 9)

And that’s why the Kim Jong-Un can at the Emily Carr grad show had me at hello. The combo of the purported drink of the death squads and dictator over actual death squads is powerful stuff indeed. The contrast between finely detailed painting on a throwaway object also needles nicely. It takes guts to go low at a grad show.

So much to see, The Show wraps up this Sunday at ECUAD on Granville Island.