well, the paper is kinda short and has some very subjective
moments, but see what you think. I wrote it in a day...blah blah
blah.
Deconstructing Shepard Fairey: Andre the Giant Has a Product
Shepard Fairey describes his art as a movement. A movement
towards or against what is unclear. A political movement? An
artistic or cultural movement? A once playfully irreverent art
project that poked fun at branding, cliques, visual
commodification and the use of public space now faces
complete implosion and hypocrisy by propagating and even
intensifying the devices it sought to critique. Shepard Fairey, the
young graphic designer behind Andre the Giant Has a Posse,
was in a position of popularity and power to stir a generation of
politically apathetic youth into social awareness and action with
his provocative mixture of design and politics, but instead he
chose to sell them more products. As per every capitalist
success in America, there is a clever anecdotal story to be told.
The Andre the Giant has a Posse sticker “campaign” began as
former RISD student Shepard Fairey’s humorous commentary
on the hip-hop inspired and brand-sponsored teams that arose
out of early 90’s skate culture. As a college sophomore, he
created a spray paint stencil from a random picture in the paper,
which happened to be a muddy photograph of the late, great
WWF wrestler turned film actor, Andre the Giant. By stenciling
the image on t-shirts for his friends and having them claim that
Andre the Giant had a posse, Fairey fashioned an arbitrary clique
that imitated, in spirit, the groups that young skaters belonged to.
When Fairey began producing stickers, friends started putting
them up all over town, as if it was a big inside joke. Then they
began taking stacks of stickers on road trips, and soon Giant
was receiving recognition at the street level in cities across the
country. Rumors described the posse as a cult, or a fanclub, a
band, or a skate brand. Nobody could say what exactly the
stickers referred to, but the fact that people were reacting in such
vocal and diverse ways piqued Fairey’s interest.
Once he realized that he had a compelling concept, Fairey ran
with the idea and developed an entire brand identity for the
non-existent product of Andre the Giant. He expanded the project
in two crucial ways. First, he built a conceptual manifesto
around his (not so) little inside joke. Citing Heidegger’s theory of
phenomenology and outlining the principle goals of the project
as that of public awareness of the medium of advertising and as
a way to observe the mechanics of visual culture, Fairey
managed to build a convincing, albeit simplistic theoretical basis
to give the project artistic and political credibility. From the
original empty Andre the Giant signifier, he developed a defense
of its emptiness, and a motive for its distribution:
The FIRST AIM OF PHENOMENOLOGY is to reawaken a sense
of wonder about one's environment. The Giant sticker attempts
to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the
sticker and their relationship with their surroundings. Because
people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for
which the product or motive is not obvious, frequent and novel
encounters with the sticker provoke thought and possible
frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer's perception and
attention to detail. The sticker has no meaning but exists only to
cause people to react, to contemplate, and search for meaning
in the sticker. Because Giant has a Posse has no actual
meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who
view it reflect their personality and the nature of their
sensibilities.
In a sense, he re-packaged the concept as a social experiment
in which the hapless status quo was subjected to meaningless
imagery in an effort to draw their attention to the plethora of
imagery which assaults our senses every day. The experiment
plays to aware hipsters, and those who do not know are the
victims of Giant’s biting social commentary – that we will
consume any image, regardless of its signification, as long as
we see it frequently, in a variety of contexts. When Andre the
Giant is finally absorbed to the point where we don’t even think
twice about his meaningless ugly face, the joke will be on us, for
we will have succumbed to the self reflexive system that the
stickers knowingly mock.
The second and most important development in the sticker
campaign was that Fairey soon replaced the raw cut-and-paste
aesthetic of the first run of stickers with a slick pastiche of World
War era communist propaganda. Simultaneously expanding
into poster production and dropping Andre the Giant for simply
Giant (due to the threat of litigation by the WWF), the campaign
became a fully developed arsenal of propaganda using mostly
black, white and red stenciled images of Giant in conjunction
with the word “Obey” or simply, “Giant”. The stickers and posters
were put up illegally in alleys, on billboards and advertisements,
bus shelters and lampposts, much like traditional graffiti tags.
The irony of his borrowed political aesthetic seemed to agree
nicely with the irony of the lack of physical product, conflating the
visual language of communism with the commercial practices of
capitalism.
The first obvious sophism in this logic of phenomenology is the
claim that Fairey was not selling a product. This is a fallacy.
