nicole_powers

Having been harassed and arrested by agents of the United States' government as he perpetrated his graffiti art from coast to coast, Shepard Fairy has since earned the respect and gratitude of a future American president. Using the visual vocabulary of popular revolution, the humble DIY poster and sticker maker-cum-revered gallery and populist street artist used his graphic skill to transform Barack Obama from a presidential hopeful to a visionary icon.

But now that the future leader of our government is one of his choosing, Shepard Fairey is questioning his own message of dissent. In essence, what does a rebellious artist do when the central entity he was rebelling against is controlled by a commander-in-chief he helped elect? SuicideGirls called Shepard at his Los Angeles studio to find out.

In our interview the artist, who celebrates 20 years of street propaganda with a solo show at the The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in early 2009, also talks about his Obama images, the psychology behind them, how he had to make unique versions that hadn't previously been distributed by illegal means for use by the official presidential campaign, and how he self-funded his own campaign of "Hope," for which he printed up a staggering 300,000 stickers and 500,000 posters.


Nicole Powers:In the introduction of your new book, E Pluribus Venom, you talk about the "rush" doing street art gives you, and throughout the book you talk about your numerous brushes with the law. Graffiti really is the only form of art that combines the satisfaction of the work with the thrill of a joyride. It's quite a heady combination. Would you still do it without the rush factor?

Shepard Fairey: You know, I made art as a little kid but it was only when I was on restriction because I'd been throwing water balloons at cars or doing something else mischievous and I was stuck in my room. Then later I got into skateboarding and punk rock, the rebellious side of both of those things was very alluring to me, and then also the creativity. So when you look at my progression to becoming a street artist, it's basically the fusion of my desire to make pictures and then my love of rebellious activity all blended.

I think I would maybe make art as something to do for a living or as a hobby, but I don't think it would be something I was as passionate about if I didn't have this tension between the different stages. I have the experimentation of working on my computer or illustrating by hand. I need a bit of space to breathe and experiment, it's a very independent thing. I do a lot of my best work late at night. Then when it's resolved, then the thrill of going out and putting it up is the other side of it that's so important.

I think being an artist, you're trying to make things that are going to communicate with an audience, but when you make it you're not getting any of the feedback from the audience. Then when you put it out there, then you have the communication with the audience...I put it out there and even if it gets cleaned in two days, thousands and thousands of people are going to have seen it. So yes, it's a very, very important component, both philosophically, because my work's about accessibility and connecting with an audience without barriers, and then also just the purely, primal, hedonistic side of it, of just the pleasure of doing it.

NP: It's interesting that blurry line between graffiti artist and criminal indeed many factions of society consider those words to be one and the same. Where do you draw your lines? For instance, I understand you draw one line at putting your art on private property

SF: Well, there's grey areas in everything, but my approach to street art is that public property is ideal because we're all taxpayers and we're all paying for it. We all own it. Then abandoned private property and dilapidated stuff that's not cared for, where I can at least feel like I'm not creating a drastic inconvenience to someone. I mean my main MO is just to try to integrate my work in a way that's visible but not unnecessarily destructive. I don't want to inconvenience people unnecessarily.

I just look at it like, would I want somebody to come tag on my house, my building, my car? And there's plenty of property around L.A., whether it's a blank billboard that's not in use or boarded up windows or a business that's out of business that has a blank sign on their roof, there's all sorts of spots like that that are great. Then there's the various concrete walls that have some tags and some posters already where adding my work to the mix is perfectly reasonable I think. But there's always people that are going to have their feathers ruffled that anything illegal is being done. But I'm very up front about who I am, therefore I feel like every poster I put up is something that I feel is justifiable and I'm willing to be accountable for.

NP: In the book you also talk about The Splasher who has vandalized yours and Banksy's street art. Playing devils advocate here, given the medium, since all such street art is illegal, and in found spaces which artists, such as yourself, neither have the rights to or ownership of, isn't he just expressing himself in a similar way to you? Isn't it part of a dialog of sorts?

SF: Sure. They are. The Splasher was two people. My complaint about The Splasher was that if you read any of their literature it's basically saying that any art that becomes commodified is part of the evil bourgeois machine. That to me is not really a valid critique. Of course I'm used to any number of critiques that I don't think are valid; the thing that disturbed me about The Splasher was that it was somebody that I felt was more of an insider to the world of street art, more of a peer. It was the Joe Lieberman of the street art world maybe.

