The Art of Shepard Fairey: Changing Institutions of Display and the Social Lives of Images |
There are a lot of illustrators and painters who do beautiful work that I either don't have the skill or the patience to do. But you don't have to be God's gift to art to be effective. My technique is not that noteworthy. Anybody can steal images and refine them with a little practice. But for me, it's all about impact, and an illustration that's well-crafted but doesn't capture somebody's attention is not serving its purpose.- Shepard Fairey as qtd. in "He Might Be Giant," Michael Dooley (49)
Shepard Fairey is the artist responsible for one of the most iconic
images in recent history, Obama Hope, but he began his art career in
1989 when, while attending the Rhode Island School of Design, he created
a sticker, "Andre the Giant has a Posse," which he intended to poke fun
at his skateboarding buddies "who [travelled] in cliques called posses
and unthinkingly [decorated] their boards with corporate logos" (Dooley,
42). The sticker campaign transcended its original purpose by not only
capturing the attention of a wider audience due to its dissemination
throughout the country, but also through inexorably exerting an
influence on Fairey's notions of the scope and range of his career in
art. After the owners of Andre the Giant's likeness threatened to sue
Fairey for violation of intellectual property rights, Fairey created the
now iconic "OBEY Giant," which altered the original image by zooming in
on the face, visibly enhancing it and adding the word "OBEY" in white
text on a red strip running across the bottom of the image. The wide
dissemination of the "OBEY Giant" image was accomplished not only by
fans of the image, but also through Fairey's use of street art
techniques to (illegally) post the image on the empty outside walls of
buildings, street signs and all manner of other structures and surfaces,
both in the United States and around the rest of the world. Sarah Valdez
characterized the dissemination of "OBEY Giant" in "Thrashers and
Taggers," saying, "...Fairey's giant-painting prank has mushroomed into
what now constitutes an industry - an influential, oft-copied anti-brand
without a product" (59). Thus, several different visual methodologies,
all found in Gillian Rose's book Visual Methodologies, will be used to
interpret Fairey's images in ways which acknowledge the existence of
authorial intent and its potential to shape the way an image is
perceived, embrace the social lives of images and integrate the concepts
of informed readings and societal constructs in their interpretation of
visual materials. One of the visual methodologies to be utilized in
interpreting Fairey's designs will analyze a discourse of his images in
terms of "their production by, and their reiteration of, particular
institutions and their practices, and their production of particular
human subjects" (Rose 172).
In terms of Fairey's images, discourse
analysis II, the name that will be used to refer to this type of
interpretation, is concerned with the ways in which an institution and
its derivatives affect the production of an image and the ways in which
visual materials espouse some of the aspects of the institution. Also
inside discourse analysis II is the interpretation of how the
institution and the image combine, or not, to produce a particular human
subject. For this analysis, Fairey's OBEY sticker campaign (included
within this is the "Andre the Giant has a Posse" sticker campaign, from
which OBEY was derived) and Obama Hope will be analyzed by examining the
street art tactics utilized by Fairey in contrast to other places where
these images have been displayed, attempting to emphasize Kevin Lynch's
idea, from his book What Time Is This Place?, "that the relation of
environmental and social change is loosely coupled in both directions"
(Lynch 222). This seems to be very important when considering Fairey's
interest in displaying his works as street art, where environmental
change is amplified in intensity and social change is more likely to
occur, due to the image's widespread availability to people of all
races, color, creed and sexual identity.
Another methodology that will be discussed is that of the anthropological approach to interpreting images. Using an anthropological approach when interpreting visual materials means to observe the social lives of visual objects where "social relations depend in large part on objects; and objects get exchanged (and made, of course) in the context of social relations" (Rose 217). In the anthropological approach, visual objects are shown to have social lives all their own, which are formed through their interaction with different contexts, which includes both people and the different spaces in which the image has travelled. The anthropological approach will also utilize the OBEY sticker campaign and the "Andre the Giant has a Posse" campaign in its interpretation. This analysis will draw upon Lily Shirvanee's term, locative media, which she uses in her work, "Locative Viscosity: Traces of Social History in Public Spaces." |
May 4, 2009 [Home] [Foucauldian Discourse Analysis] [The Social Lives of Images] [Critique of Phenomenology] [Works Cited] [Image Sources]
a class taught by Bob Bednar in the Communication Studies Department at Southwestern University
|