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As happy accidents go, Shepard Fairey stumbling across a picture of Andre the Giant has to be one of street art’s finest. In need of an image for a friend to learn how to create a stencil, he picked up a paper and as if by magic, there was the man mountain. Unsurprisingly his friend was somewhat confused with the image he was being offered, but Shepard was adamant this was the future.
"I was like, ‘What are you talking about? Andre’s Posse is going to be the hottest new shit.’ He asked me if I was serious and I said, ‘Yeah, people will ask us about it and we’ll say if you don’t know what Andre’s Posse is, we can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’
"I’ve said it many times before, if I’d had a master plan and had decided I needed an image that’d be my stamp, my logo, for the next 15 years, it certainly wouldn’t have been Andre the Giant.
"I probably wouldn’t have been able to think of anything I thought was good enough, but because it happened in a really spontaneous, casual way it was able to evolve very organically."
Andre wasn’t the only sticker Shepard was making at the time. His rise to prominence was nearly cut short by ‘Gerber Baby with a Mohawk’ – a backhanded tribute to a podgy fellow skater, who happened to look similar to the baby that appeared on the US brand Gerber’s baby products, but with a mohawk. Many of Shepard’s friends preferred the chubby infant punk, but fortunately the wrestler won out. A summer later and a trail of ‘Andre the Giant has a Posse’ stickers had been left in Shepard’s wake around Rhode Island. The mysterious nature of the images proved a provocative mix. After just a hundred stickers, a newspaper article appeared questioning the motivation behind them. Eliciting this level of reaction from a hundred stickers wasn’t lost on Shepard. In fact, it opened his eyes to the principles of Phenomenology.
The first aim of Phenomenology is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment. The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger described it as "the process of letting things manifest themselves." Andre may have had a posse, but he had no actual meaning. Each viewer’sreaction to Andre being a manifestation of their own personality and beliefs, rather than an insight into a secret truth. While no doubt successful in its aims, the campaign’s strength was also in a way its biggest weakness.
The oddness of Andre’s face being plastered everywhere certainly grabbed people’s attention—and spawned countless parodies, everyone from Mr T to Woody Allen has had a posse—but the approach somewhat limited Shepard’s ability to express his beliefs. So like David before him, Shepard slew the giant."Even from early on, I felt that Andre wasn’t an image that was really conveying what I was interested in.
"The charm of the Andre campaign was its Dada sense of humour and ambiguity. However I wanted to do work that was more serious. I wanted to address people’s inability to question what was going on around them."
As well as simplifying Andre’s face to more of a ‘Big Brother is Watching’ icon, it was the addition of one word, OBEY, that really cemented this new direction. The word itself was borrowed from John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live, whose underlying premise is that the human race is enslaved through its own obliviousness to what’s going on around it."The most jarring command in the movie was just the straight, written out, OBEY. You’re told to obey in other words constantly, but when you’re just confronted with OBEY, to me, it’s incredibly offensive."
Combining this forthright message with communist propaganda stylings, an aesthetic historically feared by the western world, the images were designed to agitate even more than previously. A preposterous notion considering the viewer had no concept of what they were being agitated by, but therein lies the beauty of the Obey Giant campaign. It’s a lesson in making something from nothing. Continuing the phenomenology of the campaign, for the conservative viewer, Shepard’s creations were something to be feared. An unknown force bent on undermining all they held dear. While for the everyday folk, the pieces were Xeroxed Zorros. Reassurances that someone’s got the little people’s backs. Quite who that someone was didn’t matter. Fear or camaraderie, the fact the viewer engaged with the works and their surroundings was all that ever mattered.
Alongside these ambiguous pieces, Shepard also started to wear his heart on his sleeve. From the war on terror to the environment, there is no doubting Shepard’s political views. Ironically at the moment there’s not much controversy around his stances, however post 9-11, when this work first started to really come to the fore, speaking out against the war, or shockingly Bush, wasn’t the most popular move. Just ask the Dixie Chicks. "I’d always had ideas about abuse of authority and the herd mentality, but what happened after 9-11 just brought my work into clear focus. It was crazy; people were willingly giving away all their rights, approving torture and phone tapping. The way the Bush administration used the collective fear to leverage their agenda was like watching the world go insane around me."
