It could be argued that Shepard Fairey’s rise from sticker artist and public nuisance to the author of internationally recognized cultural icons and the creative force behind one of the hottest and most sought-after design agencies in the country is the result of a fortune cookie and a prank.
In the fall of 1990, Fairey had just started a new semester at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). His first assignment in an illustration class was to open a fortune cookie and illustrate whatever it said. His read, “To affect the quality of the day is no small achievement.” Some time before Fairey had created his first Andre the Giant stickers and he had become obsessed with sticking them up everywhere he could. He took the message in the fortune cookie as a challenge. A billboard near campus had caught his attention even before he was provoked into action by the fortune cookie. “It was a campaign ad for Buddy Cianci, who was running for mayor of Providence,” Fairey explains in his book, OBEY: Supply and Demand, The Art of Shepard Fairey (Gingko Press), “His picture on the billboard was relatively small compared to the text above it: ‘Cianci: he never stopped caring about Providence.’ I thought it was kind of ridiculous. His head was maybe four feet high and the letters were twice as big.”
Fairey decided his best strategy to “affect the quality of the day” was to paste a giant Andre head over the picture of Cianci. He measured the Cianci head on the billboard and that evening he pasted a four-foot high Andre head over the photo of the candidate and changed ‘Cianci’ to ‘Andre.’ Within two days, “Cianci’s people had fixed the name and covered the picture with another twice as big, with Cianci’s waving hand sticking out from the billboard. Of course, I had to hold down my spot, so I went back and measured the new head – eight and a half feet and went off to Kinkos to make a new head.” With a little help from his friends, Fairey mounted the new head, changed the ‘Cianci’ backed to ‘Andre’ once again and added texts that read, ‘Join The Posse’ on the upraised hand and ‘7’4″, 520 LB’ over the lapel button.
“The next day, the story was all over the news – radio, TV, newspapers, everything. People at RISD were going crazy. It was just a prank, but people thought there was some political or moralistic motivation behind it. I didn’t know it, but it turned out Cianci had been the mayor years before, and was kicked out for beating up his ex-wife’s lover and putting out a cigar in the guy’s eye while the cops held him down. Everything thought the image of a wrestler was supposed to be a way of calling Cianci a brute. Although I didn’t intend to make a statement, the incident opened my eyes to the power of propaganda.”
These days, Andre posters and their successors have become an ubiquitous component of the urban landscape in Los Angeles and in cities around the country and across the planet.
The Andre posters feature the one word-injunction to ‘obey’ (leaving one to ponder what, exactly), and his more recent posters have drawn upon the rich iconography of propaganda from around the world and across the decades to challenge viewers to wonder what the message is. And that is precisely what the artist intends. “An ambiguous image can stir up so much curiosity that it functions as a kind of Rorschach test by stimulating interpretation and discussion,” says Fairey.
The Andre posters have done even more than that, according to advertising guru Rick Robinson of MacDonald Media, an international billboard design and consulting firm, “It’s proof of the power of visual communications to brand,” Robinson says. “If you choose one image and persistently get it out there everywhere, over and over again, it creates its own meaning.”
As a teenager in North Carolina, Fairey identified with the punk and skateboard subculture. The stickers that kids decorated their boards with fascinated Fairey and when he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, to study at the Rhode Island School of Design, that fascination turned to inspiration. During a trip to New York City he saw graffiti and stickers in risky places that left him with a profound respect for the writers and artists. “Stickers and tags coated every surface in New York City. I left the city inspired, but I was somehow convinced graffiti was something you had to be born into, like a Black or Hispanic mafia, and a pale cracker like me could never be accepted into that culture. I did, however, think I could make stickers and accomplish some of the same things.”
Fairey was designing stickers and T-shirts for a skate shop in Providence called The Watershed when a friend asked him to teach him how to make paper cut stencils. “I stumbled upon a funny picture of Andre the Giant and I told Eric that Team Shed was “played” and he should make a stencil of Andre so we could be “Andre’s Posse.” He tried to cut the image with an x-acto knife, but aborted the mission in frustration. I finished the job and wrote “Andre the Giant has a Posse” on one side, with his height and weight, 7’4″, 520 lbs., on the other side.” That was the first of many Andre the Giant designs. There would be many more to come.
Fairey uses Marshal McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message,” to explain his perception of how his work is perceived. “With street art,” Fairey explains, “there’s no committee deciding whether I can put my work up in the street, there’s no censorship and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium. The methods I employ to apply the work to the street – stencils, stickers and wheat paste – are really easy to use and are generally associated with some sort of protest or rebellion. I associate ‘the medium is the message’ with that street work, because the mere act of putting something up is a defiant one: It shows you are not willing to bow to the system. On top of that, the content can deliver another message, but purely the act in and of itself sends a message of defiance.”
The Sex Pistols and Martin Heidegger were also sources of inspiration for Fairey. The idea of creating messages that shocked people out of their day-to-day routine fit perfectly with Fairey’s evolving understanding of what he was doing. It all came together in his mind when he read about the Situationists, a group of international political and artistic agitators inspired by Marxist and anarchist ideologies and the pre-war European avant gardes that formed in the late ‘50’s. According to Fairey, “They believe that people lives have become boring and people don’t really question their condition as human domesticated livestock, and situations need to be created that snap people out of their boring day-to-day routine. The Situationists felt that art should be revolutionary and it should be part of everyday life, and that’s a major rationale behind street art.”
The rise of the internet, an inherently populist medium, poses new opportunities for artists who may be inspired by Fairey’s phenomenal success as a street artist. Or they can still do it the old-fashioned way. “People often feel they don’t have a voice because it requires some complex technical apparatus, whether they feel they need to have an inside connection with a TV station, or they think they can’t print their own materials because that has to be done by an expensive machine they can’t afford. The methods I’ve used to get my work out to the public are accessible to anyone, and I think it’s really important for people to feel they are not powerless. A Xerox poster campaign can be incredibly effective and really cheap. There’s an old saying that ‘freedom of the press is guaranteed to anyone who owns a printing press.’ But I didn’t have a big old linotype machine; I started off just using a Xerox machine and sticker paper and later moved up to screen-printing . . . The internet has really leveled the playing field now, because most people have a computer and can build a website, and it’s probably cheaper than a lot of the methods I used. It’s great to see people generating new forms of media, because it just gives you more freedom to choose a fitting outlet for your voice.”