AT TIMES IN the "Illegal Art" exhibit, this transgressive quality — the conscious flouting of law — is right on the surface. The postage stamps designed by Michael Hernandez de Luna make an excellent case in point. Over the past four years, Hernandez de Luna has created postage stamps that feature Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress, tablets of Viagra, anthrax, and a photo of Pope John Paul II labeled "International Pedophilia Week." What’s more, the artist has used them to send letters. (Among the works included in the exhibit, only the anthrax stamps were rejected by postal workers.) Hernandez de Luna’s work is a direct creative attack on the law.

Another work featured in the DC showing of "Illegal Art" — Packard Jennings’s 2001 Fallen Rapper Prototypes — spoofs trademark via Pez dispensers in the shape of dead hip-hop artists Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E, and Biggie Smalls. Along with the dispenser prototypes, the exhibit features Jennings’s correspondence with Pez Candy officials — including the reply of a "consumer relations" representative who eventually wrote back to reject Jennings’s pitch for a new line of dispensers. "Unfortunately," wrote Pez staffer Laura Thompson, "our audience is geared to 3 to 6 year olds and therefore your proposal for the ‘Fallen Rapper PEZ’ series would not fit into our criteria."

Luckily for Boston audiences, many of the most radical examples of deliberate artistic attack on copyright will be on display in the "Illegal Art" videos. Among them will be "Iraq Campaign 1991," Phil Patiris’s 1991 masterpiece of visual assault. Patiris’s 19-minute film is not only a historical record of phony news and cultural patriotism surrounding the first Gulf War, but also eerily prescient in light of the most recent one.

Patiris’s method veers wildly from subtle to brutal. A 1991 conversation between ABC anchor Peter Jennings and Baghdad correspondent Gary Shepard at the beginning of Operation Desert Storm is juxtaposed with the opening fireworks sequence of the long-running Wonderful World of Disney, with colorful explosions over Disneyland and a cartoon Tinkerbell fluttering across the screen. Footage from the 1984 film Dune — which features the planet "Arrakis," a convenient near-homonym of "Iraq" — is spliced with battle footage and coverage of professional football. Whitney Houston’s over-the-top 1991 rendition of the national anthem is drowned out by the whine of jets, explosions, and screams of terror. Bits of the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia are cut into a hemorrhoid commercial.

In short, "Iraq Campaign 1991" blurs the lines between entertainment, advertising, and news in blatantly provocative ways. In doing so, it deliberately questions how much such blurring stems from manipulation by the artist and how much the raw material lends itself to this sort of treatment. Viewed now, Patiris’s film is also a direct assault on the limits of "fair use" and trademark — particularly in its use of commercials.

Patiris never ran into trouble with the news organizations and corporations parodied in "Iraq Campaign 1991," but CBS News did go after him over what Patiris refers to as an "appropriated memo" posted on his Web site. The company sent the filmmaker a cease-and-desist letter, and Patiris decided to fight back.

"I decided pretty much at the outset that my response would have to be ‘no’ to the demand that the Web page be removed and that I refrain from any future use of ‘CBS property,’" Patiris notes in an e-mail to the Phoenix. "The manner of my response to them was straightforward — I wrote a letter back, matching legalese with legalese, maintaining my rights under both free speech and fair use, declaring my intent to contest, and even welcoming the opportunity to present my views in public and confirm — via new case law — the free speech and fair use rights of myself and others. I never heard back from them."

Many of the other videos in "Illegal Art" employ strategies similar to those used by Patiris. In his two-minute video "State of the Union," Brian Boyce turns the opening sequence of the hit children’s TV show Teletubbies into an abrasive satire of President George W. Bush. In Boyce’s subversive Tubby universe, the president’s head replaces the head of the babbling infant pictured in the sun — and oil rigs pop up on the landscape of fake grass and flowers. As the video progresses, the rigs multiply, and the bunnies hopping amid the AstroTurf are obliterated by bomb blasts. By the end, the entire Teletubby world is flooded with deep water and subject to massive oil drilling.

