Shepard Fairey Man on a mission
It’s the summer of ’89. A budding Rhode Island art student, moonlighting as a skate shop assistant, is practising his craft. From a random newspaper cutting he stencils the image of a man’s face. It will be the focus of his subculture’s purest form of creative expression: a skate sticker. Freshly pasted, the masterpiece is finally ready for its grand unveiling.
“Dude, that’s stupid,” is one skate bum’s critique. Plastered to the wall, in all its greyscale glory, is a monolithic cutout of Andre the Giant: wrestler, actor and 520-pound goliath. With a knowing smile, the artist hits back. “You’ll see,” he says prophetically, “Andre’s posse is the new shit.”
Today, the iconic Giant face litters urban landscapes across the globe. From Providence, Rhode Island, to Hackney, London, stickers on stop signs indicate the global spread of a cultural phenomenon that has fuelled one skater’s leap from anonymity to notoriety. Shepard Fairey – stealth street bomber, countercultural rebel and creator of the Obey Giant street art campaign – has come a long way since that first artistic impulse seventeen years ago.
“The Obey campaign is about not being blindly obedient: you have to look at things and think about what really applies to how you want your life to be.” Slapping a poster on a wall in London’s East End, Shepard Fairey is shedding some light on this damp London afternoon. “I guess it’s a question-everything philosophy I’m trying to put across,” he adds.
“I’m not a proponent of anarchy. But a lot of laws that don’t benefit anyone get slipped in as a form of control. I just think people should be more pro-active in taking advantage of democracy, and pay attention to what’s going on.”
When a national article came out questioning the meaning behind the ‘Andre the Giant has a Posse’ stickers, Shepard experienced his own enlightenment. “The whole thing opened my eyes up to the fact that most public space is controlled by advertisers and the government,” he says. “You’re going out there and saying, ‘I’m going to communicate, whether it’s against the law or not. I’m a taxpayer so I can seize the public space.’”
The stickers evoked mixed reactions: a symbol of youthful defiance to the anti-establishment rebel; a form of subversive propaganda to the paranoid conservative. “I liked the idea of creating something from nothing – the coup of this absurd thing taking on any meaning the public projected onto it,” says Shepard, fascinated by the wave of curiosity that swept through communities bombed by Andre the Giant.
Today, more than two-and-a-half million stickers and forty-five thousand posters have been avidly dispensed by Shepard and his network of renegade bombers. From New York to Los Angeles, London to Tokyo, a wheat-paste trail signals the Giant’s global spread.
Unknowingly, Shepard created his own sociological experiment – what he calls an ‘experiment in phenomenology,’ described by the campaign’s manifesto as ‘the process of letting things manifest themselves’. Devoid of meaning, the sticker forces people to question their surroundings and the thousands of commercial images they are bombarded with daily.
“It’s kind of like a Rorschach test,” explains Shepard, referring to the vague inkblot cards that psychologist’s use to delve into your subconscious. “How people react to the sticker is a reflection of their personality.” But just as you begin to think the man may be the next Freud, he sniggers: “Manipulating the public in this way was simply a funny concept to me.”
The stickers semantically evolved into posters that read ‘Obey Giant’ – what Shepard sees as his “counterculture version of Big Brother.” The rebel stamp of a skateboarding punk had become the political vent of a thinking man: “The Giant stuff was just meant to be a Dada, semiotic, fuck-you kind of a thing,” explains Shepard. “But I morphed it into a social or political commentary about how people are obedient.
“I’m not a proponent of anarchy,” he continues. “But a lot of laws that don’t benefit anyone get slipped in as a form of control. I just think people should be more pro-active in taking advantage of democracy, and pay attention to what’s going on.”
“The Giant stuff was just meant to be a Dada, semiotic, fuck-you kind of a thing. But I morphed it into a social or political commentary about how people are obedient.”
But as Shepard soon discovered, having an opinion politically is never good for business. When a line of anti-Bush posters hit, twenty-five per cent of Shepard’s online customers immediately unsubscribed. “Since 9/11 people are making bad decisions because they’re scared,” he says. “And right now – especially in the United States – I feel a counterargument needs to be made.”
Buffered by his successful design company, Studio Number One, Shepard can afford to be outspoken. Adding ‘street cred’ to the hackneyed world of advertising, he is an indispensable portal to the much-coveted youth market.
With a client list that includes Coca-Cola and Sony, Shepard has predictably been labelled with the ‘sell out’ tag. But how does he explain his schizophrenic approach to consumer culture? “I’m not a paternalist. Customers need to consume with more discretion and not be mindless sheep,” says Shepard. “If I have to tell you that a caffeinated soft drink is bad, you deserve bad health and it’s natural selection that your rapid demise would better the world.”
Shepard seems clearly at ease with his stamp on the world. “It’s all about understanding supply and demand economics and using it to your advantage rather than getting used by it,” he smiles. “You’ve gotta understand your position within the zeitgeist.”
Looking up at the grey sky, Shepard is stuffing his pockets with stickers. Tonight, the design tycoon will moonlight as a countercultural rebel. The clouds move in but pose no threat: he’s prepping for a street bombing mission across London’s East End.
Days later, the Giant’s face fresh above Old Street Station, we can safely surmise: mission accomplished.
Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey
For more, go to www.obeygiant.com.
This story originally appeared in Huck #002.
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