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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Much of the "illegal art" in a major copyright-infringement exhibition is just plain silly. But the giant corporations that dominate our culture want to squash it anyway.
Jul 17, 2003 | To judge from samples of his work posted on his Web site, Kieron Dwyer, a 30-ish San Francisco comic-book artist, has a crude, hit-or-miss sense of humor.
Dwyer's idea of what's funny runs from the somewhat perceptive -- for instance, a gag drawing of Saddam Hussein hiding in a book called "History of Iraq," on the theory that American occupiers will never look for him there -- to the juvenile: an image of Santa Claus having too much fun with Rudolph, say, or a three-panel, frat-boy inspired treatment of Shakespeare. ("Doobie, or not doobie? That is the question ... .") Dwyer would seem, on the basis of these creations, an unlikely martyr to the cause of artistic freedom -- yet that's exactly what he became in April of 2000, when the Starbucks Corp. decided that he was a threat to its bottom line.
Starbucks sued Dwyer for copyright and trademark infringement because, a year earlier, Dwyer had drawn a parody of the company's ubiquitous green-and-black logo and had printed it up on essentially everything he could sell: T-shirts, coffee mugs, stickers and the cover of the debut issue of his comic-book series, "Lowest Comic Denominator." Dwyer's version of the coffee company logo -- which can now be seen as part of "Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age," a traveling exhibit currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Artist Gallery in Fort Mason Center -- replaces the pseudo-mythological, blissed-out mermaid encircled in the Starbucks drawing with a more with-it chick who holds a latte in one hand and a cellphone in the other.
Dwyer's mermaid has a pierced belly button and, unlike her corporate stepsister, doesn't feel the need to hide her nipples behind her hair. Dollar signs are everywhere in Dwyer's version, which is part of his point: Instead of "Starbucks Coffee," his logo says "Consumer Whore."
Dwyer's parody is clever, though just barely so. After all, his comment -- that Starbucks is a cog in the machine of American consumerism, or something -- is about the most banal criticism you can lob at the company. Does anyone, anywhere, believe that Starbucks is some sort of noble institution? To argue that dollar signs are central to what Dwyer calls "the whole Starbucks mentality" is so clichéd as to be almost uncontroversial, and the most interesting thing about his case is that someone at Starbucks actually believed that the company had more to gain by going after the artist than by leaving him alone.
What was Starbucks thinking? The Illegal Art show was conceived by Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, and Carrie McLaren, the editor of Stay Free! magazine, precisely to ask questions like that about the corporations that rule our culture.
Much of the art on display here hasn't actually been the subject of legal action (not surprisingly, Starbucks seems to be more thin-skinned about these things than other firms). But almost everything at the show could conceivably bump up against some company's copyright or trademark, with the artists landing in a world of legal trouble. There are depictions of Disney characters in compromising situations, a drawing of Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" rabbit bitch-slapping the Trix bunny and a few naughty works concerning Wal-Mart, "The Family Circus" and the Sesame Street gang.
The idea, of course, was to get the masses fired up about corporate censorship of important art. The problem is, there's not too much important art here. Some of the pieces are funny and subversive, but much of it seems quite silly and tangential. Take, for instance, the photographer Tom Forsythe's series "Food Chain Barbie," in which the doll is seen in various puzzling poses having to do with food preparation -- Barbie is lounging in a martini glass, baking in an enchilada pan, looking happy in a blender, unmoored in a milkshake machine. This is the kind of art-chic idea that might have seemed vaguely "deep" on paper but, pulled off, appears frivolous.
What's more important, though, is that Forsythe's photos -- like so much of the work here -- are harmless. Barbie's lasting image, cultivated with millions of dollars over half a century, will not be damaged by this modest assault, just as Starbucks, whose typical customer visits the store 18 times a month, would not have been much affected by Dwyer's subversion of its logo. Yet both Starbucks and Mattel, Barbie's corporate owner, decided to sue.
