Steve Lambert (artist)
Encyclopedia
Steve Lambert is an American artist (born 1976) who works with issues of advertising and the use of public space. He is a founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, an artist-run initiative
which critiques advertising through artistic interventions, and of the Budget Gallery (with Cynthia Burgess) which creates exhibitions by painting over outdoor advertisements and hanging submitted art in its place. Lambert's artistic practice includes drawing
, performance
, intervention, culture jamming
, public art
, video
, and internet art
. He has worked with the Graffiti Research Lab
, Glowlab
, and as a senior fellow with Eyebeam Open Lab
.
Lambert is member of the New York
based artist group Free Art and Technology Lab
. He has won several awards including from Turbulence, the Creative Work Fund, Rhizome/The New Museum, Adbusters Media Foundation, and the California Arts Council.
in 2000, and a MFA at the University of California, Davis
in 2006. He has taught at Parsons The New School for Design
as well as Hunter College
in New York.
that works to set up art galleries in public spaces, such as vacant walls and fences, located throughout the city of choice. Effort is put forth beforehand to publicize and prepare the shows, and such shows are often accompanied by "hundreds". The goal of such shows is to "bring art into public spaces that need diverse messages expressing emotion and depicting issues that represent the depth and breadth of humanity."
The Budget Gallery allows and encourages people to organize an outdoor guerrilla art gallery in their own town. They provide a how-to manual for how to choose a place, make calls, and sell art for the gallery.
Adblock is supported by a small website which also contains information on the current artists and curator, as well a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Every two weeks, 5 to 8 artists are selected by emerging and established curators. Images used have to be cropped in order to fit properly in the banner space.
to block access to incoming and outgoing mail servers, as well as websites for a specified period of time. The application acts as a tool to remove the temptation to access sources of distraction to those who have trouble with self control. Steve came up with the idea from his own personal experiences with being distracted on the internet. This would help him, as an artist, to block out outside stimuli in order to get focused work done. Once the timer has been started, the process cannot be undone.
with "whytheyhateus", acting as a display of pictures that users suggest contribute to a negative view of the United States or have the potential to be misinterpreted as negative. Some of the themes include gun violence, war, crude humor, consumerism, obesity and Big Government
and Big Business
.
The site is an open forum and images displayed are not curated, edited, or censored. Anyone is allowed to contribute any image to the forum. Eventually, any image brought to the site will be shown in the random display.
The game uses what is essentially a polygraph test, as the player rests his or her arm on a metal pad. It senses changes in the users' body temperature and galvanic skin resistance. Exciting warm-up music is played before each game, to make the challenge of keeping calm more difficult.
, CodePINK, and other activist groups. The paper was post-dated for July 4, 2009, several months into President Obama's term, and envisioned a world where the Iraq war was over, Bush and Cheney were tried for war crimes, and congress had passed a maximum wage cap. The stunt created a stir, as many people were temporarily fooled by the otherwise reliable newspaper.
2009 - Charlie James Gallery
, Los Angeles CA | “Everything You Want Right Now!” -
"Lambert takes on the vernacular of commercial signage with a regional emphasis unique to Los Angeles. Visually, he is interested in what makes certain styles of signage feel so innately familiar, and in the methods that signage employs to grab our attention."
Artist-run initiative
An artist-run initiative is any project run by visual artists to present their and others' projects. They might approximate a traditional art gallery space in appearance or function, or they may take a markedly different approach, limited only by the artist's understanding of the term...
which critiques advertising through artistic interventions, and of the Budget Gallery (with Cynthia Burgess) which creates exhibitions by painting over outdoor advertisements and hanging submitted art in its place. Lambert's artistic practice includes drawing
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
, performance
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, intervention, culture jamming
Culture jamming
Culture jamming, coined in 1984, denotes a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.Culture...
, public art
Public art
The term public art properly refers to works of art in any media that have been planned and executed with the specific intention of being sited or staged in the physical public domain, usually outside and accessible to all...
, video
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
, and internet art
Internet art
Internet art is a form of digital artwork distributed via the Internet. This form of art has circumvented the traditional dominance of the gallery and museum system, delivering aesthetic experiences via the Internet. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work...
