Contested Surfaces: Dr. D and the Battle for Visibility in the City
One of the main distinctions in modern western socio-political culture is the dichotomy between public space, associated with visibility, and private space, associated with invisibility. […] In a sense, this is what the whole anti-capitalist movement’s struggle for a new model of society is all about: to bring back the visibility (as political control) of the public sphere. (1)
When Guy Debord (1967) gifted us his The Society of the Spectacle it wasn’t simply to acknowledge our pretty much complete immersion in banal commodification. Rather he was offering tools to help better understand and counter the social and political relations bound up with both the messages surrounding us and the means by which they are conveyed.
Since the turn of the millennium Dr. D has employed various media and modus operandi to interrupt the spectacle as saturated sales vehicle. His body of work includes collage, posters, stenciled motif and text pieces, billboard detournément, the ‘liberation’ of commercial advertising sites, 3D urban interventions and themed events.
While urban centres around the world have been experiencing a burgeoning – some might say glut – of more or less politically engaged street art, Dr. D’s activities are probably better described as visual activism. His work is often striking, engaging and inventive. Challenging authoritarian tendencies and holding to account individuals perpetuating wealth and privilege in the hands of a few are the clear targets of his critical wit.
Dr. D follows on from and contributes to a recognised tradition of visual art/activist endeavours. The anti-Nazi collages of John Heartfield (fig. 2); the low-tech silk-screen protest posters of the Atelier Populaire produced in late 1960s Paris (fig. 3); the enigmatic billboards of Les Levine (fig. 4) and Barbara Kruger’s (fig. 5) stark image and text works in 1980s US are all relevant precedents.
Fig. 2 John Heartfield
|
Fig. 3 Atelier Populaire
Fig. 5 Barbara Kruger We Don’t Need Another Hero |
Fig. 4 Les Levine Consume or Perish (1989)
Dr. D’s prodigious output can also be seen to chime with the anti-corporate billboards of Ron English (fig. 6) and the forthright declarations of the Guerilla Girls (fig. 7). There are traces of 70s UK punk aesthetics (fig. 8); Michael Peel’s poster works in 80s Belfast at the time of ‘the troubles’ and his Modern World series (fig. 9) and myriad efforts collated and circulated by Adbusters whose mission is to transform commercial media culture and direct it towards ecological and social awareness.’ (2)
 Fig. 6 Ron English BreatheSource: laughingsquid.com  Fig. 8 Jamie Reid Suburban Press Sticker CollageSource: jamiereid.org |
 Fig. 7 Guerilla Girls What I want…Source: artgallery.nsw.gov.au  Fig. 9 Michael Peel Modern WorldSource: ragraphic.wordpress.com |
More recently Dr. D has joined the seemingly ever-growing rank of artist activists invited to contribute to Brandalism’s ‘culture jamming’, anti-capitalist outings (See www.brandalism.org.uk). Given the current global turmoil and political polarisation perhaps it is to be expected that dissenting voices and imagery are multiplying, evermore keen to be heard and seen.
Central to Dr. D’s endeavour is the sheer range, persistence and blunt in-your-face materiality of his practice. At a time when social media and digital platforms are multiplying exponentially, Dr. D’s physical interventions on the urban canvas display accesible audacity as well as active socio-political concern. This is key because while to an extent the internet has proved an important forum for counter-hegemonic debate, the fragmented nature of this communication technology means all too often that it is an exercise in preaching dissent to the converted.
Clearly today there is a growing number of people hungry for analyses of the flaws of neo-liberal governance. In ways that were almost unimaginable a decade ago a contemporary socialist and/or communitarian conscience appears to be gaining traction. However, in this era when it is perfectly possible to imagine oneself connected and active without ever leaving the purview of a computer screen, ‘real’ or material, physical interventions calling for social conscience can take on enhanced significance.
Material networks are important because they shape the nature of cultural forms that travel along them, but also because, like platforms, they are political actors themselves. Politics does not lie within the image, as if the only political exchange at stake is lodged in the […] ability to decode a meaning that inheres in the text. Rather the modes of circulation and of making public are forms of political action in and of themselves. (3)
We know its social forces and the use that is made of various cultural and critical commentaries that determines politics.(4) The Occupy Movement, Everyday Feminism, Black Lives Matter… These and other contemporary groups hitherto somewhat disparaged by the rightwing media as ‘single issue’ initiatives are now revitalising progressive debate and forming what might be termed a more or less coherent but certainly radically refreshed political horizon. Albeit often facilitated by the web, it is physical action, tangible visibility, inventive insurgence and material interruptions to the neo-liberal presumption of authority that often inspires and fortifies such contrary points of view. Pussy Riot got attention more for their raucous DayGlo disruption of a sacred space, the unexpected visual shock of this tactic and what such an act said as much as for what they were actually saying. The fact that (while their existence was tolerated) the Occupy kitchens were better at feeding the homeless and hungry than the authorities charged with that obligation is another case in point. The message of their actions was as significant, if not more so, than any literal agenda activists were bent on declaring.