Even with the more serious nature of these works, they’re still visually seductive. In essence, that’s the difference between the news and art. They both can tell the same story, but art needs to engage. Facts alone are not enough. So by delivering his messages in an out-of-place but enticing aesthetic, their directness was shielded by the ambiguity of the medium.For all his successes, Shepard’s had his fair share of critics. Obey Giant is more than a street art moniker these days. With its fashion and graphic design arms, some would claim it’s become as much a corporation as those it rails against. Street art doesn’t pay the bills though. Clothes and illustrations do however, and despite some of the perilous spots Shepard’s hit over the years, he’s a mere mortal who needs to eat like the rest of us.
"I’ve been making T-shirts from the start and the companies I do graphic design work for are never companies I have an ethical conflict with.
The assumption is that I’m anti-capitalist. I’m not.
"I think capitalism needs to be critiqued, but I’m not saying destroy the system altogether. I’m not Marxist. I can point out the problems with capitalism―its potential to encourage greed and the dangers of the marriage of big business and government―and still be a capitalist.“I’ve succeeded in doing this outside the system on my own terms and I think I’ve done the same inside the system. There’s a big difference between being co-opted and getting in a situation where you’re perceived to be co-opted. I’m in a position where I can work to reshape the system, the way I’d like to see it, on my own terms. Unless you’re an isolationalist who’s written off any change to the dominant paradigm, then you would appreciate my approach."
While most detractors have confined themselves to blogs and forums, one (or maybe more than one – the truth’s still out there) took on a more active stance. Between 2006 and 2007, ‘The Splasher’ as he/she/they came to be known was the scourge of the New York street art scene, adding their own colourful additions to Shepard’s works, as well as pieces by Faile, Swoon and WK Interact, among others.You could argue that Shepard’s work being attacked is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In encouraging people to wake up and question what’s going on in the world, he may well have helped create the monster. After all, getting people to think is one thing. Telling them what to think is something completely different.
"It comes down to people feeling propriety about street art and clinging to an idea that street art can’t be corrupted by commerce. It was odd, people were asking me if I was done in New York, but the thing is I’ve outlasted dozens of haters like this. They were just one more in a very long train. They might be motivated, but I’m more motivated. I put up forty new pieces in New York in June and only one has been splashed."
He managed to find time for a similar amount of new pieces around London while preparing for his NineteenEightyFouria show at the StolenSpace Gallery. Considering this was a 200-piece show, Shepard’s nothing if not committed to the cause. In fact he’s still far more prolific than the vast majority of street artists who would be viewed as keeping it ‘real’. So while he may be a darling of the fine art world, he’s still got his feet firmly on the streets.
"For me a gallery career was just a side benefit. I was perfectly content funding my street art through my work as a contract screen printer. My work was always about the idea of finding a populist voice. By placing things on the street there are absolutely no barriers. However, with my work, if you see an isolated piece, it might not communicate everything I’m trying to get across. You come to a show and you’re going to be immediately up-to-speed. Plus, artistically, if you’re sacrificing work to the streets, it’s hard to justify the investment of time. It’s not practical. At a glance they’re good enough, but when the works appear in the gallery it gives me the ability to really sit down and invest energy in the pieces."
With its billboard-sized centrepieces, the NineteenEightyFouria exhibition in London showed off that investment to full effect. Shepard may be more comfortable on the streets, but he was certainly at home in the Old Truman Brewery. Andre of course featured, but his role was more walk-on than leading man. Having seen his evolution over the past eighteen years, only one man knows what the future holds for him. "At each stage of the project I’ve tried to do what’s most logical. If at some point I feel like I’m no longer able to achieve what I want to with Obey Giant, I may just go back and create a new identity. Do something different and no one will know it’s me. I’ll have that freedom of mystery again."
www.obeygiant.com
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