fLYPOSTER FRENZY
Photocopiers -interplanetary saviours from another dimension?

The invention of the photocopier as a tool for bureaucrats and businessmen, facilitating the cheap, swift and accurate reproduction of documents doesn't immediately conjure up the prospect of a powerful tool for subversion. Office workers everywhere know using it as the ultimate in shitwork. The machine makes weird smells, annoying noises and using it usually gets dumped into the thrill packed life of the kid on the training scheme along with making the tea and tidying up. The photocopy's status as a cultural artifact, as art, doesn't get much more glamourous. The quality is harsh, the paper's frail and after a while even this deteriorates.Instead of preciousness and collectability the photocopy remains steadfastly valueless and disposable.

It is exactly these qualities which make the photocopier a useful medium. Most people have access to a photocopier either at work or in one of the copy bureaus that can be found on every high street. Unlike other printing methods it doesn't require much skill to get a result. There's no training required, and what you see on your paste-up is usually pretty close to what comes out, reassuringly warmed, at the other end of the machine. Copies can be made as and when required rather than being optimistically mass-produced only to spend the next decade yellowing gracefully at the back of someone's cupboard - and what time is sweeter than company time - when being spent producing weirdo literature using the company's paper?

In "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" Walter Benjamin first detailed the gradual elimination of "aura" - the"unique phenomenon of distance however close it may be" from works of art as mechanical processes of reproduction, particularly photography and film, superseded the devotional contemplation of the unique object. He charted this transition from the singular to the mass-produced as an inevitable technological progression. This transition should not only be noted and adapted to, but extended until the reification of "aura" and notions of originality are surpassed entirely. The photocopier, along with the image manipulating computer, the sampler and other fab products of the evil multinationals throws the roles of producer, reproducer, user, into confusion. Who can tell which photocopy is an original? The negation of these traditional artistic values opens culture up to a freeing of creative activity.

Being multiple and never unique the photocopy is always social. Even if only a single copy exists at any one point it is always possible to instantly produce hundreds of others with exactly the same (lack of) aura. Some of the posters in this book have been used, copied and passed on by people until no one can remember who did it originally - hence all the anonymous ones.

This lack of aura makes the photocopy less easily distinguishable as an "artistic object". The copiers' constant use in the production of authoritative documents for large inflexible structures such as corporations or local government allows the misattribution of documents to these sources when their style is mimicked making this authority all the easier to undermine. (For instance at the time of the Gulf War thousands of fake and piss-taking call up papers were sent to unsuspecting people by their friends. Re-copied and passed on by them in turn, they got all over the country really fast.) The posters here that take on the look of adverts or official announcements go one step further than the t-shirts and other clothes that pirate the logos and look of clothes by major labels and designers. While these are subversive in that you'd have to be an idiot to buy the "real thing" when you can get a copy down the market for a quarter of the price, they rely on - if only for sales, the sustained popularity of the original that they will always remain in the shadow of. Here, once the posters have appropriated the look they turn cannibal and go straight for the jugular.

The blurring of source that becomes available with this technology points toward an advancement of culture as accumulative. That is to say that all "innovations" are built on the sum total of what has gone before. All developments are seen as the enrichment of the collective sum rather than sporadic bursts of genius. (The development of the photocopier itself being a prime example of the fusion and adaption of previously separated technologies.) The hyperinflation in the value of the "original" sinks lived culture into an inertia refuted by Lautreamont's, Situationist apropriated, slogan "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it."

Lighting up the streets in glorious black + white flyposters have provided a cultural form which those on the fringes of, or totally outside dominant cultures, have been able to use with great effect. The uses have varied from person to person and from situation to situation. The common characteristic is that flyposters are a medium for groups or individuals with little money or access to the established media. They are exciting, dangerous and subversive.

The anticopyright network was founded to make a large number of these posters available and to create an open space for the development of the poster as a creative and agitational form. Anticopyright has roots in the "underground" but aims to exist aboveground and in conflict with a culture that attempts to reduce us all to ciphers.

Flyposter Frenzy reproduces ninety of the posters that we have collected over the past three years. There are two reasons for producing it: Firstly to make these posters, which are some of the most popular ones from our catalogue, available and ready for use to a wider range of people and secondly to intensify the debate around interventional cultural practice in public spaces.

In recent years groups and artists that are not only highly literate in "high culture" but ready and willing to manipulate the language of the media and other cultures have sprung up. The best known of these are; Jenny Holzer, Barbera Kruger and the graphics collectives of ACT-UP as well as the Guerrilla Girls and OUTPOST. We will be presenting work by some of these alongside material that has never been connected with mainstream art discourse, work from other traditions, other genealogies, but that has immense importance in the consideration of possibilities for cultural practice today. Anticopyright connects with this new media practice but also with it's flip side; manifestos, broadsheets, montages, pranks, disinformation and with the necessity of constructing political and cultural activity in the face of important and immediate threats such as homelessness, racism, the destruction of ecologies and so on.