. He has worked with the Graffiti Research Lab
Graffiti Research Lab
Graffiti Research Lab, founded by Evan Roth and James Powderly during their fellowships at the Eyebeam OpenLab, is an art group dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protesters with open source technologies for urban communication. The members of the group experiment in a lab and in...
, Glowlab
Glowlab
Glowlab was an artist-run initiative that produced and presented experimental work related to cities and psychogeography, including interactive artworks and projects, events, exhibitions, and artists' gatherings. Brooklyn artist and curator Christina Ray launched Glowlab in 2002 as an experimental,...
, and as a senior fellow with Eyebeam Open Lab
Eyebeam Atelier
Eyebeam, is a not-for-profit arts and technology center in New York City. Their stated purpose is to promote the creative use of new technologies by funding artwork, education and exhibitions. The founders were John S. Johnson III, David S. Johnson and Roderic R...
.
Lambert is member of the New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
based artist group Free Art and Technology Lab
Free Art and Technology Lab
The Free Art and Technology Lab a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab is a collective of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians, dedicated to the merging of popular culture with open source technology. F.A.T. Lab is known for producing artwork critical of traditional Intellectual Property Law in the...
. He has won several awards including from Turbulence, the Creative Work Fund, Rhizome/The New Museum, Adbusters Media Foundation, and the California Arts Council.
Biography
Steve Lambert was born in Los Angeles in 1976. He and his family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area four days later. His father was a former Franciscan monk, and his mother, an ex-Dominican nun. He dropped out of high school in 1993, but went on to study sociology and film, receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art InstituteSan Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
in 2000, and a MFA at the University of California, Davis
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis is a public teaching and research university established in 1905 and located in Davis, California, USA. Spanning over , the campus is the largest within the University of California system and third largest by enrollment...
in 2006. He has taught at Parsons The New School for Design
Parsons The New School for Design
Parsons The New School For Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is the art and design college of The New School university. It is located in New York City's Greenwich Village, and has produced artists and designers such as Marc Jacobs, Dean and Dan Caten, Norman Rockwell, Donna Karan, Jane...
as well as Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
in New York.
The Budget Gallery
Before creating the "Anti-Advertising Agency", Lambert founded The Budget Gallery with the help of several others. The Budget Gallery is a non-profit organizationNon-profit organization
Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...
that works to set up art galleries in public spaces, such as vacant walls and fences, located throughout the city of choice. Effort is put forth beforehand to publicize and prepare the shows, and such shows are often accompanied by "hundreds". The goal of such shows is to "bring art into public spaces that need diverse messages expressing emotion and depicting issues that represent the depth and breadth of humanity."
The Budget Gallery allows and encourages people to organize an outdoor guerrilla art gallery in their own town. They provide a how-to manual for how to choose a place, make calls, and sell art for the gallery.
Add-Art
Lambert has made a free Firefox Plugin, called Add-Art which replaces ads with art in conjunction with the Firefox Plugin Adblock Plus. The art work used in the plug-in is from contemporary artists that curators set up and each show is shown for two weeks. There is also information about the current artist and curator for each selection of art pieces displayed. All of the art submitted has the opportunity to be displayed in the bimonthly exhibit.Adblock is supported by a small website which also contains information on the current artists and curator, as well a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Every two weeks, 5 to 8 artists are selected by emerging and established curators. Images used have to be cropped in order to fit properly in the banner space.
Self Control
In 2009, Steve developed "Self Control" at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. The application, which is open source and licensed under the GPL, was developed for Mac OS XMac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
to block access to incoming and outgoing mail servers, as well as websites for a specified period of time. The application acts as a tool to remove the temptation to access sources of distraction to those who have trouble with self control. Steve came up with the idea from his own personal experiences with being distracted on the internet. This would help him, as an artist, to block out outside stimuli in order to get focused work done. Once the timer has been started, the process cannot be undone.
