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SHEPARD FAIREY
The cat’s out of the bag
By JONATHAN DONALDSON
del.ico.us
reddit!
By now, you've heard of Shepard Fairey. The guy who made the iconic Obama campaign image, he who created "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" and the Obey clothing line—the dude who has his first solo exhibition opening this week at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.
HOW DOES YOUR WORK TRANSLATE IN A MUSEUM SETTING?
What I try to do for the museum is make work that embodies the spirit of what I do on the street. It's the same imagery, the same iconography, using the same production methods—screen printing, xeroxing, stencils, collage—but it's more refined because with the street you never know how long it's going to last. If you're doing something for a gallery and someone is going to buy it and look at it every day, then you want it to be as resolved and as sophisticated and beautiful as, in my case, what is appropriate. Which is probably a lot less time and a lot less technical skill than some amazing oil painters that are out there. But it's important that the work in the museum have some of the same qualities in terms of its boldness, its immediacy, but it also has some more subtlety. I make these really layered collage backgrounds and I produce the imagery over that, and I feel that that allows the pieces in the museum to take on a little bit of that surface texture that they would naturally accrue on the street when they're put up on a concrete wall and there's tacks around and there's old posters underneath, or after I put it up somebody comes and rips at it. An organic quality.
But my work's always been about communicating with people through any venue possible.
TELL ME ABOUT ONE OF THE PIECES THAT IS GOING TO BE ON EXHIBIT THAT YOU'RE PARTICULARLY EXCITED ABOUT.
I'm most excited that people can see what I started with in 1989, which is very primitive. And they can see work that was done two weeks ago—that still, in some regards, is very primitive—but they can see the evolution of my body of work. Hopefully it's empowering to people to see what's possible if you just spend the time and build on some very basic ideas and basic methods.
I'm also excited about the Obama fine art piece [Hope] simply because so many people know that now. It was created as a grassroots image with no direct connection to the Obama campaign or lobbying group or corporation or anybody with power. I sold 350 posters and rolled that money into making more posters, and sold some more and made some more. And by the time the campaign was over, I had made 300,000 posters and half a million stickers. That was all done with a shoestring budget. Anybody basically with a few hundred dollars in the bank could have done the same thing.
AND YOU DID THE INAUGURATION POSTER ALSO?
Yes, I did the official inauguration poster too. How funny is that? For the last eight years, I've been making a lot of anti-presidential/anti-government images, including the presidential seal with the eagle replaced by a vulture, and I did a book called E Plurbus Venom and now I'm doing the official inauguration poster. But it's a very different president.
I'm also excited for the 37-by-15 1/2-foot mural installation that is four canvas panels of different images that work as distinct images but also as a panorama. It is the largest installation in a museum as art pieces that I've ever done. They have the scale and confrontational quality of the street work, but they have the texturing and the layering of fine art pieces. It's kind of the best of both worlds, and I'm really excited about those. I finished those right before I came to Boston.
SO THE SCOPE OF THE SHOW HAS BEEN AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU TO RISE TO THIS PLACE.
Of course. I try to do the best work for every application in place. If I'm doing a CD cover, I try to make it the best CD cover. If I'm doing a T-shirt graphic, I try to make it the best it can be for a T-shirt graphic. A sticker, a sticker. And I'm doing the same thing for this museum show. A lot of people that are going to go to the museum are not going to be familiar with my work, and I want them to take street art seriously. Conversely, a lot of people that like street art are going to go to the museum and might not appreciate museums, and I want them to see that there's value to what is in a museum. So it's a valuable opportunity to create a dialogue and a cross-pollination.
I SEE A COMPARISON WHERE YOU ARE IN YOUR CAREER WITH BOB DYLAN IN THE MID-'60S PERIOD. WITH THE POLITICS, I IMAGINE THERE ARE FANS OF YOUR WORK WHO IDENTIFY WITH YOU AS VERY MUCH A PART OF THE LEFT. AND ALSO, YOU'RE ARDENT IN YOUR SUPPORT OF OBAMA, WHO IS CERTAINLY NOT "LEFT" BY ANY MEANS. DO YOU FEEL THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO PUT YOU INTO A CORNER AND PIN YOU DOWN?
