Mark Hossler
<PREV
<BACK> NEXT>
Mark Hossler, of Negativland, toured Australia in April 1998 to promote Negativland’s new album ‘Dispepsi’ and to open the film ‘The Add & the Ego’ for which Negativland did the soundtrack. He also did a series of talks, which involved audience Q&A sessions. For this Pig Meat interview the audience unknowingly play the roll of Pig.
PIG: I was just wondering about the Dispepsi artwork, have you had any trouble with it?
Mark: When we were working on the project we were very concerned about what may happen when it came out. We thought there was a 50/50 chance that Pepsi might hear it and let it go, or they might hear it and sue our arse. So we actually had a number of eternise giving us advice including Allen Corn. Basically what the lawyers said was that “if you don’t want to get sued, don’t put the record out. But if you’re going to put it out choose your battles wisely, and you don’t want to get sued for trade mark infringement.” There’s a difference in America with trade mark law and copyright law. Copyright law has this concept of far use, a little wriggle room and obviously Negativland is arguing that we want to expand that wriggle room to include art, not just news and commentary. The trademark law has no concept of fair use at all and there’s no legal precedent that you can go on, they’ll just kill you. We had a lot of different designs for the cover, in the end we decided to go with this thing were we had noticed that the ancient Yin-Yang symbol owned by (as far as I know) no one, looks remarkably familiar, and we thought we’d use that, their colour, and lettering style, and it evokes the whole thing. The attorneys said “Well, they could go after you for trademark infringement for even having the word Pepsi anywhere on the cover.” If they sued us, we wanted to force Pepsi into suing us for copyright infringement, and not trademark infringement. Because copyright infringement would be a good case, worth fighting over, trademark would be just ridiculous. We ended up coming up with a solution to this problem, one that we preferred over the original idea. We decided to have the title appear as scrambled up letters, the letters that spell the word Dispepsi. If you wanted to know the actual title you had to call the Negativland hotline, you get a tape recording that tells you the name of the record. Which, I guess is a little more complicated and expensive for people from Australia. As it turns out Pepsi’s lawyers got a hold of it, gave it a listen, seemed to be concerned, and perplexed by what the hell we were doing, but actually decided to do nothing. We had the bizarre experience of being in a mainstream Hollywood magazine called Entertainment Weekly - a magazine like your Who Weekly. We ended up being a little news story were the Pepsi spokesperson said “No, we have no intention of suing Negativland, we’ve hear the record, it’s no O’delay, but its a pretty good listen.” I think that was Pepsi’s attempt at trying to seem a little hip or something. That’s interesting to us because you can take it a number of ways:- Are the arrows we’re throwing at these people not doing anything any more, and they’re just shrugging it off. We threw this bloodied piece of meet into the shark infested waters and the sharks just didn’t care. We kind of saw this as being positive, if some number of people heard that something like this was made and a company as large as Pepsico (who’s the worlds second largest softdrink manufacturer) just decided to let it go. Wether they like it or not, decided “Gee, I guess this is just some kind of art thing, or free speech thing and we’ll just leave it alone, if we sued them it’ll just give them more publicity.” In the US there are many efforts right now to push through even more draconian laws, they’ve just extended copyright another 25 years past the life of the creator (it was the life of the creator plus 25.) Nothing that’s even made in my lifetime will ever come into the public domain. In the real world there’s more and more people who’re doing stuff in all mediums. The more that people do it, the more these companies (who own all this culture) will be forced to think a little bit more, because they don’t want to waste all their money on lawyers when it’s not piracy and it’s not bootlegging, it’s something different. Lately Negativland has been talking about this and thought that we’re never going to talk to Congress, we’re not going to lobby Washington DC and we’re feeling like, fuck it, we can’t change the laws through any acceptable channels, the system isn’t going to work for us, but what we can do is live our lives and create stuff as if the world is the way we want it to be, which is a pretty good way to change anything. We just continue to work this way and ignore the laws. In one case we got so much publicity that we embarrassed some people so bad because they went after us, we might have a reputation now that a lot of companies will say “Just leave them alone, they’re just big trouble.”
Pig: Can you envisage corporations such as Pepsi utilising your format for advertising?