Why They Hate US
In 2006 Steve Lambert, with the help of Steve Calderon, launched Why They Hate US. The project invited users to tag photos on FlickrFlickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
with "whytheyhateus", acting as a display of pictures that users suggest contribute to a negative view of the United States or have the potential to be misinterpreted as negative. Some of the themes include gun violence, war, crude humor, consumerism, obesity and Big Government
Big government
Big government is a term generally used by political conservatives, laissez-faire advocates, or libertarians to describe a government or public sector which they consider to be excessively large, corrupt and inefficient, or inappropriately involved in certain areas of public policy or the private...
and Big Business
Big Business
Big business is a term used to describe large corporations, in either an individual or collective sense. The term first came into use in a symbolic sense subsequent to the American Civil War, particularly after 1880, in connection with the combination movement that began in American business at...
.
The site is an open forum and images displayed are not curated, edited, or censored. Anyone is allowed to contribute any image to the forum. Eventually, any image brought to the site will be shown in the random display.
Simmer Down Sprinter
Simmer Down Sprinter is a two player, sit-down, arcade style video game that Lambert designed and programmed in which players compete to move runners around a track. The game is controlled by player’s bio-feedback. The more relaxed the player becomes, the faster the runner moves around the track. It is essentially a competitive relaxation.The game uses what is essentially a polygraph test, as the player rests his or her arm on a metal pad. It senses changes in the users' body temperature and galvanic skin resistance. Exciting warm-up music is played before each game, to make the challenge of keeping calm more difficult.
NY Times Special Edition
Lambert was recently in the news for helping with the organization of the New York Times Special Edition, a hoax edition of 1.2 million copies of the venerable paper that was distributed for free on the streets of New York City. A team of 35 people wrote and edited the paper, including representatives from The Yes MenThe Yes Men
The Yes Men are a culture jamming activist duo and network of supporters created by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos. Through actions of tactical media, The Yes Men primarily aim to raise awareness about what they consider problematic social issues. To date, the duo has produced two films: The Yes Men...
, CodePINK, and other activist groups. The paper was post-dated for July 4, 2009, several months into President Obama's term, and envisioned a world where the Iraq war was over, Bush and Cheney were tried for war crimes, and congress had passed a maximum wage cap. The stunt created a stir, as many people were temporarily fooled by the otherwise reliable newspaper.
The Anti Advertising Agency
Steve Lambert founded the AAA in 2004 and has acted as CEO since. The goal of the Anti Advertising Agency is to change the role that advertising has played in our day-to-day lives, an unavoidable nuisance. They believe that through long-term commercial saturation, it has been understood that advertising has the right to occupy and control every inch of available space. Their work calls into question the purpose and effects of advertising in the public space. Using the tools of public relations industries, they constructively parody today's marketing media. The AAA's work ranges from traditional styles (images, stickers, signs, etc.) to more conventional artistic formats (performance, artist books), as well as combinations of the two. It was through this company that Lambert released Add-Art.Other projects
He has also been a part of another project Wish You Were Here! Postcards From our Awesome Future. He worked on this project with Packard Jennings and within the project they questioned “What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics, or physics?" The finished result was satirical commentary on civil engineering. The project developed into six posters for the Art on Market Street Program. The posters were installed on city streets. All posters are available for use and have been released into the public domain without copyright.Exhibitions
2009 - (October) Eyebeam Open Studios, New York NY | "Uncommon Ground" - "Uncommon Ground is a sound installation created in collaboration with Victoria Estok. Using stethoscopes against a five by five foot planter box, people can hear the plants commentary, discussions, and inner thoughts – which are normally inaudible to human beings. The plants are voiced by comedians and neighbors."2009 - Charlie James Gallery
Charlie James Gallery
Charlie James Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles.The gallery’s focus leans toward political work that in some way questions or comments on issues of contemporary cultural significance...
, Los Angeles CA | “Everything You Want Right Now!” -
"Lambert takes on the vernacular of commercial signage with a regional emphasis unique to Los Angeles. Visually, he is interested in what makes certain styles of signage feel so innately familiar, and in the methods that signage employs to grab our attention."
Additional References
- Web Fight: Blocking Ads and Adding Art by Andrew Adam Newman New York Times, May 14, 2007
- Operation: Anti-Ad by Caitlin Moneypenny-Johnston, Xpress Magazine February 14, 2007
- "Advertising Counterprogramming" by Elise Soukup, Newsweek October 11, 2004
- "Wish You Were Here! Postcards From our Awesome Future." by Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings