The relationship between advertising and the medium of its appearance is both obvious and difficult to articulate. In many ways, the term ‘advertisement’ covers more ground than most, signifying, in different contexts, an instance of video, audio or print. We know it when we see it or hear it, but have a hard time pointing to what specifically differentiates it from content, except to say that one pays for us while we pay for the other, or did, until recently. In certain circumstances, this other is wholly missing, as in the case of subway advertising or billboards. Here an entirely new social space has been created, solely as a home for advertising on an epic scale.

In the city, subway postings hold a privileged point of access to the public consciousness, reaching even those otherwise insulated from the reach of well-tempered copy. People can avoid live or broadcast television, or listen to NPR. Billboards can be avoided by adopting the downward gaze typical of career New Yorkers; at least until advertising arrives on the street in the form of high-definition sidewalks playing 30-second spots on loop, completing its slow descent from the heavens. The subway however, is another matter. One’s field of vision is routinely consumed by outsize heads and palates designed for efficiency at a distance. Perhaps it is this uncomfortable proximity that lends these ads their peculiar distaste. Indeed, walking past such an endless parade of grotesques, repeated at intervals and ad nauseum, is to experience an obscenity worthy of a surprising pessimism. Faced with another interminable wait accompanied by the newscaster’s rictus grin or a garish reality-show tableau one is stuck by the distinct moderation at work in even the most radical of social prescriptions.

Naturally, most city-dwellers refuse this suffering in a variety of ways. Firstly by reading, by occupying the eyes elsewhere. This is perhaps of greater significance then it first appears. The fact of the New York subway, with its provisioning of communal reading time at regular intervals, must stand somewhere behind the general culture of literacy for which the city is known. This creates a contrast between a subway culture of reading and wall ads, and car culture of radio and 30 second spots. (And though printed matter is the focus here, it is worth pointing out that nothing is quite as toxic as radio ads. Something about compressing the orientation, edification and seduction of would-be consumers, along with any legal disclaimers, into thirty seconds of audio makes for a uniquely violent listening experience. Increasingly desperate and impossibly sad, radio advertising surely stands as the nadir of Capital’s endless performance of indispensability, confessing its historical precariousness in bursts of hysterical, hyper-syllabic soliloquy.)

Second and more common is listening to music. Much has been made about the isolation implied in the ubiquity of the iPod, with less energy spent considering the world being shut out. Yes, this includes our fellow citizens and neighbors, but also the endless, blaring appeals to our baser nature; that concert of images designed to reduce us to the simplest constellation of imperfection. On the subway, our music is a blessed silence.

Third, and finally, there is the most progressive and honest response: defilement, an ancient and sacred art whose contemporary practice typically takes one of three forms. There is first the wholesale removal of the offending poster: usually peeled off from the corner and either left to hang or positioned anew in a wastebasket. This has the advantage of being remarkably easy, but leaves the intention ambiguous. Was this an act of rejection? Or are we merely between scenes? Have we ceased demanding that the overweight gyrate in an unholy coincidence of their welfare and our amusement? Or will tomorrow bring another batch of distended kittens, leering at the onrushing end to our financial embitterment? It’s unclear.

A classic.

Second method, and much ballyhooed of late, is to carve up the offending images, either in an effort to disfigure them past all effectiveness, or to create new, whimsical combinations with their constituent parts. This is certainly the craftiest and most baroque reply, offering the consoling image of an exacto-wielding army of art-vandals repurposing the vulgar to their own creative ends. Soon, however, this borders on the professional, leaving us again alienated from a recognizable, branded production, however illicit and refreshing.

The last method is graffiti, venerable and true. Graffiti has the advantage of puncturing the surface of the ad, while preserving the democratic immanence of the response: everybody usually has a pen. Significant is that both the second and third methods frequently focus on facial mutilation: cutting out eyes or filling them in, adding mustaches, freckles and the like, or otherwise revealing the inherent monstrosity of the image. This disfiguration has as its target the very performance of humanity that lies at the heart of print advertising. Take out the eyes, soil the mouth and the truth of the image suddenly coincides with its appearance.

Signs Taken for Wonders

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