Mark: We wouldn’t be surprised if they came to us and suddenly started offering us money to use something off the Dispepsi record in an add. For a few years now there’s been quite a few ads where they’re trying to look cyclical; anti-corporate corporate adds, they’re adds that say “Hey, we know that you know, that this is just an ad and that this is all just bullshit, but because we’re letting you know that we know that you know that... ha ha ha maybe you’ll buy our product anyway.” It’s a very cleaver strategy, its extremely cynical. We’ve even been contacted by the advertising agency that does Nikey and Microsoft, and they wanted to hire Negativland to do ads for Miller Genuine Draft Beer. When we turned them down I said “We could never do it, it doesn’t matter how much money you offer us, we would have no integrity left, and no one would take us seriously. On top of all that the beer tastes terrible.” Fringe ideas are always absorbed into the mainstream, this is always going to happen, so its real interesting to me to see it happening, but when its happening to something I’m part of its really depressing and kind of shocking. I told him on the phone call; I said “God, I’m totally depressed that you called” Our style has now become fodder for selling beer and they were happy to have us do an anti ad ad. They ended up making an ad that actually sounded like they got someone and played them some of our stuff and said copy that. We’re in a really weird period at the moment, there’s no avant-garde, whatever that used to mean, its gone because the advertising industry has absorbed every single style, every experimental film technic every invented is in an ad now. One of the other changes that’s happened to me is a qualitative change is that they’re not just absorbing oppositional ideas and different types of approaches and aesthetics, they’ve now figured out that the very idea of any kind of opposition at all, it doesn’t matter what form it takes, they’re ready for it. I’ve just been reading a book by Sue Gallep(?) “The re-enchantment of art” which is real interesting because she’s trying to look beyond that; what happens when all those ideas, which maybe seemed to make a lot of sense at one point are just becoming dead ends. She’s suggesting to stop looking at making things that are de-constructing and instead re-constructing, and what does that mean? I don’t really even know either, for Negativland, we couldn’t keep making records like Dispepsi, there’s a cretin point where... Personally I want to see that I’m doing work that’s not just ripping things down and ripping them up and re-arranging them, but making things that are about stuff that I’m for, not just stuff that I’m against. Not just reacting, and always feeling like a little soft creature going through the world being stuck with pins all the time, and reacting against it. That’s the sort of area that Negativland definitely mulling about, the various projects that we’re working on now that will be taking really different directions, and probably some of the people who like the stuff we’re doing, all the anti-corporate stuff will be very disappointed with what we’ll be doing in the future.
Pig: Positivland?
Mark: That names taken unfortunately, by Greg Ginn, otherwise I’d want to use it.
Pig: Why did you choose Pepsi over Coke, are they more stupid in your opinion?
Mark: It tastes better. The real reason we chose Pepsi over Coke is that we were working on a piece called ‘A Most Sucessful Formula’ and we noticed that we had all this stuff that related to celebrities in Pepsi ads. Then I asked Don what else do we have in our archive, we’ve got these enormous labelled, already edited, and sifted through archives of audio that comes from doing our weekly radio show, which has been going on since ‘81. Every week there’s a theme of some sort that we pull all this material together, once we’ve done a show we keep all this stuff that we generated for it. When we work on our studio albums we’ve got this immense pool of material to dip into. So, Don went digging around and came up with all this Pepsi stuff, so to speak. It seemed we could make a few pieces out of this, and the more we though about it, it just kind of grew and grew. It turned out that we just about had all the Pepsi commercials, which we didn’t realise, we had commercial campaigns going all the way back to the 40’s, all these interviews. Pepsi kind of appealed to us to because its kind of iconically nicer, its got this youth thing, they’re the cola for the young, they’re the under-dog cola - I like the idea of attacking the under-gog. Any messages in our work, any meaning that we’re trying to communicate is secondary to the aesthetics, the first thing is making a collage art thing, it supposed to be an aesthetic experience. The fact that there’s a lot of meaning, social, political, ethical and corporate stuff in there is super important and obviously if you listen to what we do, we’re totally aware of it and its intentional but it is secondary. We want it to be something that is cool, weird, neat, fun, experience. We thought that focusing on one company would produce an interesting project, and might in fact produce an audio work that’s sort of visculaly simulates the way that I feel, in the US, as far as how much I’m bombarded by advertising.
Pig: How do you find advertising comperes in Melbourne to that of the US?
Mark: I can’t tell you how different it is to walk around the streets of Melbourne compared to a city of similar size in the US. One thing is that I’m not worried about everyone having guns, and Two - there aren’t words everywhere, there just aren’t as may bill boards with messages just hitting me every where I go. I realise when I’m in a place like this where you don’t haves so many or in Hawaii where they’re not allowed to advertise, that you expend a lot of energy that you don’t notice you’re expending just shutting that out. If you’re literate you’re going to read, if you see a word it doesn’t matter wether you’re ignoring it or having a conversation about something else, if you see that word on some level it goes in. That’s part of the way advertising works, you don’t really have to be paying attention to it. Its also why since the invention of the mute button that most ads on TV have got a tremendous amount of words in them now, and that’s because they know you’re zapping the mute button on, they hope that if you happen to be in the room at least you’ll read the words.
