For two weeks in March 1999, pedestrians who glanced upwards while walking along East 14th Street in Manhattan were startled by the sight of a billboard between Avenue A and Avenue B. That 246-square-foot display, which was bolted to the side of a six-story brick tenement featured the message "Think Different," which since 1997 has been used in an advertising campaign by Apple computers. The "Think Different" ads, which feature black and white photographs of cultural icons such as Gandhi, Miles Davis, and Pablo Picasso, have become a familiar part of the urban landscape, appearing on billboards and on the sides of buildings around the world. But what viewers on East 14th Street found bewildering in this instance was the image accompanying the slogan: that of the notorious cult leader and murderer, Charles Manson, depicted with trademark jailhouse swastika tattoo between his eyebrows. While it can hardly be denied that Manson has a unique way of viewing the world, the idea for this billboard did not come from Apple. Rather, it was the result of a typically defiant action taken by Ron English, an artist best known for his drawings of the Joe Camel character passing out cigarettes to children, and who since 1981 has practiced an arcane and subversive form of protest known as billboard modification.

On the day that English was to paste up the image of Manson, I met with him at his Tribeca loft, where he and his wife, Tarssa Yazdani, a freelance art critic, lived with their daughter, Zephyr and son, Mars. It was a warm, breezy Sunday afternoon and English stood beneath a skylight in his studio and unrolled a 22-by-11-foot piece of photographer's backdrop paper, revealing a large picture of Manson, which he had drawn two days before with acrylic paint. To the left of the image were the words "Think Different." Above the words, in Apple's bright green, yellow, orange, purple and blue bands, were what at first looked to be the corporation's eponymous logo, but were really the two interlocking salamanders that Ron English has used as his signature since his high school days in Decatur, Illinois.

"The religion of our culture is commercialism but the first time I saw the 'Think Different' ads it freaked me out," English said. "I couldn't believe that those people's images had been sold-it was like today's revolutionary is tomorrow's corporate shill. I thought, you want different: here you go."

English knelt down on the paint-splattered floor next to the illustration of Manson.

"Every time you put up something like this it has an effect on all the legitimate billboards," he said. "Then when people see the real ones, they do their own culture jam in their minds."

Culture jam is a term coined by the indie rock band Negativland and popularized by cultural critic Mark Dery in a 1990 New York Times article.

"Essentially it's the use of mainstream media techniques to subvert the mainstream media," English said. "By forcing people to question whether or not an ad is real, you demystify how commercial messages are presented. You make them into more critical thinkers."

English began modifying billboards while studying art at North Texas State University. In September 1984, English saw a parking lot in Dallas that had twenty-seven billboards around the perimeter of the space. On a Saturday morning, English and a group of eight friends from Austin-some wearing fluorescent suits and placards that read "Dead Artist"-arrived at the lot. While a crowd drank beer and watched, they began pasting their murals over the advertisements. Before long, the police arrived. English and his friends were arrested and charged with criminal mischief, a second-degree felony. After English spent months pleading for leniency, a representative of the company that owned the billboards the artists had covered agreed to drop all charges in return for a payment of $800 as reimbursement for the cost of removing the artworks.

English estimates that he has modified 850 billboards since that time. While living in Texas in the mid-eighties, he sometimes did as many as fifteen modifications in a week. A friend who worked for a billboard company once guessed that English's actions had cost close to a million dollars to take down.

The billboard actions started as a way for the artists to show their paintings, but English became aware of the political possibilities of such work after he moved into a house in Austin, and began living with a group of people who were involved with the radical environmental movement. English's most famous political targets became the Camel cigarette ads that featured a chain-smoking cartoon camel. In response to the tobacco ads, English designed dozens of billboard modifications. One portrayed a cartoon camel asking a second, "Hook any new kids today?" Another featured an image of a smoking cartoon camel, with the word "Cancer" appearing in the same font used to spell "Camel" in ads.

In addition to such tobacco ad parodies, English has also pasted up pieces of art that made more charged political statements. In 1991, he posted a work called "New World Order" on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street. Just days after President Bush uttered that phrase in a speech about the Gulf War, English used Disney cartoon characters to recreate Picasso's 1937 work, "Guernica," which was painted as a response to the Fascist bombing of a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. In 1990, during a pro-life rally on 14th Street, English covered a billboard a few blocks away with a painting that showed a wire hanger, a symbol of the dark days of back-alley abortions. After the sign was up, a nude woman hired by English stood on the catwalk in front of the modification and broke a plastic bag of stage blood on the painting of the hanger. The stage blood spread out over the image of the hanger and the white and yellow background to form a heart shaped stain.

