SF DocFest: Pop-aganda
All the culture jammers said hey (haaaa-yeeee) on Friday night at the Women's Building, for the first SF DocFest screening of Pop-aganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English by Pedro Carvajal, and the film short Fridge by Brian Perkins and friend of SFist Jason Blalock.
Pop-aganda is a profile of the artist Ron English, who's made a specialty of 1) guerrilla billboards and 2) paintings about the commodification of pop culture, and Fridge is about magnetic poetry in San Francisco. Like the films' introducer said, "these films are -- well, I don't want to say pranky....", to a resounding "whoo!!!" in the crowd.
What happens when you take a refrigerator into the streets of San Francisco, and ladies with Mickey Mouse boobies, after the jump.
Pop-Aganda and Fridge play again on May 21 at 10 p.m. Art by Ron English
So the two filmmakers in Fridge brought a full-size white refrigerator to various sites in San Francisco (Montgomery Street and Market; Haight and Ashbury; and Dolores Park), with a full kit of magnetic poetry words stuck onto the front, and asked people to write poetry with them, and then explain what they were trying to say. Curiously (or not), everyone seems to write about sex (except for one guy, who wrote a long screed about knives, and then shyly confessed to the camera, "I've been having a bad coupla days."). Our favorite part: the high school boy explaining his poem, to the background of giggling from his coterie of girls. Conclusion we got from the movie: people in San Francisco are awesome.
And then: Ron English! English is part of a general movement of culture-jammers, including San Francisco's own Billboard Liberation Front, who deface billboards with their own anti-capitalist messages. The filmmaker follows English and his crew as they sneak up to billboards in prominent places throughout NYC and New Jersey, usually in the middle of the day, and blithely paste over Calvin Klein ads with anti-smoking Joe Camels, grotesquely obese Ronald McDonalds, and anti-Republican propaganda. Hilarious. English also comes over to our side of town -- do you remember all those tags that got slapped onto all the SUV billboards in town? Mr. English and the BLFers.
Midway through the movie, it shifts from billboards to English's other paintings and his performance art -- so English then did a series of billboards of himself as Jesus to display in the South; a whole bunch of paintings of Marilyn Monroe with Mickey Mouse breasts (a theme which he seems to be obsessed with); talked a bunch of musicians into writing 100+ songs about him; went on various talk shows to discuss his life; collaborated with Daniel Johnston (there's a tiny scene where we think this film crew overlapped with the Devil and Daniel Johnston film crew -- like when Jessica and Ashlee Simpson's TV show teams run into each other!), among many, many other things. There's clearly -- ironically -- a huge market for things mocking the commercial market.
Okay, we're going to be honest here -- we actually found Ron English himself a little offputting. He (or at least his artistic persona) seemed kind of egomaniacal, and maybe not as thoughtful about the nature of his art as he could have been. That doesn't make the film any less interesting to watch, though: his provocative nature makes you wonder -- is he criticizing pop culture or just becoming a part of the same machine? Our favorite parts were the people who started out writing positive Ron English songs in the song cycle section, who then ended up writing really negative songs about him. That's exactly how we felt! Kind of used! Just like English does about capitalism.