What I said about The Splasher was that I don't think it's constructive, but, yes, it's getting a dialog going and I think the conversation's interesting. I've outlasted many people that have hated my work, and I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and outlast them too. A lot of people were like, "No! This is it. They're getting all the best work. There's no point in putting anything up." Sure enough, they moved to Toledo, Ohio because they got caught at my art show trying to set off a smoke bomb last summer. Then they were so scared, because the guy's picture was all over the Internet, one of the two guys, that they both moved to Toledo.

In some ways I felt it was good for the street art scene because it was getting attention in New York magazine and The New York Times, and all these places where street art normally doesn't get exposed. But I was bummed that they were going after the people making the most beautiful work. I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about Swoon, Faile, WK Interact, Banksy, anyone who'd had any success. And the thing that was so disappointing was that these were all artists where success was a byproduct of making good work. Success in a financial sense or a gallery sense was not their primary ambition, it was a peripheral benefit.

I think if you're going to live in a capitalist society, that understanding that things become commodified and value is assigned monetarily to things that have value culturally, that this is part of the natural arc of the life of something that has merit. It's unavoidable. So to me it was a very, very naive position that they were holding. But, all that aside, I still don't think it was bad for the scene.

NP: Isn't the nature of street art that it is a temporary thing, with one piece of art living out its life over layers of past art and blackout paint. Isn't that in essence the circle of life for street art?

SF: Oh, of course. I never get precious about my images on the street. Of course I'm bummed out if they get painted over in a couple of days, which happens sometimes, but, as a street artist, you know that if you go out and you put fifty things up in a city that in pretty short order half of them are going to be gone, and then maybe a small percentage of them will last more than a few months. That's just how it goes. I think the thing about The Splasher though, was they didn't have any answers, any alternative. They didn't say, "This is how art should work," or, "This is what we think." It was basically the graffiti version of, "The world is shit kill yourself." But at the same time desperately screaming, "I'm alive and I want to be recognized."

NP: Talking of death, I loved your These Sunsets Are To Die For image. During the recent SoCal fires, the sunsets were hauntingly beautiful as the sun's rays were reflected by smoke particles. Much of your work illustrates how the world can be beautiful and ugly at the same time.

SF: Thanks. I'm glad that you picked up on that, not everybody does.

NP: Exploring such dichotomies is a theme throughout your work isn't it?

SF: It is, and I try to make it even more obvious with my new show I just did in San Francisco, by naming the show the Duality of Humanity. To me it's very important to see that there are multiple layers and angles to everything. I love making work that's striking and seductive, but being seduced by art, by propaganda is something that I'm also trying to encourage people to be a little less susceptible to, and a little more sensitive to how they're manipulated by images and slogans. So, I mean you nailed it, there's a duality, a yin and a yang, to the stuff.

It's like there's some people that say, "I just won't watch TV because it's all going to soften your brain and turn you into a mindless consumer." Well you know I can watch TV, I can watch Dexter and then I can watch CNN, and still be informed, and I can be entertained and not be turned into a mindless consumer. I think that these very black and white ways of looking at things aren't really healthy. So with a lot of my work, the work sort of participates in what it critiques.

NP: It's interesting that you talk about how you're participating in what you critique, 'cause in your previous book, Obey: Supply & Demand, you liken commercial billboards to graffiti, and question how one can be considered vandalism when the other is not. That's something that I relate too, since I think corporations have turned much of America's land and cityscapes into one giant eyesore.

SF: Well, yeah. So much of it is semantics and spin doctoring. People become very conditioned to accepting things that have an economic or commercial justification. With something that's categorized as illegal, street art, graffiti, versus legal billboards, the analysis seems to stop there on a very superficial level. So in trying to get people to see, whether it's paid for or not paid for, if one is an eyesore, the other should be considered an eyesore, and just raise these issues.

