Steve Lambert Interview

Recently, I visited Los Angeles’s Chinatown Arts district to stroll beneath paper lanterns and visit the contemporary art galleries that line the sides of Chung King Road.  After parking my car in front of a restaurant filled with people eating Peking Duck and other glazed delicacies, I turned the corner and came face to face with a marquee.  Blinking lights studded a standing sign shaped like an arrow, text reading, “Steve Lambert! Solo Show Opens 4-25 – Charlie James Gallery – We Take Credit Cards.”

Considering the flashy invitation to get me into the gallery, imagine my confusion when the first thing that meets my eyes coming in the door is a huge, circus-style sign that practically yells “Look Away!”  Such is the conundrum that artist Steve Lambert is concerned.

While making art about advertising, Lambert has often assimilated the tools of the trade and the vernacular of ad agencies.  Over the course of his career, he has collaborated with fellow artists The Yes Men to create the New York Times Special Edition (an exact replica of The New York Times, discernible only by the content), done many commissioned public art works (as  well as non-commissioned), and is the CEO and founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, which has become an umbrella “company” for collaborative projects.  Some of these projects include an Anti-Ad poster campaign, downloads for DIY product label “upgrades,” and IllegalBillboards.org, a blog dedicated to fighting the illegal sign industry.

Emberly Modine: What’s your deal with advertising? I know you realize that most people go through their lives not recognizing this continual peripheral sales pitch is even intrusive. Why do you?

Steve Lambert: I don’t exclude myself from that. I know I go through life not fully aware of how much I’m being influenced by all these messages.  It’s impossible to have your guard up like that all the time.  I’m fascinated by the constant sales pitch, though.  I have tremendous respect for the way advertising, marketing and public relations have shaped and misshaped our culture, and I am also disgusted by it more often than not. So why do I recognize it at all? I don’t know. Years of training? An obsession with the concept of freedom? I don’t know.

EM: I went through a phase when I was younger, where I was obsessed with sexism, and once I saw it, the more layers of it were revealed until I couldn’t see anything but that — in my actions, in my friend’s jokes, in every written word…it was maddening. I feel like advertising is responsible for a lot of that — it has shaped our values.

SL: Sure, of course it has. There are whole studies and research papers about it. I think the best and easiest examples are often with the tobacco industry.  At the turn of the 20th century, cigarettes were smoked primarily by underclass men and poor ghetto kids. They were not widespread. Seeing someone smoking would be like seeing someone drinking malt liquor in the street.  Just…not classy! At the time, cigarettes were rolled by hand at workstations in a factory much like cigars are made now. In the early 1900s, a machine was invented that automated the rolling of cigarettes, so suddenly supply went way up but demand was still low. We’re taught, in economics, that this kind of imbalance causes the business to fail, but instead, the persuasion industry, over the course of a couple decades, changed demand to meet supply, essentially changing our culture to meet the needs of the tobacco industry. They worked strategically to make cigarettes associated with freedom, class, attractiveness, health, femininity and masculinity (simultaneously — brilliant!), etc.  They put cigarettes in advertising, in movies, and on television — every media available.  This wasn’t meant to get people to start smoking. Think about it. Who do you know who started smoking because they saw an ad?  These media placements were meant to make smoking a normal part of the culture so that smoking lost its taboo. The industry is still fighting this battle, of course, but it is much different than it was 100 years ago. You can draw parallels with this strategy pretty easily to how advertising promotes, say, the automobile industry in our culture. The tobacco industry funded scientists to do research calling into question findings about lung cancer and emphysema. The auto and oil industry actually took a page from the tobacco book when they funded bogus research to confuse the public about the climate crisis.  They go further in that buying a car can actually be connected to helping the climate crisis.

EM: You mean like upgrading to a Prius?

SL: Yeah, “upgrading.”  I mean, if Toyota cared about the planet, they’d make buses and trains. That is not their #1 priority.  It’s concern, but it’s not a priority.

EM: When you say you are obsessed with the concept of freedom, what does that mean exactly?

