Lazy Artist: Dutch Culture Jamming Network

Claiming a scarcely available parking place in Amsterdam as a way of exhibiting art publicly was not just something a group of friends came up with randomly when creating Lazy Artist some five years ago. By organizing culture jams and various underground symposiums for example, this Dutch initiative sensibly strives to reflect on today's volatile society while creatively resisting its increasingly mundane ramifications.

Up until 2003, the group made an impact through its website, operating as an online display of their culture jams and as a place where random artists were given the opportunity to publish politically engaged ideas. In July of that year, sharing a widespread contemporary belief that young artists were not given a fair opportunity to be displayed at the Stedelijk Museum, the group notoriously participated in occupying one of Amsterdam's most renowned museums for an afternoon.

After two lingering years of relatively little activity they revived their culture jams and gave new meaning to its successfully proven actions. It now claims that the continuing promotion of street advertisements, akin to our growing consumer society, contributes to an understandable sense of powerlessness and individualism on the streets. The group regards the advertisements as one-way communicators and imagines one would want to say something in return to these "aggravators of individualism" in order to compensate the feeling of impuissance. Lazy Artist is uniting people and with their culture jams attempts to create a mutual awareness that this particular feeling is actually universal and should be shared with one another. Everything the group has ever done, and will ever do, is intended to be in jest and peace.

Initially composed of just three young artists the group nowadays forms the head of a cluster of cells in which it operates independently from various locations in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (EU).