By Antarah Crawley
For Professor McRuer,
Critical Methodologies

9 November 2011, GWU

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you drive or walk or, more likely, ride your fixed gear down the city’s busiest thoroughfare New York Avenue past 7^th street you’ll see an imposing mural of a young brown boy with a cap depicting an upside-down DC flag peeking up out of a dystopian landscape reminiscent of Mew Mexico’s Bisti Badlands.  The painted caption, “Welcome to Dystopia City” invokes the notion that all is not well here.  Indeed, within the city there is a conflict of interest between a young, browning generation and the established hegemony, between corporations and small business, between those who have a voice and those who don’t.  And the artists, whose hands are also colored with paint and adhesive, have largely taken up the cause to make the corporate hegemony accountable to their disruptive actions.  In this paper I look at the actions of DC artists, who use the most symbolic city in the western hemisphere as a canvas for social correction, and the responses it stirs among those in power.  And furthermore, in the very notions of power itself.

In fall of 2010, corporate oil-giant Chevron planned to execute a campaign that sought to fix public opinion of them after attention was drawn to their crude waste removal tactics in Ecuador.  According to a team of professionals suing Chevron (formerly Texaco) for their human rights violations in multiple locations across the world, and specifically in Ecuador, the oil giant has been deliberately disposing toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon—an estimated 18.5 billion gallons from 1964 to 1990, or 4 million gallons per day at the height of their operation.  Even though they had managed to elude liability costs (a potential $27.3 billion) their public image had been damaged, thus they sought to repair it with a campaign that utilized a gritty street-art aesthetic and phrases that showed their corporate executives agreeing with “everyday, working class” Americans (e.g., “Oil companies should put their profits to good use—We Agree”, “Big oil should support small business—We Agree”, etc.)  

In an effort to make their message more accessible to the public, Chevon reached out to local artists to put their posters up in an authentic, street art way, using wheatpaste and paint rollers.  Cesar Maxit, a DC-based street artist, was one of the artists targeted to execute this operation.  However, Mr. Maxit is not one to comply with the wishes of big oil.  He has a long history of social activism and of using art, legally and illegally, towards that capacity.  He says in an interview:

…I had started working with environmental and human rights groups, I wanted to write messages about social justice.  My first burner was a piece that said “Free Tibet.”  My second was one that had a line of white-hooded Klansmen with the city skyline behind it, and in the negative space between it said “FREE MUMIA” followed by “amerikkka racist.”  This was in 2000.

Cesar Maxit

Thus, when Chevron sent him the files for the campaign, which still contained their original messages, he called his friends in The Yes Men (tagline: Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them.  Our targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an environmental activist organization begun in 1985 (mission statement: Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action), to collaborate on a counter-campaign.  Maxit, in a documentary short about the counter-campaign, says the aim of Chevon in its efforts is to “confuse the public.”  He, along with The Yes Men and RAN, altered the original Chevon files to read messages that were more precise, more radical (e.g., “Oil companies should clean up their messes.”).  Instead of retaining the images of working class Americans, he used the faces and words of the Ecuadorian peoples that the corporation actually affected, thus radicalizing the campaign in a way that Chevron had not intended.

The questions that this counter-attack (which resulted in Chevron pulling the campaign completely) raises revolve around the mythologies surrounding responsibility and authenticity.  Could the campaign have been authentically “agreeable” without the help of actual street artists?  What does a campaign like this symbolize, even when Chevron has not actually committed to cleaning up its mess in Ecuador?  At the base of it all, what is the role of the street artists in this scenario?  Is his role to help corporations get back on track, or to call attention to their faults?  If Chevron had actually continued with the campaign (and even with the altered versions already up on the street), whose campaign is it?  Who is the author?  And lastly, why DC?

Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author would have anticipated such response from the street art/activist community.  Mr. Maxit has physically done what the reader in Barthes does every time he reads a text—he deconstructs it; he takes the text and, without considering what the author intended, which is ultimately futile because the author is a confused self-destructive entity, he reassess the “blends and clashes” inherent in the text (1324).  Barthes writes, “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (1324).  Chevron acts as the “Author-God” that has been abstracted out.  With the remaining text, which reads, for example, “Big Oil should get real”, the author, Mr. Maxit, RAN, and so on, detangles what is being said.  In an interview, Mitch Anderson, a spokes man for the San Francisco-based organization, Amazon Watch, asks rhetorically, “Does Chevron think that we’re stupid?”  As the author, they are putting words on a page that come in contact with other entities, actions surrounding their statements.  The reader takes all of these aspects inherently into consideration when analyzing a statement like “Big oil should get real.”  Cesar Maxit asks, “‘Get real’? Well, what does that mean?  Of course we all agree with that.  But what about ‘Oil companies should clean up their messes?’  Do you agree with that?  I think most people would agree with that, but I think Chevron doesn’t.”  Here, the reader has destroyed the voice.  It epitomizes Barthes’s statement that, “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody [and] contestation…” (1325). In the end, this campaign has actually served to promote further scrutiny into Chevron’s actions.  It’s authorship has written its own rebuttal.  By getting street artists to interact with the campaign, it has entered the reader into the execution of the text.  This puts multiple hands on the “original” message and renders is read before it actually goes public.

This actually brings up another level of readership.  On one level, Maxit and the activist community are reading the ads.  Yet they put them up in the public sphere, thus entering the text into another, secondary level of readership.  Though it’s not as well documented or extensive as the primary reading, we still see the artist entering into his own death.  The product will now be read at face value—as a Chevron ad that shows the corporation explicitly admitting to wrongdoing.  This may lead the secondary reader to believe that the company is actually trying to get its act together.  Once again, the message of the author—now the artist—is obliterated and the reader assumes the power of interpretation.  The text never becomes the product of one author; it is always a collaborative space.  As Barthes writes, “Writing [or in this case, art/publicity/advertising] is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative space where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing” (1322).

Antarah, you’ve chosen a really interesting focus that’s, I think, much clearer than it was in the first draft. You’re also going in an unexpected and interesting direction with it–I’d have expected you to perhaps go after Deutsch or Foucault, but I think this is really interesting. As noted in the margin, you will need another theorist from class besides Barthes. It sounds like Derrida might be a good one. Or, if you want to think more about the larger frame of discourse, DC as a symbolic city, whose discourse on the level of architecture is disrupted by street art, then Foucault (or Deutsch) might help. At any rate, it’s a fascinating project!

Grade: A

© 2011 by Antarah Crawley