Street Cred

Photo by and © Ann Summa for "Modern Painters"

Shepard Fairey in front of some of his posters in los Angeles

Photo by and © Ann Summa for "Modern Painters"

Fairey signing posters in his Los Angeles studio

More on Shepard Fairey

The Philosophy of Obey
Shepard Fairey’s book The
Philosophy of Obey is published by
Nerve Books.

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

In John Carpenter’s film They Live, Rowdy Roddy Piper, a former pro wrestler playing an unemployed construction worker, discovers a pair of special sunglasses that reveal a secret totalitarian regime controlling the human race. Glasses on, Piper sees the skull-faced overlords at the levers of power and can decipher the subliminal messages, such as “Obey,” printed on the world’s billboards. And that’s how a wrestler began his tongue-in-cheek war against the establishment.

“That movie had a big influence on me,” says Shepard Fairey, the artist and graphic designer whose “Obey Giant” sticker and graffiti campaign began in 1989, one year after They Live was released. “They Live was campy and funny but had this oddly profound message, which is that people have no idea how manipulated they are. And that all you need is some glasses to see the truth just below the surface. And what he saw was this pervasive command: Obey. It’s such a compelling word. When told what to do, my instinct is to do the opposite. With my art, I have always been interested in that kind of emotional response.”

Fairey’s vehicle for that emotional response was André René Roussimoff, another former pro wrestler, whose size—reportedly somewhere between 6'11" and 7'5" and 309 to 565 pounds—earned him the sobriquet André the Giant. “Intentionally, there was no message,” Fairey says. “It was supposed to mimic advertising, but without a product.” Fairey hoped André’s visage would awaken people to the pervasive realm of real marketing around them. Contentless, André was meant as a mysterious muse, an invitation to search for meaning.

This year, Fairey has discovered a new muse: Barack Obama. You’ve probably seen the simple but effective poster by now. Stenciled in red, white, and blue, Obama has the distant, upward gaze of a visionary leader. Below him, the word PROGRESS. “That was the original print,” Fairey says. “Later, when the campaign commissioned an edition for fund-raising, I changed it to their slogan, which was ‘Hope.’ ”

Fairey is standing over a four-foot-tall version of that painting in his expansive studio and gallery facility in Echo Park, near downtown Los Angeles. This is where Fairey and several rooms full of assistants use X-Acto knives and computers to manage Fairey’s myriad art and design endeavors, including preparing for his first big retrospective next year at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In this room, a massive table is covered with hundreds of prints from over the years, showing the evolution from “Obey” to Obama. “I started getting into more explicit political statements in recent years,” he says. In 2003, there were posters against the war, and in 2004 an anti-Bush campaign depicting the president as a smiling vampire. “Needless to say,” Fairey says, as Obama’s stenciled face stares up at us from the massive paper collage placard, “that election didn’t turn out as we hoped.” Like most of us, Fairey first took notice of Obama in 2004, after his rousing keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. “I saw it on TV, and I was really impressed,” says Fairey. “What Obama said was unusually idealistic. These weren’t the usual safe things politicians repeat endlessly.”

Even before Obama upset Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, setting him on an unlikely path to the nomination, Fairey felt moved to render Obama iconic. When the artist met someone who worked in the Obama campaign, he made a back-channel inquiry for permission. To Fairey’s surprise, word came back with a green light. “Our print run was before Super Tuesday, when California had its primary,” Fairey says. “Within that first week, there were nearly 5,000 posters out.”

Fairey’s multicolored Obama gave visual definition to the intangible excitement stirred by the candidate, and soon that face was everywhere. As with “Obey,” the Obama icon propagated itself. Fairey’s free distributive model fit well with Obama’s bottom-up, technologically oriented, self-starting organization and base, and Fairey’s Web traffic spiked as thousands of people downloaded the image, applying it to their own sites and printed materials. A collaboration with a San Francisco streetwear brand called Upper Playground put the image on T-shirts. The Obama campaign commissioned 50,000 copies of an official poster, raising $350,000 for the campaign. Other artists followed suit, creating limited editions under the banner of Artists for Obama. “This was all very exciting,” says Fairey. “It went well beyond my usual audience.” Fairey understands his audience because he was once like them: a disaffected teenager growing up in the remote cultural outpost Charleston, South Carolina, where punk rock and skateboarding were imported through album art, T-shirts, skateboard graphics, and stickers. While still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey discovered the power of making his own stickers when a few hundred well-placed adhesive images of André’s face accompanied by the enigmatic slogan “André the Giant has a posse” quickly got the attention of the town paper and civic establishment. This prompted more stickers. Followed by more reaction. Which brought on bigger stickers, wider reach, an evolving cult of André, and a franchise graffiti operation whereby an informal army of surrealist propagandists could send for a pile of stickers, or make their own copies, or copies of copies of copies, and bring André and his posse to their town overnight. By the time Fairey came full circle and added obey to the André image, in 1995, he had stumbled into an international interactive public-art practice.