Boyce also radically subverts TV news in his 1999 video "Special Report." The faces in Boyce’s four-minute feature are familiar (ABC’s Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, CBS’s Dan Rather, NBC’s Tom Brokaw), but their lips have been digitally altered. What pops out of these journalists’ mouths? Hysterical and paranoid rants from 1950s-era sci-fi and horror films such as Ed Wood’s camp classic Plan 9 from Outer Space. In this age of shock TV news — featuring everything from anthrax and SARS to missing children — Boyce’s melding of contemporary news anchors and 1950s film paranoia is uncomfortably familiar.

Occasionally, the video attacks in "Illegal Art" are stripped of any traditional "artistic" pretense. Take Mike Nourse’s devastating four-minute video "Terror Iraq Weapons." This work does nothing more complicated than boil down a 2002 speech by President Bush to the three words in the video’s title. Nourse’s edit — which reveals Bush’s deployment of the words "terror," "Iraq," and "weapons" as more mantra than argument — has a lacerating critical effect. After Nourse is done slashing away at the rhetorical and visual padding in stock news video, the emperor indeed has no clothes.

IN OUR INTERVIEW, curator McLaren noted that the "Illegal Art" exhibit has yet to run into any legal problems — despite the fact that various copyright and trademark holders have been notified by the press that the exhibit has garnered lots of attention. In some cases, says McLaren, artists featured in the show "work on the fringes and elude the mainstream." She adds that the more prominent works in the exhibit actually may be protected by the potential for bad press. "Many of [these companies] believe it would be a PR nightmare to take this on," McLaren says. "They think that it would only give more publicity to the exhibit."

Predictably, the catalogue for "Illegal Art" is itself a subtle bit of bad PR for the companies. Take the catalogue’s description of Kieron Dwyer’s 1999 graphic, "Consumer Whore," which transforms the Starbucks logo into a new anti-advertisement for java bearing the words of the title: "In 2000, a year after Kieron Dwyer made comic books, t-shirts, and stickers with his version of the Starbucks logo, the company sued him, obtaining an injunction that prevented Dwyer from using the parody until the case was scheduled to go to court over a year later. When the case was finally settled, Dwyer was allowed to continue displaying his logo but only in extremely limited circumstances. No more comic books, t-shirts, or stickers: he may post the image on the web but not on his own website — nor may he link from his website to any other sites that show the parody. In short, Dwyer is permitted to use the logo as long as Starbucks can be confident that no one will see it."

On many fronts in the war over copyright and fair use, corporate America is not only winning such victories, but consolidating its position so as to prevent future battles. As demonstrated by the removal of songs from albums when samples were used without permission, the music industry has taken the lead in obliterating the principle of "fair use." Now, the same technology that keeps music from being copied and sampled is invading the sphere of film and video. As DVDs replace videotape, disc encoding makes the sort of splicing and alteration accomplished by Patiris and Boyce impossible.

"This is something that is going to be happening more in the future," McLaren observes. "The music industry is more conscious of copyright than others, but other artists are starting to wrestle with this problem.... Right now, visual artists have a lot more leeway than musicians and filmmakers."

Patiris strikes a more upbeat note. "You’re talking to someone who just recorded 330 hours of a 500-hour war on multiple channels with multiple VCRs, who knows what I’ll ever do with it all," Patiris writes. Changes in technology "may affect the delivery of my art, and even the process of construction, but I’m old fashioned and consider those to be secondary to the end result — the Idea."

Are we truly moving toward a world in which future artists cannot employ the tactics used by Andy Warhol on his Campbell Soup can paintings? Or by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention with their cover parody of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on their 1968 record We’re Only in It for the Money? The answer given by the "Illegal Art" exhibit is "absolutely, but not without a fight." If filmmakers such as Patiris can’t exercise their rights, as well as find defenders in the wider legal and political milieu, our culture — and our politics — will be the poorer for it, unless this dangerous trend is reversed.

The "Illegal Art" videos described in this piece will be shown on Sunday, May 18, at 8 p.m. at the River Gods (125 River Street, Cambridge). Many of the artworks and videos described here can also be accessed at www.illegal-art.org or in the latest issue of Stay Free magazine (www.stayfreemagazine.org). Richard Byrne can be reached at richardbyrne1@earthlink.net