People think that I'm trying to say that capitalism is bad, or that all corporations are bad, it's not that it's that. There's some hypocrisy that needs to be looked at, but it doesn't mean that I want to rid the world of capitalism. I make T-shits and I make posters, and I sell stuff. I also would hope that somebody that buys my stuff would buy it because they like it, not because they're a consumer zombie that has been hypnotized by my work into buying it, and it's not something they actually want for themselves. These things can coexist right?

NP: Well you illustrate that very point in your Two Side of Capitalism dollar bill series, which you say, "demonstrate both the positive and negative aspects of capitalism." However I see far more of the negative in your work. Is it hard for you to find the positive?

SF: It has been under Bush. And I think that just my background; I grew up in South Carolina, and my parents were very conservative and we went to church every weekend. I went to a school where you had to wear a coat and tie, and I was unhappy and mean to other kids and sadistic. I had no idea why. Then I discovered punk rock and skateboarding, and realized that you didn't have to be a jock, you didn't have wear polo shirts everyday and be a conformist.

I mean it's such a clich, it sounds so pathetic...But my mom was head cheerleader and my dad was head captain of the football team, and I knew nothing else. I was very unhappy but I didn't know why. When I got into skateboarding and punk rock, those cultures were like: "Question the dominant paradigm. Question the mainstream. Don't be a mindless sheep." And I think that being suspicious was ingrained in me as a positive thing. It was better to be suspicious than submissive, and so, especially under Bush I think that there's been a lot of stuff to be negative about. But I just made this Obama image it's pretty positive. There's something to be positive about so I made something positive...

I'm actually in a phase right now where I don't know really what I'm going to be making my new body of work about once Obama takes office. There's still going to be some issues that I'm concerned with that I can make art about. I'm worried about the environment, global warming I think is a real big problem. That's going to be there, and there's always going to be abuses of authority, whether Obama's in office or not.

But a lot of the images I've been making have been about a systemic abuse of power, and I'm going to be cautious about making images that suggest that's what I feel is going on until I've given Obama a chance. I'm not a hater just for the sake of being a hater like a lot of people are. I'd love it if the government functioned properly, and I didn't have to make stuff that criticized the government.

NP: Much of your work shows the flipside of American mythology. Do you think the phrase, "Land of the free and the home of the brave," now serves as an empty marketing slogan at best, and propaganda used to control us at worst.

SF: Absolutely and the paradigm shift away from that that might be possible. I'm cautiously optimistic...For me it's a very, very sensitive time right now. Because I don't want to look like I've been brainwashed and I'm going to be 100% complicit with everything that's going on just because Obama's the president, but at the same time I think it's much easier for negativity to flourish. I kind of want to see what happens to see what topics I really need to make art about.

NP: The image of the woman with a brush and a gun (Revolutionary Woman with Brush), which has a flower in the barrel, is particularly poignant, since, to me, it shows the choices of expression we all have in fighting for the things we want. You have a lot of Middle Eastern imagery in the E Pluribus Venom collection. Obviously, these are sensitive times, but talk a little about that.

SF: What's going on in the Middle East or what went on in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, those people are just people, they're not all good or all bad. They've got a little of both. The way all Vietnamese people were looked at as, women and children might be seditionaries, they can't be trusted. There were so many civilians that were killed. Same thing in Iraq; all Arabs are fanatical Muslim potential terrorists who are not to be trusted. One of my feelings is that fear is what drives a lot of inhumanity...

So I'm just trying to make some work that shows the humanity, and that maybe there's a choice not to use a weapon the flower and the gun. Or that the use of a weapon is sometimes a situation that people are forced into, they don't have much of a choice. Or that they're actually picking up a weapon to correct an injustice rather than to perpetuate one.

NP: And one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. The image of Obama, like much of your work, builds on images of black power and struggle from Emory Douglas and The Black Panther newspaper. In the 1960's these images were associated with people who were regarded by many as domestic terrorists, and you've turned that imagery on its head and helped elect a president with similar visuals.

SF: I think the Obama image is a triumph, in that, well, I think Obama's going to be a great president so there's the triumph there. That's the basic thing I was trying to achieve and that's the number one most important aspect of it. But in terms of people being willing to embrace an image even if the historical context of the style might be something that opponents of the image would try and spin as sinister. To me the true function of the image, to make people curious about Obama and create an icon that was compelling, was something that a lot of people responded to. They saw through the attempts to say that the image looked like communist propaganda or, the one Los Angeles Times woman called it "third world dictator" and "idol worship."

