All posts tagged: corporatism

“Slaves ‘R’ Us” : Advertising, Propaganda, and SEBS in Lisbon

“Slaves ‘R’ Us” : Advertising, Propaganda, and SEBS in Lisbon

The power of advertising and propaganda is undisputed, whether it is for toothpaste or war. We are being acted upon daily by people who would like us to do (or not do) something.  Usually it is to give money for a product or service, but more than ever it is to stand by and allow bombs to fall or laws to be eroded.

Artists have been parodying the methods of advertisement and our willingness to be swayed by it almost since it began, perhaps as a way of alerting us of the deleterious effects of unthinking consumerism in general, or to give us the tools to comprehend and analyze the methods that are effectively driving our behavior.  Invariably, our actions as individuals, citizens, and consumers are all folded into the critique.

 
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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

But whether it is the illustrated stickers of Wacky Packages  or the cereal killers and billboard takeovers of Ron English, many artists have found that humor and irony are effective ways to sweeten the lampoon of advertisers and our complicity – a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, as Mary Poppins sang.

Street Artist Mauro Carmelino, who writes SEBS as his moniker, recently completed an entire campaign of his own that questions many things we do and wonders if we are even aware of the lines between citizenry and consumerism we traverse these days.

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

Entitled “Slaves ‘R’ Us”, this series of handmade works are on the walls of Ajuda, a civil parish in the municipality of Lisbon, Portugal. Bright and simple designs that are cheerful enough, even if they belie a less pleasant series of questions for pondering.

“Democracy, the environment, freedom, security, employment and corporatism are all portrayed as products of a ‘Progress’ that seems to reach the expiration date,” he says as he describes the various elements in the campaign. In Carmelino’s view, our free will is seriously in question today.  “We look back to past societies and feel we came a long way. Did we? Are we free when all our lives can be crunched into zeros and ones, somewhere on a server in California?”

The work looks welcoming and cartoonish on these aged walls and buildings, and if the artists intentions are realized, his greater messages will have an affect on the mind of the viewer. It helps that some of the locations of the walls provides a bit of context, like the silo-shaped building that has a warning about cow milk, “Some of these are inspired by the personal stories of people or are somehow related to the intervened walls,” says the artist.

Special thanks to the artist for providing these exclusive photos for BSA readers.

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

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SEBS, or Mauro Carmelino in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Mauro Carmelino)

 

 

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Occupy Wall Street: Handmade Signs and #Hashtags

“New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant” E.B. White

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And to the above list we might like to add the very, very rich.

“Occupy Wall Street” is the command of a loosely knit congregation of primarily young people who have set up a small colony in downtown since the 17th and, despite the armature of a police state surrounding them, these Millenials are questioning the economic structure of this millenium.  Using D.I.Y signage, social media savy, and a fair amount of street theater, their message has been making it’s way far beyond the cavernous streets of the best know banking district in the country. Fortified with a heavy contingency of uniformed and plain clothesed officers with cameras and weapons at the ready, Wall Street became an iron clad citadel 10 years ago, an impenetrable marble and concrete castle to capital where tourists waddle and traders race daily past the steps on which  George Washington took his oath of office. The stock market is here, the Federal Reserve, and so are all the banks.

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

It’s understandable that a generation with bad prospects of finding work, saddled with high debt for their education and living with parents who are at their wits-end because of underwater mortgages, loss of health insurance and disappearing retirements would now fix their gaze upon the root causes of this permanent insecurity. In many people’s minds the class warfare has been in full effect for a while and these folks are now wondering about those basic tenets of free speech and right to assemble that Americans of previous generations fought to maintain, guaranteed by the constitution. As corporations continue to gain rights and citizens continue to cede  them, these demonstrators say they feel like they have nothing to lose, except their entire country.

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Their camp is a nerve center of hi/low tech creativity where handmade signs on cardboard are painted with sharp slogans and laptops and handhelds are regularly updated with hashtags and twitpics. In the center of the camp  a makeshift digital press office is ringed with faces glowing in the cool blue hue as communication with the rest of the world is continued under the watchful gaze of a ring of blue officers and street cameras. There is also joyful music performed live, with folks sharing food, books, blankets and stories.

Here are some images from the streets of Wall this week – with tourists alternately perturbed and pleased, police polite and alert, and demonstrators all over the place with messages and chants forced into a cyclical narrow path in the public space by temporary steel structures. 2011 has brought an Arab Spring where people have taken back the discourse from ever more entrenched power holders, and this spontaneous discontent appears to be encircling the globe as the shiny finish on corporate globalism seems to lose it’s luster. It makes perfect sense that these demonstrators are in this symbolic and actual nerve center of capitalism in such a public way, using public space to public issues.

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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