Turning the Tools of Capitalism Against Itself
In revisiting his original 1967 treatise, Debord (Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1988) makes clear that to imagine one might ‘escape’ Late Capitalism’s grip would be somewhat foolish:
Just as the logic of the commodity reigns over capitalists’ competing ambitions, and the logic of war always dominates the frequent modifications in weaponry, so the harsh logic of the spectacle controls the abundant diversity of media extravagances.(5)
Capital, its ideological manifestations and global commercial imperatives are endlessly adept at ducking and diving, absorbing or obscuring alternative agendas, but perhaps there are ways to interrupt, puncture, contest its dominance?
Let’s be plain, Dr. D steals space as he makes space. Physical spaces are taken over and headspace created to consider the city and its governance in a different light. From the early H.M.P. LONDON OPEN PRISON I.D. MUST BE CARRIED AT ALL TIMES poster series appearing throughout the noughties to the BLANK FRIDAY events staged in November 2016 Dr. D has produced and displayed hundreds of socio-economic and cultural critiques. Faced with the sheer range of his output I propose here to consider the scope of some paper-based works. By tracing their material type, scale, position and various other qualities I want to show that his interventions operate in different registers, posing ideas and questions that are often not as clear-cut ‘agitprop’ as it might seem at a passing glance.
Fig. 10 Dr. D The Sterile State…and East End Bloc
Billboard Diptych (circa 2003 – 2005)
When considering the The Sterile State of Hackney and East End Bloc (fig. 10) billboards – remember standard single billboards (known as 48 sheets) are twenty feet wide by ten feet high – you are looking at an intervention on two adjacent hoardings. Physically this is no easy feat to achieve.
Though ‘crude’ in some respects: limited palette, simple design and stencil-type rendering this is far from any tag-and-run operation. The Sterile State of Hackney and East End Bloc works appeared throughout said borough and more generally around the East London. You might think the Marxist-Leninist red star and sparse block-capital lettering, the scale and God-like vantage point – certainly of higher billboards – all indicate a dictatorial proclamation. However, pasted up during the death-throws of New Labour, one can observe a cheeky dig in the appearance of the red star motif.
Visibility curdles into representations. In the absence of dissonant messages, representations tend to settle down and stabilize themselves. That is why the issue of access to the places of visibility is a central political question. To access these places is the precondition for having a voice in the production of representations. More precisely, it is not simply ‘access’ that matters, but rather the styles and modes of access.(6)
Choosing ‘to stamp’ the city with enigmatic ‘appeals to question’ rather than – what they first appear as – dictatorial sloganeering suggests an instinctive knowledge of the ‘slipperiness’ of images on Dr. D’s part. The viewer is not quite told what to think but pointedly invited to wonder what the ‘Sterile State’ is referring to. Is it the then notoriously incompetent management of funds, schools and services by Hackney Borough Council? And what does ‘Bloc’ mean? That venal scramble by an ‘alliance’ of East London boroughs to carve up and scoff from the pre-2012 OIympic trough? The stark messages were seeking to unsettle, affect and contribute to tweaking the disposition of publics. Some passers-by might dismiss the works as a red star diatribe but then be confused because New Labour were supposed to have dismissed the loony left years beforehand.(7) Others, a good proportion of whom were fiercely suspicious of Harriet Harman’s Olympic smoke and mirrors project, might read the work as a resurgence of a popular socialist conscience (perhaps presciently as it happens). Still today there are many who persist in asking quite who benefitted from the Olympics many years after the event, although such voices are muted by a constant resurrection of that over-sponsored spectacle.
Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of space and the possibilities of time.(8)
This is one of Jaques Ranciere’s uncharacteristically clearer formulations. Dr. D, though capable as we’ll see of being productively enigmatic, never seeks to be obscure just for the sake of it. Rather, he speaks in a number of different ‘voices’. I would suggest that energetic reinvention accounts in part for the longevity of his efforts. He not only challenges publics – plural because urban dwelling is an agglomeration of many ideas and mentalities – but is constantly challenging himself to frame and address issues and the people they may affect in different registers.