The sometimes controversial messages of his artwork have landed English in perilous situations. In 1998, he drove to Jersey City. As a group of neighborhood men gathered to watch, English and his crew unrolled and posted a work called "Redneck Nietzsche," that was an illustration of English crucified along with the legend "Let's get drunk and kill God."

English said the image and message are meant to comment on the hypocrisy of the Religious Right, whose intolerance he compares to that of the mob that urged Pontius Pilate to sentence Jesus Christ.

"It took them about five minutes to realize that they were pissed off," English said of the watching men. "As we were driving away, they chased after us, beating our cars with baseball bats."

Some of the hazards he has encountered have been occupational. Once, while using rubber cement to paste up a piece of art over a billboard in Texas, the caustic glue caused second degree burns on English's hands and arms. Another time, he stepped onto a steel scaffold and received an electric shock caused by faulty wiring in the floodlights used to illuminate the billboard at night.

While posting his modifications, English has worked with crews numbering from two to a half dozen. Generally, these are friends or other artists. For a time in the mid-eighties, English worked with a man named Charles Tunstall, who would thrill onlookers and terrify English by balancing precariously on the tops of billboards and dangling from scaffolds.

On the day that he posted the Manson modification, English was joined at his loft by Don Goede, an editor at a Lower East Side publishing company, Janet O'Faolain, a member of a modern dance troupe, and the owner of an independant record label named Jake Szufnarowski. All three were in their late twenties or early thirties and had recently met English and volunteered to help him. The work of assisting English is dangerous and offers little in the way of recompense. But his helpers view their work as an opportunity to participate in an adventure and in a form of activism. Goede, who had met English six months previously at a show exhibiting the art of a reclusive Texas musician named Daniel Johnston, said he leapt at the chance to take part in a modification mission. "People get tired of looking at ads all day and having no choice about it," he said. "And going out with Ron is nice because it lets you take a little stab at corporate America."

After the crew assembled at English's loft, the artist rolled the Manson mural around a cardboard tube and the group set out. They walked to the City Hall subway station and boarded the uptown 6 train. On the way, English recalled a time when his crew mutinied and refused to climb up upon a rotten wooden scaffold. After disembarking the train at Union Square, the group walked east. While O'Faolain halted on the north side of 14th Street and set up a video camera on a tripod to record the afternoon's actions, Goede and Szufnarowski continued on to a red brick building on the south side of that street between Avenue A and Avenue B. They buzzed the intercom, gained access to the building, and ascended six flights to the roof.

After preparing a cornstarch paste mixture at the apartment of a friend who lived nearby, English joined them. As a stiff wind blew across the facade of the building, the men stepped carefully over the parapet and descended to the catwalk. Moving gingerly, they used stiff bristle brushes with long wooden handles to cover the surface of the billboard with paste. Then English moved along the catwalk, slowly unrolling his piece of art and pressing it against the face of the billboard, as Goede and Szufnarowski maneuvered around him to add a second coat of paste over the new display. Twenty minutes later, they were done. The men climbed back up the ladder, clambered onto the roof, and used a rag to wipe bits of paste from their hair and faces. As they walked away from the building English paused to look up at the billboard. Goede congratulated him on the realistic appearance of the modification.

"Well," English said. "The real test will be when we see how long it stays up."

The modification was still intact a couple of weeks later when a show called "Steal This Billboard" opened at the CBGB's Gallery on The Bowery. In a telephone conversation over a year before, English and Jack Napier, the leader of a San Francisco group called the Billboard Liberation Front, had come up with the idea of a show documenting the ways in which billboards have been altered. The resulting show included photographs of work done by English, Napier, and others. English was excited by the chance to bring the culture jamming aesthetic to a new audience. Soon after the show opened I joined him at the gallery to look at the photographs. He pointed out modifications done by individuals including D. S. Black and Packard Jennings and such groups as Hocus Focus and Cicada.

"We'd like to see people putting up art on billboards all over the place," English said. "We'd like the billboard companies to know that if you put one up in our backyard, we might just paste over it."

While leaving the gallery, English mentioned that he he was about to leave Manhattan. The day before he had looked at a house in Jersey City. The house, he added, was only a block away from the spot where he'd pasted up "Redneck Nietzsche," the work that had caused the men to chase him the year before. English laughed at the memory, then pondered the possibility of encountering them again.

"I hope those guys don't remember me," he said. "If they do, I'll just have to put up new billboards inviting them all over for a party."