Giant has always had a commodity and always will - it is just
more obvious now that it has been licensed into retail clothing
and accessories. The product is not only the posters and
stickers and t-shirts, which sell in galleries and on his website
as works of his unique artistic vision, but the attitude professed
by the ironically rebellious designs and statements. The
ambiguous command to “Obey!” is not only an empty
signification of the devices of advertising, but also an empty
signification of the techniques of social activism. In this context,
the Obey Giant phenomenon’s flashy aesthetic and totally
ambiguous dialogue on social disobedience serves to make a
once powerful form of immediate social discourse into a mere
fashion statement. “All I can say is that even in the commercial
applications of Obey/Giant I am attempting to retain the
rebellious spirit of the street project (every t-shirt comes with a
mini-stencil and manifesto).” In an ever-growing catalogue of
Obey Giant designs, once politically charged imagery and
culturally specific signifiers are routinely stripped of their
resonant value and incorporated into Fairey’s sale of politics as
attitude and style. He renders everyone from Noam Chomsky
and the Zapatistas to Mao and Che Guevara in a unifying war-era
propaganda style, slapped with the Giant logo or the Obey
command. Although he claims that he would like to see people
take the initiative to find out the origins of his symbols, he gives
them no reason to do so. He accuses movements of using
figures symbolically for their agendas, “Simplifying them in a way
which can never truly reflect the complexity of the individual.”
What he does not care to mention is that his work removes
those individuals once more, turning them into cultural capital for
his art career. He is a consumer - a tourist - of political
iconography in an effort to wrest those symbols of all relevant
meaning, blurring the lines between cultural sign and corporate
logo.
"There is no specific political affiliation behind what I do, only the
philosophy "question everything", which is why I can use Jesse
Jackson and Joseph Stalin in the same body of work. I also use
the word "Obey" in much of my art as a form of reverse
psychology. Though most people wish they were independent,
many obediently follow the path of least resistance and are
uncomfortable with confronting the word "Obey". As
disconcerting as the word "Obey" may be, when not attached to
any further command, it poses no threat beyond forcing the
viewer to face their feelings about obedience."
The lack of threat is exactly what is most disconcerting about
Fairey’s work. He appropriates a variety of socially conscious
devices and then proceeds to say absolutely nothing in regards
to the sources of that material. Nor does he utilize the formula to
represent any relevant issues. The experiment is so
self-reflexive in its emptiness that it becomes a black hole,
assimilating and commodifying dissent.
Fairey’s website contains two telling illustrations of this
fundamental resistance to actual political content. The first is a
disclaimer explaining that he has no affiliation with the creators
of “Bin Laden has a Posse”, an obviously politically charged
knock-off of the original sticker idea. Although somewhat crude
and shocking, the sticker touches on our paranoia of Al Queda’s
decentralized, elusive terrorist network. Of all the bootleg
stickers that Fairey features on his website such as “Hello Kitty
Has a Posse”, and “Bill Nye the Science Guy Has a Posse”, the
only one that carries any possible resonance beyond smug
imitation or inside joke is the one sticker he refuses to post.
References to surveilance, industry, technology, fascism,
communism, and organized revolution are pervasive in his
designs, but when confronted with a contemporary example of a
dangerous or specifically contextualized political idea, Fairey
quickly disassociates himself and his “movement”.
Another example is that of a poster by a man named “Bob” from
San Francisco. Bob used Fairey’s now signature aesthetic to
depict images of Al Gore and George W. Bush with the phrase,
“Obey. Choose One” below their heads. In a short statement, the
poster explains the agency of the American people as individual
voters who do not have to necessarily settle for the lesser of two
evils. The poster is an independent stab at the two party system,
effective in both design and content. On the website Fairey
writes, “This is a really cool application of the principals of
Obey/Giant to a real world political issue. I encourage activism
and this is a perfect example of borrowing from the principals
and graphic language of my concept and taking it in one's own
direction.” Regardless of the total hypocrisy vis-a-vis the sticker
mentioned above, one must also ask, what is the direction of
Obey/Giant if not towards activism? Why doesn’t Fairey address
these issues in his own work?
All signs point towards a consciousness of activism, but the
content has been conveniently swept away. Just as the
manifesto explains, we are left with only the medium. The
medium is the message. And at this point, one realizes that
Shepard Fairey just doesn’t care: Instead of engaging in the
politics he appropriates, we find him selling his illustration skills
and marketing techniques to large corporations under the
auspices of BLK/MRKT, a design firm that caters to corporations
that would utilize his “guerilla marketing” to target young adults
eager to look rebellious by purchasing products that are
marketed in a rebellious fashion. His clients include Pepsi
Cola, Ford Motor Company, Dreamworks, Levi’s, Netscape and
Red Bull, to name only a few.
What was once a critical voice, is now teaching big business
how to be cool with their biggest market. “Giant's just...I hate it
when I start talking about the serious side of it when it's not the
main part. The main part is just making fun of everything.” It sure
was fun being totally disillusioned by the work of Shepard Fairey.
― Timothy, Thursday, 11 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
one year passes...