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Subversion
Just another ad
A typical bus shelter is transformed into a startling provocation
By Kevin Potvin
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There is a bus shelter on Commercial Drive near Napier Street with a large advertisement down its side saying, in simple block letters with no accompanying graphics or even punctuation, “Imperial Canada where is your status card?” Along the bottom, it says “Insurgent messages for Canada.”
The shelter is directly outside a pizza slice shop, Pizza Garden, which is typically surrounded by loners furtively inhaling cheese and dough while standing on a rug of discarded pie plates. The ad space has in the recent past sported a female model wearing jeans, and before that a provincial government ad showing a healthy, white family of three portraying who might benefit from a rent relief program. Ads here are usually defaced within a day of going up, and for the month they last, a running battle erupts between the nocturnal defacers and the CBS-JCDecaux staff, owners of the bus shelters, who try daily to undo the damage.
But this ad has not been touched. Sure, there are no mouths to put a subversive sticker on top of and no eyes or teeth to blacken with a Sharpie. But something else is protecting this ad space this month, a kind of magnetic repulsive force that keeps all hands off.
For one thing, it is the appearance of a famous corporate name rendered not in its usual colour and swirls, but in plain block lettering reminiscent of legal documents. It’s power has been drained: it’s name, the name of the biggest profit-generating company in the country, is reduced to the same level on which we see our own personal names.
Then there is the term “status card.” No explanation or definition is offered, as though it were a commonly-enough recognized term. But only some of us really know what it means. The majority of us have only an inkling for we have no equivalent of the “status card.” It’s a racial distinction: only officially registered Indians have status cards.
These are meant to confer special benefits and rights onto bona fide Indians in fulfillment of obligations assumed by the federal government in exchange for having largely illegally deprived the original inhabitants of their land. But most Indians, despite these benefits, go on living lives of impoverishment, and so a “status card” has another meaning: the “status” it indicates is found on the lowest rung of the social and economic ladder.
So not all Indians choose to apply for or carry their status cards, or to use it to claim the benefits it confers, for the act is humiliating. “Where is your status card?” then sounds like the kind of painful question a dignified Indian might resent hearing too many times. It’s not enough to look Indian and to carry an Indian name or to say you’re an Indian, even. No, to lay claim to the meager benefits on offer, one also has to produce one’s “status card,” one needs to show some kid behind a counter selling sneakers that one is officially registered with the government as a chronically impoverished victim of systemic and historic abuse at the hands of the very same government.
“Where is your status card?” is a direct and insensitive question that perpetuates the abuse. So not only is the gigantic profit-generating machine called Imperial Canada reduced to the level of a simple person, it is further subjected to that humiliation that drives it further down to the level of the Indian in Canada, which is something even less than a whole person.
Finally, posting the question on a bus shelter in the public out in the wind and rain of a street completes the denigration. It’s as though an Indian were in a big line-up at a store, and at the cash register, the clerk barks out the question on the PA system so everyone can turn and stare at the one who is reduced to being unable to substantiate his claim for a paltry hand-out.
Presumably, the question is put to the oil company because it is engaged in exploiting underground resources the ownership of which is disputed because of unresolved Indian land claims covering territories it is drilling and mining in. A status card, in this context, would identify one as Indian and so would establish ownership of the land and resources beneath it. But of course an oil company cannot be an Indian, and so it can’t produce a status card to substantiate its claim to the oil under the ground. Yet it takes the resource anyway.
The tagline on the bottom of the ad, “Insurgent messages for Canada,” tinges an encounter with the bus shelter with a spine tingling chill. Insurgencies are what are destroying lives of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now increasingly in Pakistan, and the word means, today, bombs going off in shopping malls (mercifully called “public markets” by our newspapers so we don’t identify too closely with the tragedies), and roadside bombs flipping M1A1 Abrams tanks over like helpless turtles.
The term “insurgent” also implies an authority that is being undermined. “Insurgent messages for Canada” makes clear which authority in this case is to be undermined: ours. The ad equates our government with the illegitimate, US-installed regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it thereby associates Ottawa with American military occupation. Imperial Canada may be a Canadian oil company, but it is an oil company all the same, and so doubly does the ad associate us with raw deployment of US military might, since the occupations that have brought it into such horrific contact with insurgencies abroad are all about oil companies getting resources under the lands of other people.
The bus shelter, usually the scene of corporate image marketing and petty resistance to it exercised with stickers and Sharpies, has unexpectedly been transformed into a powerful and effectively subversive message that speaks of war, occupation, bombings, killings and grievous injustice, and it implicates all of us as collaborators. It beats all to hell what previously appeared here as subversion of corporatism. That’s why no one touches it.
And yet, this is only an advertisement for an art show (of work by Edgar Heap of Birds) at The Grunt Gallery, sponsored in part by The City of Vancouver and CBS-JCDecaux.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
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problems with no preconceived notions. We hope to afflict the comfortable,
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