The word propaganda has a sinister connotation, but the real definition of propaganda's just "images and words used to influence." And influence can be positive or negative. With the way I felt about Obama, if an image actually made someone go to Obama's website or watch him give a talk, it's him himself that's going to compel people not the image. The image then though becomes a symbol of people saying like, "I dig the guy. I believe in him." It's a very easy thing to replicate and symbolize. And there's a big difference in that happening in a grass roots way and that being a systematically government implemented image that's forced on people. There's a huge difference between Lenin or Mao and my Obama image.

People ask me, "Well if the U.S. government asked you to do a portrait and that was going to be how they were going to use it, would you do it?" And I say, "Well, no, because I'd be a little suspicious of how it was going to be used." With the Obama image, I'm the one that set it in motion how it was going to be disseminated and put up on the streets. And there was this people's movement, this grass roots movement vibe to it that I think was really important.

But you know I like the Black Panthers, their ideas. I mean not everything about some of the violent aspects of it, but just the idea that they didn't feel like black people in Oakland were getting a fair deal and they set up their own crossing guards, their own breakfasts and school lunches, various other programs that they thought were a part of what the government should be taking care of. They would police the police whom they thought were harassing them. To me that's a very positive way to take matters into your own hands, and if you've got to do it yourself, do it yourself.

So the Obama thing, even though the Black Panthers were vilified, the Obama thing does have parallels to that because I wasn't hired by the Obama campaign to do that image, I just did it because I though he would be the best guy for president, and a lot of other people agreed and it just spread virally.

NP: It became almost an open source art project. You collaborated with other artists and musicians and it became this viral internet phenomenon.

SF: Yes, a lot of other people made images. There was an artist from Chicago named Ray Noland who had done that Go Tell Moma (To Vote For Obama) website, and he'd been doing some images. But I think it was because of my history that when I made my Obama image it really encouraged a lot of other people to go ahead and start making images. The thing that was unique about that was a lot of it was coming form a community that usually would never endorse a mainstream politician.

NP: So how did this all come about. Because in your next book you actually reprint a letter from Obama thanking you for your campaign art. What was your relationship with the campaign once the image was out there?

SF: I guess about about two and a half weeks before Super Tuesday I made the original image and started putting them up around L.A. I also, of course, posted on my website. Then a lot of other websites picked up on it, and news sites and blogs posted about it. A lot of people from Obama's campaign started using my image as their email signature or their MySpace or their Facebook [image], and then the Obama campaign hit me up and said, "Wow! This image has already caught on like crazy. Would you be willing to do an illustration for us if we gave you some photos to work from, and it'd be something that we could use officially for the campaign?" That was how my relationship with them started. I had no relationship with them prior to that.

I donated an image to them, which they used. It was the one that said "Change" underneath it. And then later on I did another one that said "Vote" underneath it, that had Obama smiling. But the image that I continued to put out there myself, they couldn't have any affiliation with it because it was being perpetuated illegally in a lot of ways, and so I just continued to do that on my own without any coordination with them, and that was the "Hope" image.

By the election I had made three hundred thousand of those posters and half a million stickers, a lot of T-shirts, done a lot of billboards, and large painted-in mural installations in different cities. It was all done grass roots and it was just funded by selling some posters and reinvesting the money. I did a couple of art pieces for some bigwigs; Russell Simmons commissioned an art piece and this guy from Universal Pictures got an art piece. I just put all that money back into making more stuff, so I didn't keep any of the Obama money.

NP: You've said in your book that, "People should not submit to any attempt to herd and manipulate them," but in your own work you've often exploited visual psychology. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, what psychological traits did you exploit in that Obama image?

SF: I think in the Obama image we the viewer are benefiting from several things. Obama had a relatively clean slate. A euphoric association with an image is definitely impossible if the person has a lot of negative baggage already; He didn't have that...

I think also that he seems wise in the image, or to have some sort of vision. I think that there are things that people respond to in a very intuitive way confidence I think is important. People definitely respond to conviction, but the problem with that is if the conviction isn't justified. George Bush, I think had conviction about Iraq and he was completely wrong about it, there's a danger there.

