Glf the Gnome Liberation Front:

GLF The Gnome Liberation Front: Radical Left-Wing Situationalists or Right-Wing Liberationist Parody? On its surface, the Gnome Liberation Front (GLF) seems like an absurd, Internet-generated creation. Its leader is known as "SPRKYTHDVL," as he proclaims himself on the organization's official website. The tone of the website seems like a combined parody of political correctness rhetoric, pertaining to oppressed minorities such as the short gnomes, and fringe liberation front rhetoric about liberating these tiny ceramic people.

One line reads: "Man has looked down on these poor people for too long only because they are lacking in height." (2000) Then, as the reader delves further, it becomes clear that it is garden gnomes, not even real, supposed living gnomes that are the focus of the GLF website's outrage.

The manifesto continues, "no longer shall these once proud people be forced to remain outdoors and fight the elements while their human owners enjoy the comforts of climate control and central heating and air...This is also a call to arms to all those who would sympathize with the plight of the garden Gnomes." (2000) Even the GLF website domain of 'internet-trash' suggests a parody. Although there is photographic evidence of 'real' rescue activities of garden gnomes, this could just as easily take the form of a montage of staged shots.

The blatantly false "Gnomes on the Roam" section, which superimposes gnome shots upon real-world images, seems to confirm this idea and increases the reader's suspicions that this is not a real organization of any serious intent. However, the 2000 news story "Garden Gnome Liberation Front strikes Paris show" by the respectable news organization CNN ultimately belies the web-surfer's initial suspicions.

CNN would not cover a false and purely Internet-generated organization as if it had not committed real acts of terror, in real life, presumably, and state "the dormant Garden Gnome Liberation Front has sprung back to life, stealing about twenty gnomes during a nighttime raid on a Paris exhibition." (CNN.com, 2000) Moreover, CNN gives a history of the organization.

"The Garden Gnome Liberation Front vanished from the public eye in 1997 after a northern French court handed its ringleader a suspended prison sentence and fined him for his part in the disappearance of around 150 gnomes." (CNN.com, 2000) Although the organization may be humorous, so were the legitimate artistic escapades of Dada and the Surrealist movement, as chronicled in Kalle Lasn's essay on "Culture Jamming." But if the GLF is a parody, what is its aim with its acts of minor legal thefts and petty outrages? Lasn includes in his web of culture 'jammers,' musicians such as punks that eventually became mainstream or at least commercial, high artistic stylists like the Surrealists, and looser social movements such as hippies.

(Lasn, p.412) The tone of the advertisements also recalls that of the film "Fight Club's" parody of modern, urban life, by encouraging gray-suited executives to engage in bare-fisted boxing and prove that the men's untested but carefully toned gym physiques can fulfill a purposeful function. When Brad Pitt's characters says that the first rule is that no one mentions the club, the sense of boyish secrecy and humor seems paralleled in the GLF website.

The characters of a soap salesman and an advertising executive, one of whom named Tyler who states "***** off with your sofa units and serine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect!" seems to show a similar disdain for middle-class artistic tastes. From the cultural elements chronicled in Lasn's essay, the spirit of the GLF would seem closest to the Sex Pistols, a band "without talent" that created its own joke by becoming popular, despite its profane and anarchist spirit.

(Lasn, p.413) The Sex Pistols in turn where descended in spirit from the Situationists, whom, like the GLF, engaged in spontaneous acts of social defiance that were apparently purposeless, like putting switches on lampposts to put street lights under public control. The Sex Pistols made music and money, eventually, from their situationist style activities, but the GLF seems closest to the original anti-commercial acts of the movement. (Lasn, p.

413) Just as "Fight Club" attempted to give its participants a kind of elemental sense of their masculinity by upsetting their social rules about decorous behavior and even the rules of conventional combat, the GLF seems to be doing something on a guerrilla, grass roots level of protest designed to gain attention by confusing the consumer about a common product.

However, the GLF, although secret, commits public acts of defiance like the Situationists, rather than engages in private and individual acts like "Fight Club." The Situationists were performance artists who encouraged ordinary people to be part of their 'show' and to wake up to the humdrum nature of their ordinary lives. The Situationists wanted people to move beyond pure reflexive actions into a realm of real creative engagement with the world.

In contrast, despite their public manifesto, the GLF's actions seem more like Fight Club's attitude of wishing to create in-joke amongst a group of members, for private self-glorification. In fact, one site called "Free the Gnomes" actually titles itself: "The situation: Thousands of Gnomes are enslaved in gardens across America.

For too long we have let our neighbors usurp the rights of these gentle woodland creatures." (2001) The reference to the situation may recall the Situationist name, but taking away the gnomes has no clear purpose of increasing creativity in everyday life, like the first Situationists.

Some of the elements of the "Free the Gnomes" site are rather disturbing in their violent imagery and content, such as the poll on the title page that asks if violence is ever justified when freeing a garden gnome, and an anti-corporate section accusing Fidelity of genocide: "Tell Fidelity to divest from the Scotts Corporation makers of Miricale-Gro and other lawn and garden products, and a partner with the genocidal gardeners.

Scotts helps outfit and supply oppressive gardeners in their campaign of gang-rape, mass murder and slavery -- all to decorate their gardens." ("Get Fidelity to Divest from the Scotts Corporation," 2000) The gleeful attitude towards violence, rather than an acknowledgement of the impact of violence echoes the worst aspects of the human spirit drawn forth in, for example, "Fight Club's" resolution, rather than humor about tackiness, or even a call for more creative gardening.

More seriously, the language suggests a parody of marginalized groups that are targets of brutal actions -- in which case, it would again seem to go against the radical stance of the Situationists, who called for a questioning of capitalist norms of private property and commodities. Although the GLF may have a Situationist love of performance art, to parody the voices of groups that are undergoing real acts of genocide or oppression in the world is hardly an act of true liberation. Of course, the group might have artistic aims.

The widely respected Internet magazine Salon.com wrote: "You may not know this, but garden gnomes are all the rage in Paris. The colorful, gaudy gnomes, which some find cute and others find repulsive, were invented in eastern Germany in the 1870s and have become something of a status symbol in French gardens." (Getzlaff, 2000) The Situationalists also wished to parody the "spectacle" of consumer consumption of trash and needless commodities with their own staged spectacles.

(Lasn, 416) Thus, when asking whom the GLF is, perhaps the best answer is that they are a group that uses Situationalist-style techniques and methods to accomplish what is to the eyes of the world uncertain goals. On one hand, their use of the immediate stage of performance art is Situationist, and their use of the commodities of consumer culture that have become popular for inexplicable reasons in America, Britain, and now France is situationalist in tone.

But their humanization of garden gnomes, unlike knocking down churches for playgrounds for children, or enabling pedestrians to have control over the.