INCHOATE THOUGHTS
“SHEPARD FAIREY:
SUPPLY AND DEMAND”
Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston, Massachusetts
February 6 - August 16, 2009
Shepard Fairey is a clean-cut, upstanding, all-American guy. He
remains true to skateboard culture and “bombing,” plastering his stickers and
wheat-pasting his posters in the urban streetscape, so his probity may seem
hard to believe. After all, on the very day that this exhibition opened—his
first at a museum—he was arrested by Boston police for vandalism.
For all the urgency and earnestness of his imagery—punk
musicians, sixties peace activists, Black Power advocates, Third World
revolutionaries—his is a visual repertory of nostalgia, more quaint than
cutting. Is this because of his schematic graphic technique, unquestionably of
a very high order, that relies on contrasts within a limited palette? Is this
because the artworks—some stenciled on wood achieving an instant craquelure,
others on collaged newsprint, yet others on discontinued wallpaper—look
prematurely aged, incorporating an appearance of venerable deterioration within
their contemporary substance? Whatever the answer, the results exemplify an
accelerated trajectory from protest against tangible wrongs—Greetings from Iraq (2006) reads, “Enjoy
a cheap holiday in other people’s misery”—through cooption to
commercialization, and aestheticization.
Fairey manipulates this progression masterfully on every scale
from sticker to vast mural, contriving poster signifiers of propaganda and
advertising with empty referents that, at their best, pinpoint the mechanisms
of pictorial persuasion. His strategy is opaquely solipsistic, associating his
ostensible subjects with repeated emblems of his own Fairey brand, such as
“OBEY,” and a stylized derivation of wrestler Andre the Giant’s face that he
stenciled early in his career, and which is now part of his personal mythology.
In his reworking of Alberto Korda’s familiar 1960 photograph of Che Guevera (Gigante, 1997), the Obey Giant icon
appears in place of the expected badge on the revolutionary’s beret. Fairey
thus creates what he terms “paradoxes that help people question a charismatic
order,” membership of which he himself is acquiring by promoting his own
identity, the true paradox of Fairey’s art.
The large-scale presentation by the ICA of Fairey’s art as a
crossover from the street to the museum, and its further gloss as also spanning
the commercial world, ignores the status of such a claim as itself nostalgic
for a time when art was “pure.” There are no contradictions in reconciling
these practices for Fairey, for he is a profoundly conservative American
individualist. “If you work hard and are industrious, you can create your own
Utopian way of doing things under capitalism,” he stated. But Utopia is a
social, not an individual, concept. Fairey may protest a wide variety of
abuses, as in Rise Above Cop (2007)
in which one of America’s finest, baton raised, addresses the viewer, “I’m
gonna kick your ass and get away with it,” but nowhere does he propose social
means of redress, only individual grievance.
In this setting, his most famous work, thanks to the Internet, Obama HOPE (2008), has already acquired
an air of distant longing. It obeys the rule that governs this entire
impressive body of work: that the rate of cooption of the subversive visual
gesture has accelerated so much that it is hard pressed to generate more than
nostalgia.