SL: Freedom in the anarchist sense — and I mean anarchist philosophy, not 1977 Sex Pistols anarchism.  A more balanced distribution of power. I am free to pursue my life without being controlled or influenced by people I have never met and will never meet.  For example, six guys in suits in a room came up with the phrase “Fill it to the rim with Brim,” which I will remember for the rest of my life, even though I have never drank Brim and don’t care to know about it at all. Think of all the advertising you have seen for cars in, say, the last month — all the different places.  I’m not in the market to buy a new car, and maybe 95% or more of the people in the US right now are not in the market for a new car.  I personally haven’t owned a car in about ten years (I like motorcycles), but I know what a Prius is, I know what a Chrysler Sebring is, and I know that an F100 is a pick-up truck made by Ford.  You do too, right?

EM: Well, I don’t have a TV, but it all still comes to me somehow — billboards…Internet… I know what a Hemi is.

SL: So that is an — albeit subtle — form of control and manipulation by the industry on the population, just hammering us constantly with all the ideas surrounding new cars. Maybe this is where it comes from: I studied sociology, and the idea of social mores and values — things that are theoretically created by populations together — were amazing to me.  Unwritten rules.  Why we frown on cannibalism — we don’t need a law for that, right?  I mean, people just don’t eat each other because, well, that’s horrible!  Or personal distance. What makes someone a “close-talker” and why do we care?  Those are social controls we put on ourselves to make society work. (In a way, that is anarchism at work, but that’s another thing.) Advertising manipulates these social controls — inserts ones where there wouldn’t be any, all at the service of capitalism, which we all know has no values to begin with, right?  I mean, Bernie Madoff? So, halitosis — that’s an invention of industry.

EM: That exists!

SL: [Laughs] Yes, bad breath definitely has existed since forever! But it wasn’t a social taboo until the last century. No one really cared…not like they do now. The industry distorts our culture.  Cigarettes, cars, breath mints, etc…

EM: “You won’t get that job with breath like that!”

SL: Yup. If a breath mint can be positioned between you and the job or you and the date, then you get the breath mint. right? So, yeah, I am fascinated by subtle social controls.

EM: It’s really an inexhaustible source of things to look at and can be a pretty self-reflective process, really. If you could honestly look at yourself and understand how much influence it has had over you, how you feel about yourself, your values…? It’s hard to see what is left at the core.

SL: Pursuing that core would turn you into a madman, probably. My wife is from Hawaii and I have spent a lot of time in Kauai.  There is this largely inaccessible valley there, and I learned that a lot of people have gone there to live.  It is pretty impossible to be completely cut off from the whole social infrastructure.  I mean, on Kauai, you can get pretty close because food just falls off the trees, but I guess the state has to go into the valley every so often and take out all their trash! I mean…we live in the world today.  You can’t really escape. So how do we become free?

EM: There was this Berkely, California band, Fifteen, fronted by this guy Jeff Ott (previously of Crimpshrine). They were really immersed in environmentalism and wanted so badly not to contribute to polluting the Earth just for the sake of music, so they tried to tour without a van and used bikes…but eventually ended up retiring the band for the sake of this ethic… I believe Jeff Ott just continued doing solo acoustic shows.  I always found that interesting because they were so much about bringing awareness to people about environmentalism (among other things), yet by choosing to forgo electric amplification, their message wouldn’t reach as many ears…which is why I think that your work is so interesting — you have assimilated the same tools as the entities you criticize because they are so effective at communication.

SL: I really try to avoid that “all or nothing” kind of thinking. I recognize that I exist in the world today and not a utopia, though I think we need to always work toward those ideals. I was talking to a pretty successful artist once — she made this formalist, very arty sculpture stuff that, to this day, I still don’t really understand. She said to me, “I couldn’t make work like yours because I just couldn’t give up my cellphone,” and I said, “What?” And she explained, “Well, do you have an iPod?”  I do, and I love it — it’s great.  She tried to make this case that if one makes art about these issues, you have to take it on to this insane degree, and she was serious. I think that extreme thinking, which is part of punk rock and kind of what makes a lot of things so amazing, can be really dangerous. In this artist’s case, it was an excuse not to take any stand at all, but it can also drive people to quit trying because it’s just, legitimately, too hard to live that life! Or, if they can continue, it makes one inaccessible to a broader audience because no one else can relate.  Or they just keep going and get more frustrated.  I mean, do we really need more frustrated and bitter activists in the world? I’m certainly glad those super hardcore people exist. I started there…but it’s not easy to not cling too tight to those ideals, to recognize you live in the United States in 2009, and then staying engaged and active while keeping yourself healthy in every sense. It’s just not easy.