Fig. 11 Dr. D (2010) Beg Society
16 sheet billboard
The BEG SOCIETY (fig. 11) work is a simple, declarative pun on David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. A smaller I©*BS poster supplementing the billboard campaign rammed the message home. The superscript asterisk is prosaically unpacked: ‘Big Society means you will be required to work for free in a job you were previously paid for.’
Beyond this righteous, some might say self-righteous, anger there is evidence of a much more variegated, thoughtful impetus and depth to Dr. D’s interventions. American architect, urbanist, writer and teacher Keller Easterling (2014) observes in Extrastatecraft that the declarative and enacted approaches to activism are to an extent bound together and complimentary. She cautions, however, that too glib a reliance on any declarative ‘us versus them’ rhetoric completely misses the mark in terms of effective dissent in contemporary political work. Worse, it plays into the hands of excessive power and wealth because more and more the means by which the ‘1%’ maintain control is extremely sophisticated. ‘Righteous ultimatums or binaries of enemies and innocents that offer only collusion or refusal might present a structural obstacle greater than any mythical opponent’ such as Capital, Empire or Neoliberalism.(9) Adopting merely a simplistic oppositional stance lets big business, government and the sophisticated mechanisms of global capitalism off the hook.
Many powerful players that […] activists oppose maintain fluid or undeclared intentions by saying something different from what they are doing. It is easy to toy with or trick activist resistance if declaration is all that qualifies as information. When targeted, the powerful wander away from the bull’s-eye, arranging for shelter or immunity elsewhere. They may successfully propagate a rumor (e.g., that there is evidence of WMD, that climate change is a hoax, that Obama is not a US citizen) to capture the world’s attention.(10)
Capturing attention to divert attention. Vested interests are even cloaking themselves in the mantle of resistance. The commercial construction sector negotiating to build (inadequate) quotas of ‘social housing’, the thrust to privatise services, schools, the pushing through 24/7 of access to health is ideology in the guise of reform, the cynical volte face of a Murdoch press (TITS AND FARCE as Dr. D puts it in a 2011 postcard work) ‘supporting’ breast cancer awareness…
Easterling’s concern is to unearth and explore ways that publics might counter the power of global infrastructure but her proposed co-option of extra state craft in support of radical reform has other elements that accord with Dr. D.’s thinking and practice. ‘[…] Techniques that are less heroic, less automatically oppositional, more effective, and sneakier – techniques like gossip, rumor, gift-giving, compliance, mimicry, comedy, remote control, meaninglessness, misdirection, distraction, hacking, or entrepreneurialism.’(11)
Of course, whether you cite the precedents of a carnivalesque ‘telling truth to power’, vaudevillian comedy, Dada gestures… The tactics Easterling refers to predate the digital age and Dr. D’s ransom note style billboard works evince a number of them.
Fig. 12 Dr. D Left Sucking…
Ransom Note Style Stencil Billboard (circa 2009)
Like pretty much all of Dr. D’s output, these gigantic epigrammatic works are an act of gifting, a one-liner that ‘brightens’ people’s day. ‘Gifts’ that are often remarked on and circulated via social media. They are archetypes of roadside distraction: WAIT HERE FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS… (fig. 13) and I MADE YOU YOU’RE SCUM work in a similar vein.
Fig. 13 Dr. D Wait Here For Further Instructions…
Ransom Note Style Stencil Billboard (circa 2009)
Source: hypocritedesign.com
Initially these billboards could be said to be one-liner ‘shout outs’ at passers-by but multifarious connotations soon emerge. The ransom note style lettering is at once comical on account of its scale – these are usually intimate or at least secretive communications – but there is also a melancholic desperation. It is not established whom exactly is ‘Left Sucking The Mop’ so perhaps this refers to a general malaise. The ‘Wait Here…’ work seems similarly abject. Seeing this amid the teeming urban environment, that ‘thick space’ as sociologists sometimes refer to it, one mentally plays out the required act but soon enough realise that if we were to do as we are told nobody is going to rescue us or offer any purposeful life chances. The ‘I Made You…’ billboard agressively redoubles the alienation. But is this the Government talking? Or is it the ‘designers’ of variously visible boundaries that crisscross the mega-city? Or is it simply the advertising platform on which the text is displayed that is being challenged and mocked?
