The branding mania of the past few years has put the emphasis on swoosh semiotics instead of sneakers, but only Shawn Wolfe has managed to put the ideas of McLuhan's ghost into practice with the Remover Installer. Better than a widget, more ergonomic than a Palm Pilot, the Remover Installer is an M.C. Escher-inspired tool that holds the promise of usefulness while providing no tangible benefits. Wolfe offers impossible advantages with his nonsense product ("Live twice the life in half the time!") then admits that the advantages of his product are impossible ("The general gloss of falsity is our only product.") so as to show the limits of the advertised life promised by Nike and Disney. And since it is a purely fictional product, it truly is an inducement to purchase the advertising (or in this case, his artwork).

Or at least, it was. In the only disappointing decision documented in Uncanny, Wolfe created a urethane version of the Remover Installer in 1999. The RI should have remained a way to illustrate his ideas, the distance between idea and product creating the perfect method of reinforcing his purpose. Being able to buy a limited edition Remover Installer not only removes some of the mystique and subversion, it generated filthy, ugly, consumer desire within me. I want one, damnit, the whole point of it is to cultivate exactly the opposite response.

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The most revealing photo in Uncanny is one of the least prominent. In a double-page spread, about a quarter of the way through the book, are photos of Wolfe's "Panic Now" sticker applied tactically on mailboxes and phone booths, documenting his addition to both the anti-WTO Seattle proceedings and pre-millennial angst (remember Y2K?). There, underneath a black, graffiti-stenciled image of Shepard Fairey's Andre The Giant, sits one of the aforementioned Panic Now stickers.

Andre the Giant Has a Posse, a nonsense sticker born at a Kinko's in 1989, has many similarities to Beatkit. An advertising campaign without a product, Fairey has spent over 10 years distributing and posting posters and stickers in cities across North America, and encouraging others do to the same. Like Wolfe, his project was driven by a desire to tweak the nose of the corporate, well, giants. As Michael Dooley noted in the May/June 2000 issue of Print, "By taking something with no intrinsic value, like the image of an athlete from a bogus white-trash sport, and elevating it into an icon, Fairey feels he's exposing and subverting consumer culture's susceptibility to propaganda."

But here is where things get tricky. For Wolfe, Beatkit has always been a project that runs parallel to his work as a graphic designer for "the man" whereas Fairey simply did Andre because he thought it was fun and cool. But in 1996, Fairey formed Black Market Inc., a visual communications agency based in San Diego and has worked with Pepsi, Hasbro, Netscape, NBC and GTE along with films studios and record labels. Black Market conducts "guerrilla marketing on a corporate scale" and offers to bridge the gap between the underground and the general public. Worse than this collusion with advertising, the Andre the Giant campaign has morphed from an anti-advertisement into a brand that sells posters, hats and T-shirts. Both had the freedom to pursue their projects for many years without corporate influence or attention, but with the terminus of Beatkit, the prospect of being commodified has evaporated (no fad or idea that admits to being dead can be fresh, cutting edge and cool), while Fairey is slowly selling off chunks of his anti-corporate cachet until it is bled of that which made it worthwhile to begin with.

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Rudy VanderLans (editor of ŠmigrÈ) makes an interesting claim in his Uncanny essay. He believes that graphic design is a reaction driven by a commission, while art is pure action. Thus, he sees Beatkit as a hybrid that has converted design into action. It would appear that VanderLans is onto something, as Wolfe himself is a hybrid kind of designer -- all of his creations start with pencil on paper. As the numerous sketches in Uncanny prove, Wolfe is a very accomplished illustrator and a technically savvy designer, a kind of artistic hybrid. Of course, some would argue that the distinction between art and graphic design isnít quite as precise. As the real McLuhan noted back in 1976, "Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century." Books like Learning From Las Vegas have tried to suggest that the gaudy and damned neon signage of that desert oasis is actually beautiful. But is commerce really art? Many print ads in the 1990s have utilized well known "underground" artists and at times it was difficult to tell the difference between the ads and the articles in Raygun. But at its core, the intent of art and advertising appear to be at odds with one another.

Certainly, Wolfe uses big, bright, bouncy, arresting images that advertising traffics in, and his logos, stickers, snowboards and shirts are as bold and sharp as the kind created by "real" corporations. This is no coincidence -- he spent many years at an advertising agency. Still, he managed to supplement paying the rent with work for Raygun and Seattle alt.weekly The Stranger. His posters for bands such as Massive Attack seem to work as pure pop art on their own, regardless of the fact that something is being advertised and his power at manipulation and understanding of corporate iconography was used to good effect when he designed the linear notes for Negativland's Dispepsi album.

Wolfe is also quite good at using the language of his enemies as satire, and his dadaist comic strips show how, stripped of context, the lexicon of business means so very little. A blond, male, dramatic hero looks thoughtfully into the distance as he says, "Some have even failed to build real value and equity in their brands." His girlfriend puts her hand over her mouth in mild horror, as she gazes at him adoringly.

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David Carson notes that Wolfeís work is infused with a kind of "intelligent absurdity." Like any good artist, Wolfe has an unwavering internal logic that pervades everything, from his Bionic Cat to Acme Visible. "Acme visible TM is a revealing sheet of waste product you spray on to guard against reflection, penetration and superficial scarring caused by casual eye contact and other forms of exposure. [...] Acme visible works by actively dulling perception as it gently erases definable features, giving you a relaxed air of sufficiency that others are bound to notice."

By cultivating his own brand, Wolfe was able to be infinitely more flexible than a spoof ad. Beatkit was adjusted throughout the years to reflect the problems with mall called North America -- it sells nothing while selling everything, where a subvertisement is often thought to target a specific instance of ecological disaster, corporate bullying or sweatshop horror. Better, by creating his own ads and stickers, he avoids the weakness of culture jamming which, by drawing attention to targets like Nike, only further reinforces the power these brands have to begin with. By creating a brand new world, Wolfe has effectively reduced the power of these icons by drawing attention away from them, and thus, creating an intellectual environment in which to question their power in the first place.

An essay by Wolfe concludes the book and as he puts it, "[I]'ve convinced myself that my work amounts to more than just a personal grudge. But as I continue to wrestle with the unruly advertising beast, I have to ask myself why or how it came to be that this cultural battle royal should continue to be my chronic obsession as an artist and a person." Uncanny never creates the impression that Wolfe is a fierce, birkenstock wearing anarchist smashing the windows at Starbucks. This is good. He might come across as calm and middle-class, but his advertising jihad seems genuine.

In an October, 1997 New Yorker article entitled "The Big Sellout," John Seabrook examined 20-something artists, the sort of demographic that is accused of having no past, no knowledge of history -- raised instead by television and pop culture. Because this group both ingests culture and understands the machinations of the corporations that created it, "The artists of the next generation will make their art with an internal marketing barometer already in place. The auteur as marketer, the artist in a suit of his own: the ultimate in vertical integration."

Wolfe is probably one of the few artists of said demographic that draws upon advertising and marketing as a way of communicating, but yet has something worth saying. He has shoved past the limitations of the seemingly shallow format, and the proof of his good intentions rests with his expiry date. As Wolfe points out, "Real brands, emblematic of mass-produced goods, exist only to perpetuate their own existence. And now, as its final act of common decency, Beatkit[TM] must die." Many environmentalists preach about our ecological footprints, but Wolfe has managed to ensure his ideological footprint is both powerful, yet self-contained and discrete. May Beatkit remain in our hearts long after it has disappeared from our sight.