Artists, eccentrics, yuppies and canned-meat enthusiasts gathered at the Gallery Cabaret in Bucktown Feb. 26 for a night of art, drinking and, oddly enough, SPAM. The 7th Annual SPAM Sculpture Contest — which was actually the first annual celebration of SPAM art, but dubbed the seventh for the sole purpose of mass confusion — was mounted by the Chicago Cacophony Society, a non-political, non-revolutionary and completely informal group of pranksters just looking for a good time.
Brian Sobolak, 30, a software project manager, founded the Chicago chapter in August 2004. It is one of the Cacophony Society’s 30 national and international chapters throughout the United States, Canada, South America and the United Kingdom. (Cacophony, incidently, means harsh or discordant sound.)
The SPAM event gained more attention than Sobolak had anticipated, receiving coverage in Crain’s Chicago Business and a short segment on WBBM news. Throughout the evening a martini glass (which Sobolak regretfully drank from), the Millennium Park “Bean” (complete with a “No Photography” sign) and Stone Henge were all molded out of SPAM — a highly unlikely (not to mention extremely smelly) artistic medium. With the success of its first major event, the Chicago Cacophony Society is off to a good start, embracing its offbeat California roots and stirring things up in the Windy City.
“I moved back to Chicago (from California) a little over a year ago,” Sobolak says. “I noticed that a lot of stuff that seemed silly or fun is overtly political. Can’t you just do something stupid for the sake of doing something stupid? Why do you always have to be protesting something?”
As its mantra asserts, the Cacophony Society was spawned from the “pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society.” Playful San Francisco nonconformists gave this notion context in 1977 by forming the Suicide Club, an underground organization started by original Cacophonist Gary Warne. The club was not as dark as its name might imply. It actually references the Robert Louis Stevenson story of the same name, about a morbid group of Londoners with a penchant for pranks and eccentric get-togethers. In 1986, former club members started their own organization, the San Francisco Cacophony Society.
Sobolak lived in San Francisco in the early days of the city’s chapter and remembers participating in its first antics, including the annual Urban Iditarod — a Cacophonic take on Alaska’s dog-and-sled race where, as Sobolak describes, they would “form teams, dress up as dogs, steal shopping carts and run through the streets of San Francisco — drinking heavily, of course.”
Kevin Evans, 37, a graphic artist and illustrator, joined the San Francisco Cacophony Society shortly after its inception. Evans and fellow Cacophonist John Law wanted to revive some of the Suicide Club events pioneered by Warne, such as throwing cocktail parties in abandoned buildings, having formal dinners on the Golden Gate Bridge and pulling absurd pranks.
Throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, Evans and Law were involved in many Cacophony events. They did a midnight reading of W.W. Jacobs’ eerie short story “The Monkey’s Paw” in San Francisco’s seemingly haunted Piedmont Cemetery and its surrounding underground tunnels. And Evans and Law organized “Kill Your Television,” a San Francisco Cacophony event during which more than 500 fully functioning televisions were destroyed. Many of the original San Francisco Suicide Club and Cacophony Society events will be documented in Law’s upcoming book, “The Suicide Club: Chaos, Cacophony, and Dark Saturnalia.”
“I was heavily involved with the San Francisco Cacophony Society, and I started planning a zone trip called ‘Bad Day at Black Rock,'” Evans says. “The idea was to create a temporary autonomous zone, make a bunch of art and destroy it. A dopey meditation on the impermanence of everything. I knew the surreal nature of (Black Rock Desert) would be a great outdoor gallery, capable of distorting people’s perceptions. More so if coming in from some dense urban zone. We used to say of the desert, ‘It’s so empty, it’s full.'”
Sobolak was determined to bring some of these avant-garde traditions to his newly founded Chicago chapter. One of his first transplants was the surprisingly well-known San Francisco and L.A. Cacophony Event “Santa Rampage.” In Chicago he rented a trolley and led a brigade of 40 Santa Clauses around the city — quite a sight for anyone who wandered into the Billy Goat Tavern, witnessing 40 Santas having burgers and beer. Sobolak implemented only one rule: “Even though you’re smoking a cigar and you’re three sheets to the wind, if you see a kid, you pretend you’re Santa. You don’t want to be ‘that guy.'”
While the 7th Annual SPAM Sculpture Contest was the Chicago chapter’s first major event, Sobolak and his Cacophony friends have orchestrated a squirt gun fight in Millennium Park and pulled a number of small-time pranks on local residents.