Just turning someone into an icon, into a graphic icon, I think psychologically makes the viewer think that this person has already achieved a level of significance that would be something that maybe they as a viewer should be aware of, so that therefore they become curious. My reasons for wanting to know who Che Guevara was or Lenin or Mao, or Sid Vicious, who I saw on T-shirts before I listened to the Sex Pistols for that matter, was because this person had been a common icon and treated as such graphically; There must be a reason, they must have achieved a level of importance and status, and, whether that be for good or bad reasons, I should find out [why].

I think making a graphic illustration of someone achieves that. There's examples in my work where I've done that intentionally to manipulate. There's that "Nubian" series that I did. I've got Angela Davis and Jesse Jackson in that series, but then there's also people from 70s haircut books that are nobody important, and everyone assumes, "Oh, is that Che?" or "Is that Huey Newton?" because they're treated in that way and that's a natural assumption.

NP: Well you definitely made Obama look like a visionary. Using that Black Panther imagery, I mean back in the 1960s Martin Luther King was viewed by many as a nuisance at best and a criminal at worst but now he's seen as a visionary, and it's a testament to how far we've come that such imagery is now associated with our president. I mean what you've actually done, whether your realize it or not, is history changing. When future generations look back at such imagery, they'll now associate it with hope rather than oppression. It's like you've changed the meaning of a word in our visual vocabulary.

SF: I hope so. But what I also fear; I've already been hit up by a bunch of people to make this political poster or that political poster, because people really want to capitalize on what that image achieved. But I won't do it because Obama was a really special case.

But to get back to what you're saying, what a lot of my work that used the propaganda aesthetic was actually about, you really just nailed it. If my work which was actually benevolent, in my opinion, was packaged in something sinister then hopefully the viewer would realize that conversely there were many things out there that are packaged as benevolent but the content is sinister. Whether it's fast food advertising or whatever miracle cure products, there's plenty shitty stuff out there that's packaged in pleasing Americana, almost in a way where as a consumer if you were to question or reject the advertising or the product it'd be like un-American to do so. What I'm hoping is people question that stuff.

And now, what you're saying, which I think is exciting, is that I created an image that hopefully will revise a little of the misconceptions of a lot of what I would consider these people's movements propaganda pieces, like the Black Panther stuff, that people would have an irrational fear of, and make them not so afraid of that aesthetic. But now that aesthetic is ripe for exploitation. [laughs]

NP: In defending yourself against those who say a white artist has no business using black imagery in his work, you've said that, "Distrust of those who have oppressed is only natural, but intentional isolation only fuels racial tension." I really agree with that statement, and it saddens me how segregated America's black and white communities still are decades after the laws that drove us apart were repealed. How do you think and hope Obama might bridge the divide?

SF: Well I think that the great thing about Obama for racial issues is that he's shattered a ceiling. I think there are genuine examples of racism out there, and then there's people who hold themselves back because they don't feel like something's possible. This isn't just [about] black people that think that aspiring to do a certain thing might not be possible for someone that's not white it's true for people that come from every gender, race, walk of life.

I feel that a lot of the time people's fear of what they could or couldn't accomplish keeps them from trying, and I think that now there is an example of someone from the black community who's made it all the way to the presidency of the United States, that's very encouraging, and I like that it really removes any justification for complacency.

Obama, he's just a great role model for everybody, not just for black people. The guy's led a stellar life thus far. What Obama says, not literally, metaphorically, how Obama does things and what he's achieved, it's not good for a black guy, it's good for anybody.

There's people that are going to be racist no matter what. People find things to distinguish themselves from others, and race just happens to be a really convenient way to do it. To me it's a sign that there's just a lot of people out there that are basically trying to find ways to separate themselves from others. Race or gender or religion are convenient ways to delineate people...This sort of, "I define myself by who I am, who others are, and who I'm not," is a mentality that just needs to be combated in general I think. It's a much bigger thing.

Source.


Shepard Fairey will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of his seminal Obey Giant campaign with the opening of his first solo museum show. The retrospective, which opens on February 6, 2009 at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA, will feature a collection of over 80 works. In addition, Fairey will create public art at sites around Boston. Click HERE for more info.