EM: I was living in France and somehow stumbled upon The Anti Advertising Agency, and I was…sorry for the expression — tickled.

SL: Good. It’s supposed to be funny. Sometimes people miss that.

EM: The do-it-yourself labeling — so mischievous and lighthearted yet seriously effective at promoting awareness. Very creative.

SL: PeopleProducts123 was Amanda Eicher working with me.  She pitched that project to make new, more honest product packaging, but she had been working in El Salvador and realized the people she knew were all making products that we have in the US.

EM: Can you tell me how you came up with the idea for the Anti Advertising Agency?

SL: I had been making work about advertising and public space for a few years before that. I would paint over ads in my neighborhood. Part of it was that I was convinced that no one saw these as ads. They were basically invisible or blended in so much to the urban landscape.  But (and this was my youthful arrogance) “If I could show them the world as I saw it…” Of course, that doesn’t really work, but I didn’t know that yet.

I had painted over an eight-foot-tall by 70-foot-long wall of illegal poster advertisements with a giant mural that read “ADVERTISEMENTS” and it got covered over seven hours later. Then I realized: If I was going to have any real impact, I needed a team of people working on this, and funding might help. I had already created bogus and/or grassroots organizations before, so I decided I would apply for grants with the AAA as my project. Nobody wanted to fund it because it was dangerous (not kidding). So it took about three or four years, and I started to think I was crazy for even thinking it was possible — like, this whole train of thought in my work: people with money don’t want your attacks of the system that brings them money. (It turns out that a lot of ‘em love it, but that’s another story.)  But then the Creative Work Fund came though and funded the project, and the AAA started as this “official” thing.  We put out a call for artists and re-granted the money for people to collaborate with me on AAA projects.

EM: Why exactly did these foundations you were applying for grants from find your intentions “dangerous”?

SL: Well, that’s what I was told.  I was actually awarded a grant and then they had to back out because my project would be dangerous to the foundation or something like that. It was because we were going to be working in public spaces without permits, which the foundation at first was fine with. Anyway, it’s kind of a worst nightmare situation if you’ve ever won a grant.  After that, I was spooked and started to wonder what the hell I was ever thinking.

EM: Did that influence you to take a different approach as far as work?

SL: No. [Laughs] I mean, I knew I could just go and do it myself with no money, but I also knew I could do a lot more if I could garner some support, and I really prefer being able to pay people for their time instead of being the dude who is always asking for favors. But when I applied for the Creative Work Fund, I was of the mind that “This is the last time I will try to get this funded, then I am gonna move on.”

EM: What happened?

SL: They funded it. I was kind of stunned.

EM: What projects did this new opportunity engender, and were they all under the umbrella of the Anti Ad Agency?

SL: Well, the idea was to get more people working around that concept of the role of advertising in our lives and the battle for public space, so I’ve done about six major collaborative projects.  I think there’s been about 20 artists involved. If I do something that relates to advertising now, it gets released as an AAA project. There’s a whole audience built around the AAA now.

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EM: What was one of your most “successful” projects?

SL: One of the better-known ones was Light Criticism, which was me working with the Graffiti Research Lab. I had been researching illegal advertising in New York just after I had moved there, and we had seen this project by Ji Lee called “Abstractor.tv” that covered the HD TV advertising screens that are on some subway entrances.  Ji’s project left a little line of pixels and was intended to turn the screen into this minimalist, abstract art piece.  We all thought it was great, but there was more potential there.  So it took a couple days, and Evan Roth and I put together our idea and got it done over the weekend. I started working in the street because I knew I could reach more people in an hour than would ever come to an opening. I thought the street was where I could get to the most people, but this was the first time the online audience exceeded the public audience that saw it live.  I think we had 200,000 views in a week or something. The physical work lasted 12-24 hours at most, with people walking by.  I have no idea how many people saw it in person, but I know not everyone even paid attention. But 200K online views — that was huge.  The great thing about that is it inspired a project by Jason Eppink called “The Pixelator” that also spread really far online. And then a year later, another artist called PosterChild from Canada came to town and did his thing on the screens.  So covering those screens with art specific to that context has kind of become a thing in NYC, which is also one of the things we were hoping for — to turn those locations into targets. [Laughs]

EM: What do you think the “unwilling participant” who encounters the work “on site” walks away with?

