Shepard Fairey

“Whenever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience.”
— Thomas C. Halibuton

 

Artist Shepard Fairey is truly the anti-authoritarian poster child. The international notoriety achieved by his Andre the Giant paper campaign offers us, if nothing else, gloriously ironic proof of the power of advertising. For over a decade, from Tokyo to London to Philadelphia to San Francisco, posters of the long-deceased, larger-than-life WWF star have proliferated like goofy Orwellian/Constructivist icons, issuing vague threats like BUY, SUBMIT, OBEY.

 

Buy what? Obey whom? The question answers itself: nothing, and no one. The Giant is an empty signifier, and when a viewer begins to question the meaning behind Fairey's propaganda, they begin to question the meaning behind all the rest.

 

Fairey designed his first Andre stickers in the late 1980s while he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. The stickers sported the wrestler's face and the motto “Andre The Giant Has A Posse.” Fairey plastered Providence with them. While skaters, punks, and taggers were gleeful, local cops and conservatives were definitely not. Fairey made thousands more of the stickers and sent them to friends across the country, who posted them everywhere. Suddenly Andre the Giant's posse was larger than Fairey had ever anticipated.

 

Over the next few years, the phenomenology deepened as Fairey began to experiment with the image of Andre the Giant, blowing him up to poster-size and juxtaposing his face with those of adored celebrities. Thus began, in the early 90s, the proliferation of pop-art images of Andre—as Marilyn Monroe, replete with blonde wig and mole, as Gene Simmons in Kiss makeup, as Jimi Hendrix—in public places. The associations lifted The Giant out of the wrestling subculture into the mainstream, giving a face to the faceless.

The campaign evolved yet again when Fairey borrowed the red aesthetic of communist propaganda, simplifying The Giant's face into a stencil of bold black lines on white paper, then blowing it up to billboard-poster size above the single word OBEY. Now, an anti-authority demigod cum Kabuki huckster, Andre crowds in alongside Coca Cola and McDonalds, a humorously iconic reminder that Big Brother is being watched.

 

Fairey has always been willing to serve jail time to get his posters up. His street creed, and the sheer size of his stencil-wielding, sticker-placing, poster-bombing auxiliary crew, has earned him an integrity rivaled by few in any artistic sphere. He has been shown legally in major galleries, and illegally on flat blank surfaces, across the world.