The ‘unslickness’ of these works, so much at odds with the surrounding corporate offerings, lends them a sort of gallows humour amid the sophisticated commercial onslaught into which they have been seeded. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry, which is I think how a lot of people feel when confronted with a venal, mealy-mouthed politics that appears simply not able to address economic and social ills other than in a crass, self-serving manner.
Fig. 14 Dr. D Evening Standard Poster
Disabled activists protested against Tony Blair’s welfare cuts in 1997 and 1999.
Their actions continued into the new millennium against the Coalition and Conservative Governments.
Dr. D uses the ES poster as a generic form applicable to many ‘cuts as savings’ outrages.
Gossip, rumour, comedy, meaninglessness, these tactics are evident in Dr. D’s reworking of the Evening Standard newspaper posters usually seen outside tube stations, on the high street and elsewhere (fig.s 14,15 and 16).
UK artists Gilbert & George have been similarly fascinated by ES posters, the journalist Alison Roberts interviewed them on the subject in 2012:
“We collected the posters without thinking for years and years,” […] “We didn’t want to think too much. We do not say these [headlines] are good or bad, it is just what it is.” […] They both dismiss the St Paul’s protesters as “hippies” and “idiots” and would rather side with the bankers than “some vegan twit on benefits”, they think Boris Johnson is “a wonderful modern person” and believe fiercely in “making money”.(12)
Earlier I asserted it is not artefacts themselves but particular kinds of social forces and what use is made of various cultural and critical commentaries that determine politics. I don’t propose here to offer any sort of evaluation of Gilbert & George’s art but want to illustrate how they and Dr. D take the same artefact and reproduce it in ways that reflect – and/or generate – very different dispositions. Gilbert & George extract realism from the street and elevate it into a high art, elitist commodity. Alternatively Dr. D reproduces this form associated with knee-jerk shock or tacky, titillating banalities and employs it to address pressing social and political concerns albeit with mordant, somewhat surreal wit: TESCO SOLVE SHERGAR MYSTERY (fig. 15).
Fig. 15 Dr. D Evening Standard Poster
Referencing the famous racehorse Shergar, this is great joke about finding horsemeat in supermarket ready meals but also an indictment of worldwide industrial food production.
Dr. D’s versions of the ES posters are also shared on social media, they become spurs to thought and further engagement. Gilbert & George’s work arguably expands visual language but exists pretty much exclusively in the realm of aesthetic knowledge and ‘appreciation’. Dr. D furnishes the streets and publics with foci for critical resistance not pat ‘answers’. His visual activism is supported by active engagement in dissent, practical support for significant, pressing causes. Famed though they are for constant perambulation round London’s East End, Dr. D isn’t likely to cross paths with Gilbert & George on a street protest march. Or outside the Bank of England…
Fig. 16 Dr. D Money’s Too Tight For Pensions
This version of the ES poster plays on UK band Simply Red’s cover of the song
Money’s Too Tight To Mention which reached no. 13 in the charts in 1985.
Perhaps a sole meeting point between the Dr. D and Gilbert & George is a less than sympathetic attitude towards the ‘art world’. The latter are purported to hate the art establishment because of what they saw as its original disregard for their efforts. Dr. D’s – how to put this? – ‘mistrust’ of the same is, I think, rooted in what National Art Critic for Artnet News Ben Davis observes is a blissful irresponsibility germane to much of the art world, an inability to recognise when an emperor – in this case the philosopher Jaques Rancière – may be somewhat lacking in the clothes department:
Such an inability to call obscurantism as one sees it – the confusion of complex forms with serious meaning – is, of course, an intellectual problem, leading to the substitution of quirky diction for critical thought. It is also […] a political problem, in that it draws good people’s efforts into false intellectual debates. But it is, finally, an esthetic problem as well. Failing to deal with such thought skeptically can only make the art world more insular, and more pompous.(13)
In the same text Davis also cites the Visible Collective that draw attention to U.S. government’s detention of Arabs and Muslims since 9-11 as an example of a group who, like Dr. D, use a range of approaches in their activism: ‘everything from slick light-box installations, to comic films, to simple banners depicting the faces of the disappeared, making it clear that formal issues are secondary to getting people involved.’ (14) Eschewing obscurantism, inhabiting a marginal position in terms of the art world is not a choice but rather an outcome of the means Dr. D employs more than the subjects he chooses to focus on.
The posters, small fly-posted works to billboards, the placards, postcards – Dr. D’s G.C.H.Q ALWAYS LISTENING TO OUR CUSTOMERS work mimicking the corporate solicitation rife in contemporary service industry blurbs was used in postcard form by human rights campaigning group Liberty (fig. 17).
