The billboard brigade.

• Author: Armstrong, Bob
• Position: Vandals satirically change billboards to mock advertisers in San Francisco, CA - On The Line - Brief Article

The slogan Torch the Ass of the Ruling Class appeared overnight in huge block letters on the base of a San Francisco billboard. Last summer, many billboards startled passing motorists with agitprop messages from unidentified pranksters.

Unlike taggers, who sometimes deface billboards with graffiti, these anonymous artists specialize in slogans that mimic advertising. Most of the alterations leave enough of the original image or words to make it clear that the subversion is directed at the company that rented the billboard space. Sometimes they change only a single word in the corporate advertisement, using the same colors and typeface in the correction. For instance, one revisionist altered an ad for Johnnie Walker Red on a downtown kiosk, substituting the word " white" for "right": Politically Correct? Here's to Just Being White.

The group seems to have targeted Lucky supermarkets with a special vengeance. One billboard amends the supermarket's slogan, Freshness First, to read: Freshness First, Farmworkers Last, Lucky You're Middle-Class. Another billboard reads: Pesticides First, Lucky You're Not Dead.

The perpetrators, who remain at large, sent The Progressive a batch of promotional material in late January. Included in the packet were photographs of transformed billboards and a one-page "mission statement" from the California Department of Corrections operations manual. The statement had been rewritten as follows: "The Department protects the public by:

* Altering California's most criminal advertising in a secure, safe, and...