The book will appeal to those who are interested in the creation of a vital oppositional culture but also to those on whose behalf both theorists and political militants are wont to wax most lyrical. This book is by and for those who have been marginalised but whose lives and their manifestations of them, in this case as posters, are central to any project which seeks to understand or to change.

Public space -common ground...

The flyposter's intervention in public space, in physical terms, disruption, is minimal. It is almost gone as soon as it is placed. forming a shifting, fluctuating second skin on the city its effectivity is in direct conflict with the notions of permanence, eternal verity and worth that clutter our towns in the form of monuments. Monuments built to withstand the passing of time, attempting to impose a fixed, everlasting image. The flyposter formalises a necessary impermanence - it's brief presence attempting to stimulate the viewer into self activity by denying itself fixity, interested in diffusion and not central points. The flyposter asks the viewer of itself "What is it? Who made it and why?" Its function is to destabilise the cohesion of what we are told about cities and to insert itself as a temporary site of antagonism, whether as part of a specific and broader movement with well defined political or cultural aims or for the sheer joy of rupturing power's smooth transmission of meaning and death.

Those posters that do articulate specific social and political contentions are notrestricted by an adhesion to a particular organisation or "line". This has allowed a wide variety of uses, from community groups concerned with getting better housing or beating racists and fascists out of their areas to individuals concerned to do some civic minded shit-stirring.

...or battleground?

Public space is a myth. The last of the common land was bundled up and sealed a long time ago. In cities and industrialised nature every last millimetre is so obviously owned by, broadcast to, and fought over by a deluge of competing interests. Public space remains contingent on what and who is excluded or included by definitions of a mythical "general public". In contrast to "public art", whose practitioners must always have one eye cocked to what is required by this constituency the flyposter is unabashedly conflictual. This conflictuality is unavoidable for anyone who has experienced the city in slightly different terms to that of a literary exercise; as a place of traffic, accidents, violence, lust, strength, poverty, intoxication, attacks, hunger, fear and shopping

Flyposters and the Quality Environment

Flyposters are generally placed within an architectural environment, consequently it is worthwhile to consider the functions of architectures in relation to informational and behavioural discourses and the ways in which these are subverted and repositioned. Social and cultural positionings work in material and spatial terms. Posters counterpose points of view in real terms, as cultural constructs they are something tangible, having an effectivity shaping contexts and frameworks, points of view and points of conflict. They interlace orientations of struggle, challenge acquiescence and the provoke the revelation of intentions and desires.

Arrangements of built environments must also be seen in terms of symbolic power relations which by their denial or allowance of possibility may be equally harrowing or liberating. Public space as idealized on behalf of the general public has become the shopping centre. The mythology presented in shopping centres such as Cardiff's Capitol Exchange or Birmingham's Palisades with their strange mixtures of film set, local vernacular, art deco or Victorian play bricks embody an official postmodernism. Entirely ephemeral, buildings gorging on their own display, which when you enter, credit card in hand, become immense pleasure domes of consumption.

Displayed commodities draw the crowds together in high-security safety, cocooned from the street. The momementary pleasure of buying is connected successfully with the lack of lack; no political demonstrations, no beggars, no violence. Seduced by a thousand special effects and fortified by a snack from one of the range of themed eateries the abandonment is delayed. That was a couple of years ago, before the boutiques started emptying, when people no longer somehow managed to afford Belgian chocolates and designer socks. However, the project - the channelling of desires into an endless and well monitored one room labyrinth, remains the same.

Every Reality a Virtual Reality

The apparent permanence of buildings; concrete, glass, steel, is constantly repositioned by non-tangible information systems; electronic imaging, surveillance equipment, communications structures and so on. The seemingly natural and always "necessary" authority of the architect and client is an attempted channelling of social currents whose flow cannot help but burst its banks. Architecture is reinterpreted by shifts and conflicts within social structure. Even the subjectivity of its inception's form cannot remain a functional constant; Churches become housing, warehouses become homes for the rich, paving stones shatter windows. The Bauhaus idea of a homogenised form and function, the semiotic value fused with the utilitarian - the signifier coupled with a conveniently immediate signified was produced by a discourse dominated by a self-proclaimed rationality. They knew that transformations of social life could be made by way of the transformation of space but they couldn't countenance contradiction. The voice of the author commanding the interpretation and use of the building only in terms of the denotative attempted to drown out the connotations of the user. Conversely the self consciously irrational and weird novelty architect relies as much on this concept of the rational for effect as he equals its hectoring voice. The sham colloquialisms and classicisms of much postmodern architecture embody the compression of history into that of a monological vision.

The civic improvement developments that encrust our pavements and walls along seems of financial movement are renamed in the great spirit of democracy as public art. The class alliances that place these edifices to the blandness of the official mind, symbols of the supposed unity, historically and in the present, of a carved up terrain, stifle difference with the clammy hand of homogeneity. Combined; the multivalent spectacle, a regime of flexible accumulation - the spectacle as play and the spectacle of posturing civic "health" reinforce each other. This false plurality and arrogant sports centre virility attempt to smother diversity and confrontation. The flyposter does not only erode the bombast of architecture - it is architecture - an anarchitecture.

No doubt some of these flyposters are ending up providing variations on the James Dean/Marilyn Monroe/ Fluffy Kitten poster as decorations for people's rooms rather than being splattered up on a wall in a glorious blow against the commodification of art, or something. But this can be easily understood when you realise that when correctly placed in the bedroom they will improve the quality of sex and in the kitchen, the taste of cooking.

Advertising and sloganeering

While Anticopyright has provided a forum for the discussion and development of flyposting as a cultural and political form there remain various issues around what is possible to be done within this format; whether complex ideas can be effectively put across/whether didactic sloganeering ever achieves anything, whether media saturation reduces everything to just another advertisement, or whether the total disregard for involving people in any of its processes shown by the state results in the dismissal of any political ideas and action all together.

We are not looking for any kind of final resolution to these problems, or any of the others that are faced by people producing flyposters, nor do we believe that in themselves they form anything more than contingencies, that in every situation the conditions will differ and that everything is possible to deal with on that basis. We can in fact use them to our advantage. The stale, same old lies of democracy can be used as a trope for the language of a refreshing and vital "real politics". While the dully frantic screams of "SMASH THIS! FIGHT THAT!" will no doubt go on for evenn some faction's mental barricades there will always be eruptions of humour and inspiring demands for the impossible and the necessary. It is to the defiant and unexpected, breaks with received "reality", that we look for development.

Advertising is essentially always fragile and subject to constant rupture by peoples' expectations and intelligence. Advertising attempts to endow the merchandise with potency, make its purchase and consumption inseparable from the exciting and sexualised images that accompany it. The purpose of these posters is not simply the unnecessary reverse; to make excitement and sexuality desirable rather than the product. Advertising attempts a channelling of desire and in channelling desire does not merely repress it but focuses it, enables it to achieve the merchandise. Its supplications are orders. The purpose, if it can be called that, of these posters is to destroy this imposition, diffuse this focussing and in doing so flood out beyond these channels.

We can learn from the techniques of advertising, adapt it, wreck it. How can we not do so, it constructs our environment. This is getting back to nature. It is useful to study and use the array of visual and textual devices that are used in advertising. Firstly, they did not originate there, they are culled from techniques that develop from all kinds of situations, they are not immediately compromised when used elsewhere and secondly, they work. The danger of oversimplifying the issues that these posters involve themselves in is always present and undoubtedly there are some here that will not satisfy some people in this respect. The fact that posters have only about two or three seconds while people are walking past them in the street in which to be noticed is not an intractable limitation. The placing of posters is often just as important as their content - you need only to compare the length of the text of advertisements in underground train stations compared to those on billboards to notice this. People have a lot of time to read at bus stops for instance. Just because the content of the poster has to be communicated in seconds does not immediately rule out anything but the inane. It does however mean that we need to be careful of stripping language down, simplifying it so that it becomes rigid, lacking in idiosyncrasy and beauty. The ironic, use of density and lightness, the scraping and pasting of accumulated layers of signs, dislocation, are means by which fixed meanings, from us or onto us, are overcome.

Higher Purpose + the mechanisms of authority.

Whether these posters interrogate and disperse the language of authority or just plain slag it off ("Never trust a politician - they always lie") they all celebrate its downfall. Universal languages and their inherent promise of "rational" discourses, in the pursuit of reform, have become an irrelevance no matter how much they are grasped for by the fast fading avatars of "progress". There's no need to bemoan this loss of a "common language", of rationality. Because loss for us it certainly isn't. Universal languages have never meant anything in the way of a shared experience but a decoding device for those who situate themselves and only themselves, at axial points of power in society. Their translation to us of our own lives into that of a general public is increasingly hard to dissimulate. Between those included or excluded from the post-industrial game plan lies a massive disproportion of wealth in what has become the prime commodity and currency - informations. Society can no longer be held together by appeals to a common discourse, a greater good. Increasingly conflict has no mediation in appeals to some mythic common ground because it is precisely this common ground that is slipping away. We are being left to act out the role of general public while capital migrates into the abstract and its attendants attempt to enforce a scorched earth in its wake.

Only Global Niceness Can Save Us Now

"Committal" chosen from an arbitrary check-list of right on concerns makes no essential change. The martian artists who land in sections of human society bleeping "solidarity with the underprivileged" and the revolutionary cabals who emerge at moments of struggle with ideologies to sell inevitably end up coming to terms with their failure with the platitude that we're all "alienated". Yeah, sure we are. Is it beside the point that this alienation can be measured in direct proportion to their love the people - help the people - art for the people specialisation? The quantifications with which people are referred to in "progressive" cultural work, idealist though they may be, can never be anything but quantifications. The panicking lack of "the masses", "the public", and "society" as an audience that hits the virtuous like the threat of Hell is a result of their refusal to see the "audience" as anything but passive. Creative production of meanings through engagement with cultures is a threat to the author (of any ideological persuasion) at centre stage.

The leftist (or artist) specialist identity is formed by the role as oppositional to the way authority is conducted by those who hold the dominant position. This role is performed in order to mask the specialist as integral to the dominant term. As the structure loses the intactness of its fake pluralism they lose their role as oppositional. Their complicity reveals itself. History is not the history of class struggle until on the level of the individual's subjective engagements these engagements accumulate into social formations, a collective subject. Instead of the arduous efforts of these cultural workers to be "pro-oppressed" and "anti-hegemonic" they should determine and alter the relations and conditions of themselves and their peers and thus embody rather than represent displacement of oppression and hegemony.

Simple machine

The way in which the anticopyright network is structured is designed to make it as accessible as possible. We work on a principle of decentralization. Each distribution point is relatively independent, responsible for raising its own funds and supplying posters and any information to people who get in contact. The catalogue that lists the posters is of course the same for all of the distribution points in order to avoid any muddles. We also use the same basic design for the general publicity leaflets which briefly explain what anticopyright is and list the distribution points. Decentralization works well by spreading all the necessary work and responsibilities - allowing maximum effect with minimum effort. We also feel that in maintaining such an open structure we avoid problems of hierarchy - of any one person or group having too much control over the processes of the network.

We hope to encourage new distribution points in any country or area to which the posters would be relevant. At the moment we are largely limited to English language posters but would hope to develop contacts with people interested or involved in parallel or connected structures using other languages. The posters have also been reproduced as stickers, t-shirt designs, grouped together and shown at community art spaces as well as being used as magazine illustrations. In this sense anticopyright functions as a library of radical texts and images. People involved are also very open to collaborating in similar areas. It cannot be over stressed that anticopyright is a continuing project and needs all kinds of involvement from all kinds of people.

Brief history

Anticopyright was initially proposed from Cardiff, with a number of leaflets floated around various networks suggesting the idea, listing different ways people could become involved and asking for help and comments. This was accompanied by letters sent direct to people who it was known were producing flyposters themselves or who had numbers of them that were suitable for distribution. This initial process lasted about half a year until sufficient posters had been collected to compile the first catalogue, by then distribution points had also been established in Iowa and Braunschweig (these are no longer going). Once this simple machine had been constructed all that remained was to keep it ticking over through the countless activists, artists, cultural workers and others who pass on information, posters and resources and by doing so produce and enlarge the network.

One effect of the network was to bring into contact a number of groups and individuals who used flyposters on a regular basis in what had previously been a solo endeavour. The network was able to distribute numbers of posters, quite rapidly, to people up and down the country and round the world, when circumstances demanded it. Such posters were produced at the times of the Ambulance Workers' strike, the Gulf War and continually throughout the reign of the ever popular Poll Tax. Obviously this is on a relatively small scale, but working alongside support for the strike, war refusal and non-payment, can bolster and sustain these activities.

D-I-Y

In April 1992 a meeting was held in Stoke-on-Trent which brought together a number of people involved in using, making and distributing the posters. The event proved useful, and achieved its aims of informally encouraging the proliferation of contact and collaboration between people connected with the network. Unlike "proper" arts conferences or whatever there was no massive entrance fee, everyone chipped in what they could afford with food, beer and other costs being shared. We believe that people can do a hell of a lot on low, or no, budgets. Doing it yourself creates a culture responsive to those taking part in it , divests itself of any central authority and enables its perpetual reinvention. This means making and changing politics and culture not because of any party induced political guilt or because it looks good on some arty CV, but because people want to do it, because it responds to our needs and desires.

We hope that this book goes some way in presenting ideas about what is possible, nevertheless, we want more! We want more posters, we want better posters, we want more people getting involved.

Let's wallpaper the world.
Matthew Fuller

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