RT@Sean Howe: Jonathan Lethem on Shepard Fairey, very relevant to Beastie Boys/Goldieblox case: In the early nineties, first in Providence, Rhode Island, and then up and down the eastern seaboard, thousands of paper, and later vinyl, stickers began proliferating in the urban commercial-detritus/graffiti collage of lampposts, subway entrances, and construction-site billboards. The stickers presented a blunt little graphic, a visage of testosteroid hostility, recognizable to some as the masked face of the professional wrestler Andre the Giant, accompanied by various slogans—most often ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE. After a 1994 lawsuit denied use of the wrestler’s name, the reworked stickers took up a They Live theme: the wrestler’s face was now accompanied by the single command OBEY. The sticker campaign was eventually credited to the street artist Shepard Fairey, who’d created them with his schoolmates while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Fairey’s famous now as a lawsuit-stricken imagery poacher, creator of the iconic Barack Obama CHANGE poster; he’s as mediocre a poster boy for “appropriation aesthetics” as 2 Live Crew, whose sample of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” thrust them into the Open Source vanguard, such as it was, in 1989. Fairey’s stickers could be seen as a guerrilla-subliminal ad campaign for They Live, reinscribing the film’s motif of icons of persuasion hidden in plain sight: our overlord’s commands are visible if you know where to look. And we, the underground, make ourselves known to one another by outlawed modes: pirate broadcasts, signal jamming, samizdat pamphlets, graffiti. (Fairey’s They Live reference also puns on Roddy Piper’s career as a pro wrestler.)
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 01:12:00 +0000
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