Fig. 17 Dr. D G.C.H.Q. installation image reproduced on Liberty Postcard (2014)
Commercial advertising hoardings that have been ‘doctored’, for example, when the Pirates of the Caribbean’s actor Johnny Depp appeared one day with David Cameron’s face replacing that of Jack Sparrow’s (Fig. 18):
Fig. 18 Dr. D Pirates of the Coalition (2011)
Dr. D’s output extends to ‘special builds’ such as the BENT COMMANDMENTS series, one of which was painstaking installed on the lenticular door of Cordy House, Curtain Road, London EC2 and works that I’ll refer to as FAMILY HOMILIES which have appeared at music festivals as well as in the urban environment (Figs. 19 / 20).
Fig. 19 Dr. D Honour Thy Labels & Thy Plastic (2013) from the print,
poster and site-specific installation series Bent Commandments.
Fig. 20 Dr. D If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong… (2011) This and other of the FAMILY HOMILY
works combine the wholesome knitting pattern imagery of the 50S and 60s with a 21st century cynicism towards sexual exploitation.
All of these various formats and styles, with their differing potential to reach and affect publics share one quality. They may be said to be ‘woven’ into the spectacle but are transparently ‘stamped onto’ the material surfaces of the physical world. It doesn’t take long for their visibility to be ‘read’ as an intervention, an alien creature. And despite the ambitious scale of some it is not inconceivable to take the message, at least from their often ‘homespun’ form, that anyone can join in this practice of making critical interventions questioning the society of the spectacle. You simply need a stencil set and spray paint, or access to Photoshop and a printer to join in.
Under Cover Visual Insurgence
There is, however, a vein of ‘less visible’ paper based work that is different. Often installed by Dr. D wearing that time-honoured aid to invisibility, the high-vis. jacket, these pieces somewhat hide in clear sight. I am referring to a number of projects that often appear ‘under glass’ and/or occupying ‘legitimate’ advertising or informational spaces. These works, in design and positioning, mimic so closely their referent image/text that even seasoned urban detectives may sit beneath or walk past them without quite realising that they are not part of the usual commercial or civic rhetoric (Figs 20 / 21).
Fig. 20 Dr. D No Smirking and No Eye Contact Underground Info. Interventions (circa 2009).
Fig. 21 Dr. D Mind The Crack Underground Info. Interventions (circa 2009).
NO SMIRKING; NO EYE CONTACT; MIND THE CRACK… Dr. D’s (2009) interventions on London Underground disarm by the fact of their seemingly belonging to the realm of official transport notices. That publics are first induced to ignore them – who reads a notice we think we’ve already seen a thousand times? – makes the eventual realization that they do not belong all the more subversive. We may smile at commentary on rules appertaining to ‘the presentation of self’ in public. And get the sardonic humour of ‘minding’ something, as in ‘object to it’, ‘don’t fall into it.’ But it is the design, the mimicry of the visual language of authority and its revelation to be false and questionable that interrupts prevailing messages of social control. It is the way such works query our constant subjection to behavioural and other boundaries that constitutes their valuable work of dissent.
Fig. 22 N’Oreal (2008) Cheryl as Dole Model rather than a Role Model: ‘Hair from India, Voice via Auto Tune, Publicity by Satan.’
Long before Owen Jones sought to expose the consequences of our ‘Because I’m Worth It Culture’ and how ‘an ever more unequal distribution of wealth leaves those in power with the feeling that they have every right to ever greater slices of it.’ Dr. D had ‘re-presented’ the L’Oreal advert (Fig. 22).(15)
Again, a key feature of this work is how Dr. D is apparently seeking to be more thoroughly ‘woven into’ the urban fabric rather than stamped on to its surface. Cheryl’s stretched smile, gleaming white teeth, perfectly coiffured visage is seen beneath the strap banner ‘N’Oreal’. Smaller text down the right hand side of the poster questions more detailed aspects of the celebrity’s manufacture but unless one were really attentive this would elude most people. On the surface all you see is Cheryl’s ‘pretty face’. One could say there’s a generosity in that. It’s not as if Dr. D is averse to employing somewhat obscene and disturbing visual exaggeration when deemed necessary (Fig. 23).
Fig. 23 Dr. D So Huge… (2010) A comment on spam emails concerned with erectile function
that relentlessly crop up amidst the plethora of other email marketing.
