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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, June 1, 2008

ART SCENE
Phenomenology

By William Booth
Washington Post

Hawaii news photo - The Honolulu Advertiser

Shepard Fairey covered a wall at Makiki Skate Park in November 2005 as part of a public art project. Fairey did a residency at The Contemporary Museum, and his art can still be seen about town.

ADVERTISER LIBRARY PHOTO | Nov. 18, 2005

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Hawaii news photo - The Honolulu Advertiser

Shepard Fairey wanted to make Obama posters that the cool cats would want. This is one of a series in support of Obama.

WILLIAM BOOTH | Washington Post

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When the street artist and guerrilla marketer Shepard Fairey got word from the Obama people that they would welcome his contribution to the campaign, he knew what he wanted to create: a phenomenon.

All political art is propaganda (that is the point), but most political posters are bland, forgettable, wallpaper, like Fred Thompson on an off day. Fairey wanted something more iconic — aspirational, inspirational — and cool. In other words, he wanted to make posters that the cool cats would want. The 2008 Democratic primary season equivalent of the Che poster (with all that implies). More Mao, more right now. The kind of poster that might make its way onto dorm room walls of fanboys. The kind of poster that might sell on eBay, as a signed Fairey Obama recently did, for $5,900. He wanted his posters to go viral.

"I wanted strong. I wanted wise, but not intimidating," Fairey says of the look for his Obamas. The agitprop pop art has become a must-have accessory among a certain subset of the candidate's supporters, who have gobbled up more than 80,000 of Fairey's posters and 150,000 postcard-size stickers since Super Tuesday.

Who is this Shepard Fairey? He is a skate punk — with a secretary. A CEO in Puma sneakers. The rebel who did Pepsi ads. In Honolulu, his handiwork graces the wall of NextDoor in Chinatown, and he was an artist in residence at The Contemporary Museum in 2005.

Since 1989, during his student days at the Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey has been slapping stickers and pasting posters depicting the face of Andre the Giant, the deceased French actor and professional wrestler, on every available surface, legal and not. Fairey has spent two decades shimmying up lampposts and over chain-link fences in a tenacious public art enterprise, irony performed on a landscape scale. Thousands of his Andre stickers include the word "OBEY" in bold lettering. What are we dealing with here? Obey what? Obey whom? A giant from France? Aha. You have cracked the code. It is reverse psychology. (Pssst! Don't obey.)

You see, in his 1990 manifesto, Fairey wrote that "the Giant sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as 'the process of letting things manifest themselves.' Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they become muted by abstract observation."

We're talking German philosopher and author of "Being and Time" Martin Heidegger? The very same. "The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker," Fairey wrote. Unless that person is what Fairey describes as "the paranoid or conservative viewer," who becomes confused and annoyed, "considering them eyesores and acts of petty vandalism, which is ironic considering the number of commercial graphic images everyone in American society is assaulted with daily."

His pro bono Obey Giant campaign created a niche market for Fairey's graphic designs — for movie ads ("Walk the Line"), album covers (Led Zeppelin's "Mothership" compilation) and the brown spirits (Dewars Scotch).

At his new, plywood-floored offices at Studio One, in L.A.'s Echo Park neighborhood, Fairey appears in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. He's 38 and boyishly handsome. He confesses he suffers from a Peter Pan complex. He has just flown in from New York, where he DJ'd at the Guggenheim Museum.

Fairey has done his share of political art in the past. He did posters for Ralph Nader in 2000. In 2004, he did George W. Bush, depicting the president as a grinning vampire. In the weeks before Super Tuesday 2008, "I put out the word I wanted to do something for Obama," explains Fairey, through Yosi Sergant, a plugged-in "early adopter" publicist in Los Angeles who knew prominent Democrats in the Obama circle. The Obama people, somewhat to his surprise, said go ahead.

To create his Obama poster (which he did in less than a week), Fairey grabbed a news photograph of the candidate off the Internet.

He sought an Obama that looked presidential. "He is gazing off into the future, saying, 'I can guide you,' " is how Fairey reads the image. The artist then simplified the lines and geometry, employing a red, white and blue patriotic palette. He uses a lot of red along with boldface words: PROGRESS or HOPE or CHANGE.

"There's an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image," wrote op-ed columnist Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times, "a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; (b) a controversial American figure who's been assassinated; or (c) one of those people from a Warhol silkscreen that you don't recognize but assume to be important in an abstruse way."

Fairey rummages around on his desk and produces a letter from Obama himself. "Dear Shepard," the candidate writes. "I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. The political messages involved in your work have encouraged Americans to believe they can help change the status quo. ..."

Messages. Images. Effect. Someone understands phenomenology. And the thing about stop signs? "He's kind of endorsing graffiti," Fairey says, "isn't he?"

He has more Obama art in the works.