Everyone projects their own desires onto others. Especially people they identify with. That's only natural. Some people are bigger assholes about it than others. Some people are very sincere in feeling they should offer me advice on what I should do at different junctures. My feeling is that I'm an idealist and a realist. My support for Obama is not because I think that Obama is flawless or that Obama as president will fix every problem. It is that Obama has enough of the ideas that I think are the right direction for the country and the realistic potential to get a lot of serious work done by not alienating people. I'm doing what I think is the best thing to realistically attack the problems. It doesn't mean that in other areas of my work, I can't use a more "what if" approach based on my ideals. The ability to be multidimensional as a human being is extremely important, I think, and the idea of these narrow categories that people have to fall into or else they are not being true to something I actually think is really unhealthy. A lot of people look at what I do as a brand in that if I don't look rebellious enough or maintain my street cred enough that I'm going to "hurt my brand." Well, I'm not worried about my brand as much as I'm worried about doing things that I think are most constructive. I answer to myself.
ANOTHER COMPARISON IS IN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHETHER EARLY DYLAN WAS ORIGINAL OR NOT. DYLAN WAS NOTORIOUS FOR CRASHING AT PEOPLE'S HOUSES, STEALING THEIR RECORDS AND MEMORIZING A LOT OF ARCANE BLUES AND HILLBILLY RECORDS. OR ALSO LEARNING SONGS FROM PEOPLE WHETHER HE WAS OVER IN THE UK OR PEOPLE LIKE RAMBLIN' JACK ELLIOTT, AND THEN MAKING UP HIS OWN WORDS AND ARRANGEMENTS OF THOSE SONGS. HE WAS A REAL KIND OF JOHNNY APPLESEED WITH FOLK MUSIC. OUR GENERATION HAS BEEN BOMBARDED WITH IMAGES. WE HAVE A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH IMAGES THAT OTHER GENERATIONS DIDN'T NECESSARILY HAVE. DID THIS EXPERIENCE OF BEING BOMBARDED WITH IMAGES AFFECT YOUR COMPULSION TO WANT TO WORK SO MUCH AS A GRAPHIC ARTIST AND PARTICULARLY WITH ICONOGRAPHY?
From a young age, I loved to draw, and I just liked to look through books, whether they were books of WWII planes and tanks, or art books, or the Sharper Image catalogue. I loved to look at stuff. I loved television as a kid. Later on, when I started listening to punk rock and skateboarding, the motifs of the skateboard companies and bands—the way that certain elements would reemerge from album to album or from skateboard to skateboard for a certain rider or a certain company—started to make me really understand the power of how this process of graphic insinuation worked. I don't think that I really consciously understood the concepts of branding or that repetition works, but definitely subconsciously I started to feel like I wanted to know about things that I saw more frequently because the more that I saw them, I thought that they must be important, and I then think that if I had something it should work the same way.
And also in the process of making my work, I looked at art history and poster design history and thought, "These things are powerful and they seemed to have worked on previous generations. I'm going to extract the elements that I think are valuable to what I want to say and how I want to make it look and cycle them back into my work now." Especially early on, I never expected to be taken seriously as an artist. I considered myself as more of a provocateur as a street artist and irreverence was part of that, and stealing something and making it your own—whether it's Jamie Reed and taking the Queen's portrait and putting a safety pin through it or me taking Andre the Giant and making it my image—the idea of hijacking things was almost part of the concept rather than it being looked at as appropriation or plagiarism. It's like, "Fuck you if you don't like that I'm using this, 'cause I'm using it anyway. I have no money and no power so you can't get anything from me anyway."
Aspects of that have remained with me. When I did my Obama image, I just found my image from an AP news photo on Google and illustrated from that. There was no time to get Obama to do a sitting or license a photograph. I felt I needed to get the image done and out there right away. So part of that is still with me. Then, in other ways, now instead of finding an image I might get in trouble for to make a poster, I'll have my wife or a friend do a photo shoot or I'll collaborate with photographers or I'll "Frankenstein" some images together so it's not an obvious reference from one. I'll use the spirt of graphic familiarity that will lead people to have a certain feel or a certain assumption about an image rather than it being literally a piece of an old Black Panther poster or a piece of an old Russian poster. But absolutely, I think once again that the Dylan analogy is very appropriate.
SHEPARD FAIREY
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
UNTIL 8.16.09
INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
100 NORTHERN AVE.
617.478.3100
ICABOSTON.ORG
OBEYGIANT.COM