With ‘N’Oreal’ though the point is that we absorb the image, take it for granted pretty much as we would any ‘pleasing’ example of the advertisers’ seductive handiwork. In effect Dr. D is reproducing one of the regimes of visibility that social theorist Andrea Brighenti talks about, namely the ‘flash and halo effect’. As a process visibility ‘works instantly but extends in time.’(16) With the ‘N’Oreal’ work Dr. D is conjoining with a recognised marketing trope. Namely that we see celebrity, and the messages connected with them, first in a flash, a gaze that weakens or removes context: ‘Wow look, it’s Cheryl!’ This contextual blinkering allows us all to momentarily ‘enjoy’ our instant recognition of the celebrity. But then there is ‘the halo’, the reverberation of her presence that occurs through our being constantly reminded of her presence and effects on popular culture and particularly expectations of what it is to be a ‘successful feminine role model’.
Metaphorically and now literally Cheryl has become part of the street furniture. We are so drawn in by the familiarity, by the ubiquity of ‘our girl next door’ that when/if we do finally get the point of the work, it makes one think of all the other times that we have been duped. Dr. D here has employed the style and mode of ‘easy consumption’ and it’s only in time that we can perhaps think on what a mouthful we are being expected to swallow, what eyefuls, headfuls, we are subjected to daily, moment-by-moment as we walk down the street. Maybe when we question the detrimental effects of such stereotypically normative constructions with which we are bombarded, we might get to laugh at them.
Fig. 24 Dr. D Curfew (2014)
If Dr. D’s work is not going to directly bring about a crisis that produces real change it does contribute to ideas hanging around, and it performs acts of dissent which can inform action. In his CURFEW series mimicking TfL’s Congestion Charge notices, it is again the delayed recognition that is a critical part of the message (Fig. 24). These, as are all works, are clearly ‘signed’ by the ‘author’ but self-agrandisement on Dr. D’s part is never part of the project. Rather, on reflection, one is induced to wonder to what extent are we unaware of other injunctions? The social cleansing alluded to variously takes the form of access to housing, education and more and more healthcare. From the CURFEW warnings it is just a short step to realising that so much of urban design consists of more or less visible boundary markers: directions, demands, prescriptions as to behaviour and thinking. The spectacle, populist media, policing and right leaning policy all cohere to manage a supposed ‘democratic’ society in its own image. With CURFEW, the ‘content’ and surreptitious physical form of the work takes reiterate passers-by lack of access. They remind them that lives are continually filtered, mediated, trammeled: earphones, screens, ‘happy’ pills, myriad exhortations to consume and, at the same time, to do as we are told… All this becomes who we are: a society driven more and more by the prerogatives of the market economy.
Dr. D’s work interrupts neo-liberal assumptions of all pervading visibility, the relentless onslaught of dominating stereotypes foisted upon us. This is not at all anti free choice but rather for a fight against the hard sell of our commodity culture, the supremacy of the unregulated market. Through his protest by deed activism, Dr. D introduces into the urban fabric variously visible pointers contesting the supremacy of unregulated markets and the self-serving ideas and mentalities that determine the way they behave. The spectacle would have us believe that its over-riding character is, yes aspirational, but emphatically neutral and apolitical. Dr. D’s urban interventions suggest otherwise.
Adrian Burnham 2016
1.Andrea Brighenti (2007) Visibilty: A Category for the Social Sciences in Current Sociology, p332
2.Joseph Thompson et al (1999) Billboard: Art On The Road MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, p.10
3.Megan McLagan and Yates McKee (eds) (2012) Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism Zone Books, Cambridge Massachusetts pp17/18
4.The artists Gilbert and George and Dr. D have both, for example, used Evening Standard newspaper posters in their work but (without either being particularly didactic) the outcomes point to very different attitudes to society and its perceived condition. More on this later…
5.Guy Debord (1988) Comments on the Society of the Spectacle Section III. Source: libcom.org.
6.Andrea Brighenti (2007) Visibilty: A Category for the Social Sciences in Current Sociology, p333
7.The red star, of course, is also the logo of Pret-A-Manger which between 2001 and 2008 was in large part owned by global food giant McDonalds
8.Jacques Ranciere in McLagan and McKee (eds) (2012) …
9.Keller Easterling (2014) Extrastatecraft Verso, London p.212
10.Ibid.
11.Ibid.
12.Evening Standard, Alison Roberts, 05.03.2012
13.Ban Davis Rancière For Dummies Artnet.com
14.Ibid.
15.Owen Jones (2014 [2015]) The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It Penguin Books, London p.14
16.Andrea Brighenti (2007) Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences in Current Sociology 2007 p.333