Pig: What’s your opinion on the recent splurge of advertising campaign that are self promoting such as the ‘What would life be without advertising,’ campaign.
Mark: Yeah, I saw that one the other night. Its scary. That’s so blatant, there’s nothing subtle about that at all.
Mark: The thing that’s happening is that we now have, what I consider be like an alien life form that’s invaded the planet called corporations. They’re behold to no one, they are immortal and want to own control and profit from things into infinity. There’s not time limit that’ll ever make them happy, because the corporation will last forever. I don’t know what legally a corporation in Australia is but in the US its the corporate structure which encourages profit for the sake of profit and has no ethical or moral sense to it what-so-ever. I think that the American corporate model is the one that’s spreading all over the planet and it is directing all the economic agreements that are coming up. If you haven’t heard of M.A.I. (Multi Lateral Agreement on Investment) you should be scared to death by this thing. Its the most Orwellian thing I’ve ever heard, its basically a secret agreement which if you haven’t heard about, its because they don’t want you to hear about it. Its corporations basically saying we don’t like this NAFTA and this GAF stuff, we didn’t get what we wanted out of it so fuck it! Lets make our own agreement and forget about the governments and just have our own agreements amongst ourselves and we’re so big and powerful as economic engines that everyone’s going to have to come and get behind us once we’ve made these agreements amongst ourselves, you won’t be able to play ball unless you do it the way we want to. That’s happening right now. An example is if your country has some environmental laws which impact on the corporations ability to maximise profit then your environmental laws go out, because the most important thing is that the corporations make as much money as possible. When I talk about it, I feel like I sound like some sort of crackpot.
Pig: Why is there only on e in Negativland? Your not implying that you drop e?
Mark: No, we’re a lot older than that. In pop rock years I’m a dinosaur now, I’m 36 year old. The answer to that’s a bit long and boring, we just liked how it looked better that way. Regardless of the specifics of what Negativland has ever done we always enjoy doing things that are playing around with peoples minds. Its a little experiment to see if people are paying attention, is this a U2 record or what is it? We did a whole tour where at the beginning of every show we announced that someone had died. Its real interesting and fun to play around with what people think in real and not real. The whole axe murderer hoax thing we did, lots of people who were following us totally believed it. One thing that’s great is that we get letters from people who say “Dear Negativland, I love your music, you guys are so great, right on, keep doing what you’re doing, I love you, I have all your records,” and they spell the name wrong. I don’t disbelieve they love what we do, but I think that’s really interesting, they didn’t even notice that. It’s turned into this thing that’s an interesting little test to see if anyone’s paying attention.
Pig: What are the intrical Negativland beliefs?
Mark: Its funny that I’ve gotten drawn into doing these talks and stuff like that because really the way we work as a group, we don’t discuss what we’re doing very much at all. I’ve done this since I was a teenager and its just always kind of made sense. Once we got sued we got sucked into having to articulate to ourselves and we had a great chance to articulate to the public all this stuff and its been really good for us to do it. Its far more intuitive than that. You get ideas and you just follow them, in a lot of ways I didn’t want to do a whole record about corporations, with the Dispepsi record, but it just obviously was a good idea. For me personally that’s a way I’ve always been, this needs to happen, someone needs to do it, no one else is going to do it so I guess I’ll have to do it myself.. that’s going to be a lot of work. In the last few years I’ve been making trips, when I can, out to the South West deserts of the US and I’m absolutely blown out of my mind when I go visit there. Its so beautifu, incredible and moving, so we’ve started doing field recordings out there of the plants and insects and banging on cactuses and also collecting funny old stuff related to the desert. We ended up with all these educational films from the 40’s. The found aesthetic keeps coming back, I don’t even know how we can get rid of it, but I’m real excited about doing a project all about a place that I love, a place that’s moving, I don’t exactly know what direction the records going to take but, anything that I’m really moved by powerfully wether it negatively or positively, if I follow that I’m sure that it’ll produce good work, I just feel sure of it, I always have. What’s changed is that I’d like to do some work that’s about stuff that I’m for, opposed to something I’d like to see destroyed.