SL: At worst, nothing.  They don’t notice it or are puzzled for a moment and then move on. At best, they get what is happening, are happy to see it, understand the point we’re making, and then go and do it themselves…which is why we made the video — you have more control in communicating that message and they don’t have to be in a specific place or time to receive it.

EM: Do you remember, in Sao Paulo in  2007, when their city council decided to make Sao Paulo an ad-free city? There was one dissenting vote on the council. This person claimed that “An ad-free city would become a sadder, duller place,” and that advertising was “A form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom.” What are your thoughts on this?

SL: [Laughs] It’s true. It does do that, but we can do better. Advertising isn’t the only thing that brings stimulation in public spaces and thinking that it is a failure of the imagination.  Advertising also brings all kinds of other subtexts with it that are simply harmful.  So, as a culture, we can certainly do better.  For the AAA, we had two projects where we basically did polling, and we asked people what they wanted to see more of in public spaces.  Most people say trees.  Some say art.  No one says advertising.

EM: I read the hilarious article in Bomb magazine where you interviewed The Yes Men.  Can you tell me what you like about them and what about their work appeals to you?

SL: Well, they are great to work with.  Andy [Bichlbaum] and I can talk for about ten minutes and come up with some ridiculous yet feasible idea. One of the things that was great about working them as well was they’re like kind of…reckless. I am actually super cautious when I do the work I do.  I get anxious every time, and I do all this planning to minimize whatever risk I am taking, but I still do it and I think my cautiousness has helped. I’ve never been arrested in my life, never lost a court case, and often I think that extra planning makes the project better. But Andy and Mike [Bonanno] have done such amazing things, and nothing really has ever happened to them.  For example, they’re actually suing Exxon right now.  They are the plaintiff! When we were working on the newspaper, they were just always pushing for bigger print numbers, more locations, cutting closer against the edge of Fair Use, and I was balancing out on the other end.  In the end, I think we hit it just in the right spot.  The way that whole project worked out was amazing, but I also took something from that, and I think, in the future, I will have more of their abandon!

EM: I guess, as you go, you are able to realize different limits…

SL: Yeah, and like we were talking about before, there are these various pressures and controls we take on, but sometimes they’re fabricated. I was threatened with eviction twice in San Francisco during the [dot-com] boom. The first time went to a jury trial, and the second time I had done it all before so I just went and filed the papers myself when I was doing other errands. Before one knew it, I was one week away from facing a judge to fight for my home of the last three years. I went through all the pre-trial stuff myself against one of the big San Francisco landlord attorneys.  (I ended up getting a lawyer about three days before through the Homeless Advocacy Project.) It was scary as hell, but you know…you just do it. Once you’re familiar with doing these things that at first seem scary, it takes away some of the fear. Most people haven’t written on a wall before, and they feel, if they do, the cops are gonna sweep in, throw them in a car, and haul them away. They feel it in their gut, even if they know it’s unlikely. Or with illegal advertising — I can’t tear it down because it’s someone’s “private property.” There’s so much respect instilled for private property in our culture that it extends to protect this corporate crime happening in our public space. We gotta get over that and just tear it all down.

EM: Most of your work has a huge sense of humor attached to it, though you are usually approaching serious and complex issues.  Do you think your levity has had something to do with your success?

SL: It’s part of who I am for sure.  I think I have always been more interested in comedy than art.  I still am, but it’s also a strategy. With humor, I can talk about much more difficult things. If I said, “Hey, do you want to talk about nuclear weapons and the connections between the military and higher-education?”  You might say yes, but you wouldn’t be excited about it.  I wouldn’t be.  But I’ve made projects about that very issue that are fun and people are engaged and they start saying, “Why is all this money going into weapons when we don’t even need them anymore?” They are generally interested — not feeling obligated to be interested. Plus, I gotta make all this stuff too, you know? I want it to be fun.

Steve Lambert’s show will be up at Charles James Gallery in L.A. through June 6th.
If you would like to find out more about anything Steve Lambert, visit his website.