What started, in 2018, as “a bit of a wind-up” quickly turned into a political act. Approaching 30 and after a string of self-described “menial” jobs post-art school (manual labourer, chalkboard writer and a brief two-week stint as a graphic designer), Birmingham-based Foka Wolf was restless. He stuck up a satirical advert that read, “Do you drive a 4x4, Jeep or Range Rover in the city? You could be entitled to FREE penis enlargement therapy on the NHS” and received several serious enquiries.
“People will believe anything if it’s packaged and polished in a certain way. That really worries me,” says the artist, whose name is an apparent play on Focke-Wulf, the German manufacturer of second world war fighter planes familiar to generations of model aircraft builders and who uses art to subvert the power and meaning of advertisements.
In a world where billboards are largely accepted as infrastructure, subvertising serves as an antidote, challenging advertisers’ legitimacy. The practice, inspired by the avant garde 1950s situationist movement, typically makes spoofs of political and corporate posters, taking the form of a new image or an alteration to an existing image. According to author Naomi Klein, subvertising – also known as “culture jamming” or more recently, “brandalism” – offers a way of speaking back to advertising, “forcing a dialogue where before there was only a declaration”.
Wolf’s work draws on global issues such as police brutality, climate change, corporate greed, workers’ rights, gentrification and the housing crisis. “Barclays: Proud sponsors of fossil fuels, climate breakdown and the Premier League”, washes over a display in Brighton featuring two footballers tackling amid a forest blaze. Another, in Birmingham, a city he says is regularly left out of the national conversation, recreates a Barratt Homes advert with the slogan “Erasing history to maximise profit”: in 2018, a church was dismantled in Park Central, formerly named Lea Bank, to make way for luxury flats, pricing out locals. Wolf has also targeted the disproportionately high number of damaging products being advertised in the second city’s low-income areas, yet he is reluctant to call himself a “proper activist”, saying “I don’t go to protests or anything like that”.
The process, he says, is simple. Choosing an image online requires little consideration: apparently, opportunities for cognitive dissonance are everywhere. Then, fuelled by anger and a dark sense of humour, he works on the images digitally (art-school knowledge of software such as Adobe Photoshop and large format digital printers is useful but not essential). Placement, says Wolf, is everything. Reclaiming physical spaces dismantles the notion that outdoor advertising is untouchable. Though the act is illegal, he wears a hi-visibility jacket and has never been questioned. This may have something to do with his impressive speed (usually taking 30 seconds; one minute maximum) or society’s blindness to service workers – and advertising.
Thomas Dekeyser, a cultural geographer at Royal Holloway, University of London, suggests that advertising’s invisibility is its most poignant and perilous quality, protecting its status in cities. Does this limit the efficacy of subvertising? Wolf thinks not. People are interested in an alternative: he makes a living out of it. The creative hosts events, talks and sells prints on a tongue-in-cheek website Megacorp: Profit Before People, which he describes as “deliberately evil and faceless” and has Clive Babbington, a pseudonym, named as its CEO. By way of a newsletter, which now has more than 6,000 subscribers, the street artist also sends free PDFs for people to download and print out, some of which have even ended up in New York, pasted on to Trump Tower. Perhaps, just like advertising, its emotional and political impact works cumulatively. In January he opened a faux bargain store installation in the Black Country’s capital, Dudley; one oblivious customer, he tells me, laughing, tried to buy a bottle of Lairy Little Prick, a pastiche of Fairy Liquid.
I ask if he worries about fuelling deception. In 2019, a series of his posters (unnamed for full effect) appeared on London Underground trains simulating a poorly worded Conservative party campaign pledge; one promised to “erase all disabled people by December 2020”, and a second to “cut all homeless people in half by 2025”. Each poster displayed the Conservative party logo and attracted notable attention on Twitter after some commuters interpreted the ad as genuine. Full Fact, a non-profit organisation that exposes and counters misinformation, was forced to debunk the “suspect images”. “We’re in a post-truth apocalypse,” Wolf says. “I’m only throwing a lighter into a house fire.”