“On April Fools Day, a buddy and I put on big pink bathrobes and wandered around downtown,” Sobolak says. “We saw some anarchist group protesting the war, and we thought, ‘Looks like we need to protest the protesters.’ Not only was it a small, sad group, but they smelled bad. We didn’t want to get too close and decided to wander around instead, receiving some very interesting looks from people on the street. Everything is so latent with seriousness and political correctness these days, and it’s just dumb! The stuff we do is stupid and funny! It gets people laughing and using their imaginations in ways they wouldn’t otherwise.”
While the Cacophony Society stresses purposeless, nonsensical and imaginative fun, its activities are highly reminiscent of a nihilistic avant-garde philosophy that originated in early 20th century Europe: Dada.
“The founders of the Cacophony Society were very familiar with Dada visual and performance art,” Evans says. “It’s important that we still have these (apolitical, creative) organizations to alter perception, encourage the opening of minds and foster creativity in all its forms.”
Like the Cacophony Society, Dada distinguished itself through the rejection of historical practices and concepts of art. It embraced an incoherence in performance and visual representation. Dada criticized a complacent society and advocated public disturbance. It emphasized the sort of anti-aestheticism that was embraced by Evans and friends when they created and destroyed art in the desert.
A particularly historical Cacophony event that embraced Dada-esque rejection of any and all institutions occurred when L.A. Cacophonists set up an official rest stop at the 1999 L.A. Marathon. Their words of encouragement to the runners were printed boldly on posters that read “Why Try?,” “Just Stop” and “Free Donuts.” Instead of the typical water and towel hand-offs, Cacophonists handed beer and cigarettes to runners. Hilarious details included the ever-popular pre-lit cigarettes (called “sport smokes” by the participants) and fishing poles from which members dangled donuts, pork rinds and packs of cigarettes to tantalize calorie-counting, health-conscious marathoners.
Tara, 37, like Sobolak, moved to Chicago from San Francisco just over a year ago. Tara would not divulge her last name in order to keep her Cacophony involvement secret from employers — leading to the assumption that her self-described profession as an orange highway cone producer might be pure Cacophony. Tara was very involved in the San Francisco chapter, and when she moved to Chicago, she was looking for a fun and unique social outlet. Tara got in touch with Sobolak through friends from San Francisco.
“Sports are fairly standardized — you pretty much know what to expect,” Tara says. “When you go to Cacophony events, you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen — such as the SPAM sculpture contest. You show up and you expect to be entertained, but at the same time you’re agreeing to be part of the entertainment. The real goal is
to get people to participate in these events. If we held a music concert, we’d give everyone musical instruments.”
Tara and Sobolak have a number of future Chicago events in mind, including a mini-Renaissance fair at a local White Castle. While still rebellious and entirely disruptive of everyday life, the nature of Cacophony events has changed a great deal over the past few years. Safety has become a huge priority to Cacophony Societies nationwide due to a deadly 2000 drunk driving accident. L.A. Cacophony members Daniel Lippert and Peter Geiberger were killed as they were driving home from a raucous L.A. Cacophony Halloween event. It was Lippert’s first Cacophony event.
Since the accident, many Cacophony Societies have toned down their activities. Events now are more quirky and playful instead of overtly anarchistic and out of control. Societies take specific precautions to prevent this sort of thing from occurring again. During Sobolak’s recent Chicago incarnation of “Santa Rampage,” he rented a trolley for the day to avoid issues of drinking and driving. Members say these improvements in safety have added to — not detracted from — the exhiliration of participating.
“If you know you’re not going to get hurt, you can open yourself up to different experiences and have some fun,” Tara says. “Take carving SPAM. Why SPAM? I don’t know. Why not? You can sort of let yourself go and experience the unexpected — that’s the best. Even if you don’t like it, it’s the experience of the unknown that matters.”
Not to mention an element of surprise. You can imagine how startled I was when Googling myself the other night (Don’t judge. I’m a writer — I live to see my name in print.), I came upon the following Google item: “[Noise] [Fwd: Chicago Cacaphony Society]” with my name all over the body of the document. Extremely confused, I opened the link and found a response to an email I sent Sobolak a few weeks ago:
“Ok friends, now it’s time for the birthday event we’ve spoken about in the past. I can set up a time and a place to meet with this woman. We figure out exactly where she’ll be, and do the whole birthday surprise on her. Takers?
Those sneaky Cacophonists. To join in the craziness, go to www.geocities.com/pcpboy_jones or www.planetshwoop.com/noise. But be careful, you could end up being the victim of their next gag or attending my impromptu birthday surprise.
Medill junior Rachel Wolff is the PLAY theater editor. She can be reached at [email protected].
