Frank Shepard Fairey : my favorite artist
"André the Giant Has a Posse" is one of my favorite stikerz(& wheatpastez) and stencilz by shepard fairey, these are some information about him from wikipedia:
André the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on an original design by Frank Shepard Fairey created in 1989 while Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). At the time Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology." Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide movement, following in the footsteps of Ivan Stang's Church of the SubGenius and populist WWII icon Kilroy Was Here. At the same time, Fairey's work has evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant campaign.
History
Fairey and campaign co-creators Blais Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mongo Nikol created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States.
Vintage Andre the Giant stencil on street light post.By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Greece, London, Mexico, Japan, Florida and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image profoundly irresistible.
OBEY Giant poster on building exterior.Threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. in 1993 spurred Fairey to stop using the trademarked name André the Giant, and to create a more iconic image of the wrestler's face, now most often with the equally iconic branding OBEY.
"Obey Giant" sticker appearing under a marker for Nevada State Route 604 (Las Vegas Boulevard), Las Vegas.Over time, Fairey's artistic imagery has evolved into a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, parody of a range of iconic styles, mostly a juxtaposition of popular political propagandas and multi-national commercialism. It usually bears the text OBEY Giant. In addition to countless small stickers, OBEY Giant has been spread by stencil, murals, and large wheatpaste posters, covering public spaces from abandoned building faces and street sign backs, to commercial spaces such as billboards and bus stop posters. Furthermore, the popular "OBEY" slogan and stylized Andre The Giant face continues to be reproduced on products ranging from art and clothing to home accessories and decor, considerably expanding the impact of the campaign through iconology based on an allegiance to media and popular culture in the guise of counterculture.
Fairey later used stencils to make posters on old wall paper: 'a simple way to make art for people who had seen my stuff on the street and wanted a piece'. As demands on his time grew, Fairey needed help disseminating his work. Gerardo Yepiz helped make stencils of many of Fairey's designs, and also found a die cutter to mass-produce the two most used Giant icons.
Meaning
The essential appeal of the campaign is its parody of propaganda, both political and corporate, that permeates modern American culture. The ubiquity and placement of the André the Giant/OBEY GIANT imagery resembles an advertising campaign, a campaign for a non-existent product. Fairey mocks the idea of branding by creating his own fake brand, subversively using advertising techniques to elevate André the Giant's image to iconic status.
Andre the Giant "Make Art Not War" poster with small OBEY sticker in NYC.Similarly, the campaign parodies government sponsored propaganda by invoking Orwellian language (e.g. "OBEY") and the artistic style of Soviet propaganda posters. These styles are strongly associated with the spread of misinformation, and paired with the André the Giant image indicating the joke nature of the message, reinforce the idea that governments have methods to spread misinformation.
Fairey occasionally creates work with actual messages (one OBEY graphic declares "Make Art Not War") but most of Giant's pictures have no text. The campaign's self-description on OBEY products is filled with doublespeak: "Frequent and novel encounters with OBEY propaganda provoke thought and possible frustration, revitalizing the viewer's perception and attention to detail."
Splinter movements
In recent years Fairey has profited from the popularity of the campaign by selling merchandise. As a result of a perceived commercialization of the OBEY Giant movement, the Creative Commons-licensed World Giant movement was created in 2005, seeking to alleviate concerns that Fairey's commercial success was nullifying the movement's momentum and unfairly capitalizing on the labor of the original co-founders and anyone around the world who had ever put up a sticker.
André the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on an original design by Frank Shepard Fairey created in 1989 while Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). At the time Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology." Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide movement, following in the footsteps of Ivan Stang's Church of the SubGenius and populist WWII icon Kilroy Was Here. At the same time, Fairey's work has evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant campaign.
History
Fairey and campaign co-creators Blais Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mongo Nikol created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States.
Vintage Andre the Giant stencil on street light post.By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Greece, London, Mexico, Japan, Florida and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image profoundly irresistible.
OBEY Giant poster on building exterior.Threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. in 1993 spurred Fairey to stop using the trademarked name André the Giant, and to create a more iconic image of the wrestler's face, now most often with the equally iconic branding OBEY.
"Obey Giant" sticker appearing under a marker for Nevada State Route 604 (Las Vegas Boulevard), Las Vegas.Over time, Fairey's artistic imagery has evolved into a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, parody of a range of iconic styles, mostly a juxtaposition of popular political propagandas and multi-national commercialism. It usually bears the text OBEY Giant. In addition to countless small stickers, OBEY Giant has been spread by stencil, murals, and large wheatpaste posters, covering public spaces from abandoned building faces and street sign backs, to commercial spaces such as billboards and bus stop posters. Furthermore, the popular "OBEY" slogan and stylized Andre The Giant face continues to be reproduced on products ranging from art and clothing to home accessories and decor, considerably expanding the impact of the campaign through iconology based on an allegiance to media and popular culture in the guise of counterculture.
Fairey later used stencils to make posters on old wall paper: 'a simple way to make art for people who had seen my stuff on the street and wanted a piece'. As demands on his time grew, Fairey needed help disseminating his work. Gerardo Yepiz helped make stencils of many of Fairey's designs, and also found a die cutter to mass-produce the two most used Giant icons.
Meaning
The essential appeal of the campaign is its parody of propaganda, both political and corporate, that permeates modern American culture. The ubiquity and placement of the André the Giant/OBEY GIANT imagery resembles an advertising campaign, a campaign for a non-existent product. Fairey mocks the idea of branding by creating his own fake brand, subversively using advertising techniques to elevate André the Giant's image to iconic status.
Andre the Giant "Make Art Not War" poster with small OBEY sticker in NYC.Similarly, the campaign parodies government sponsored propaganda by invoking Orwellian language (e.g. "OBEY") and the artistic style of Soviet propaganda posters. These styles are strongly associated with the spread of misinformation, and paired with the André the Giant image indicating the joke nature of the message, reinforce the idea that governments have methods to spread misinformation.
Fairey occasionally creates work with actual messages (one OBEY graphic declares "Make Art Not War") but most of Giant's pictures have no text. The campaign's self-description on OBEY products is filled with doublespeak: "Frequent and novel encounters with OBEY propaganda provoke thought and possible frustration, revitalizing the viewer's perception and attention to detail."
Splinter movements
In recent years Fairey has profited from the popularity of the campaign by selling merchandise. As a result of a perceived commercialization of the OBEY Giant movement, the Creative Commons-licensed World Giant movement was created in 2005, seeking to alleviate concerns that Fairey's commercial success was nullifying the movement's momentum and unfairly capitalizing on the labor of the original co-founders and anyone around the world who had ever put up a sticker.
posted by PENDAR at
10:30 AM
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