Obey Giant

Shepard Fairey has exploited a notion

that art can be anywhere

to compete with advertising,

so I don't consider it art.

Well, the guy is famous for being a plagiarist.

It's vandalism.

Shepard Fairey is pillaging the work

of important political and cultural movements.

Shepard is a genius.

His artistic work overshadowed

by his alleged criminal activity.

He employs cut and paste as his artwork.

And at the end of the day, it's a very empty experience.

I think he's our generation's Warhol.

His work is too obvious.

He's reinvented a political image

for today's world.

A wheatpaste artist is not to be taken seriously.

The more famous he got in the art world,

the less fans he had.

He created an icon.

From the very beginning when

he was doing Andre the Giant,

the joke was on the public.

It meant nothing.

Not only is Shepard Fairey not an artist,

he's about the furthest thing from art there is.

Things are not all great in the world,

and it's not all the Carpenters

and love songs and Wings.

I grew up in the '70s,

and when I felt frustrated,

there was nothing that seemed like

the creative analogue to that.

But when I discovered punk rock,

the Sex Pistols talking about frustration,

the Clash talking about frustration,

Black Flag, very angry music.

But they also were not just angry

for the sake of being angry.

A lot of it was critiquing

the problem of conformity,

oppression,

corruption of power.

And all these things connected with me

because I grew up

in a very, very conformist town

at a conformist school,

and I was--I was frustrated.

Everything that I felt like wasn't being addressed

in other parts of the world and other parts of my life,

punk rock addressed.

Skateboarding too.

Skateboarding was about

creative reuse of the landscape

that was intended for other things,

and it's aggressive.

I was inspired by bands putting up flyers.

I was inspired by graffiti.

Graffiti culture is all about lettering

and putting your name up.

Colors, designs, style.

-Technical, advanced. -Just get loose.

Get loose, and when they see you got a vicious style,

they be wanting to get loose about it, you know,

and that's what keep it going.

And that's what sparks graffiti.

Right.

The technique of graffiti,

people going out

and doing daring locations anonymously,

and doing it for the sake of saying, "I exist,"

I kind of loved that.

I'm looking for the graffiti artists.

We are all graffiti artists.

Being from South Carolina

and watching movies like Breakin'

and Beat Street,

my assumption ignorantly was

that I had to be black or Latino

and be in a crew

where I'd practice in a black book

until some peer said

that I was ready to hit the streets.

You know, it's like an art gang.

To me, street art is any art that's done in public,

but what it's really about is democratizing art,

making art accessible,

saying that there's room for more in public space

than just commercial advertising

and government signage.

Where you get up,

how much you get up,

how daring the placement is,

and just the coverage, that's everything,

especially pre-internet,

because the credit you're getting

within that world

is based on people seeing

the different examples firsthand.

Some giant posters.

Andre the Giant.

Here we have this week on Piper's Pit, of course,

Andre the Giant,

supposedly the biggest man in the world ever.

It's a pleasure to have you.

Where are you from, Andre?

I'm sorry, do you speak English?

Where--Andre, where do you come from?

None of your business.

The first thing I ever did as my own street art

is the Andre the Giant Has a Posse stickers.

I worked at a skate shop

the summer after my freshman year at RISD,

and I was putting up some of the stickers

of some of the brands I liked,

because I got the stickers free at the store.

And I was trying to teach a friend

how to make stencils,

so I looked through the newspaper

and saw this picture of Andre the Giant

and said, "Why don't you make a stencil of this?"

He said, "No way, I'm not gonna do that, it's stupid."

And I said, "What are you talking about?

Andre's posse is taking over,"

which was just a spontaneous joke.

We were listening to a lot of hip hop--

Ice-T, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, NWA--

and they all used the word "posse."

I'm living large as possible

Posse unstoppable

It's vividly optical

Listen, you'll see 'em sometimes I'll be 'em

Cops, critics, and punks

never ever want to see me in power

And I made a few stickers just as a joke.

Only a few friends knew about it.

Put some up at some skate spots.

I had a fake ID so I put some up in some clubs.

Put some on some street signs.

And then I noticed that, you know,

I was out at a party and I saw a guy

with one stuck to the front of a plain baseball cap,

and I could see paint chips at the edge,

so he'd clearly peeled it off something

and stuck it to the hat.

And, you know, I asked,

"Hey, what's up with that Andre thing?"

He was like, "I don't know, you know,

I saw it on the street, I thought it was fresh."

And I realized very quickly

that even though the subject was totally silly

that it was spreading

in an underground, mysterious way.

It impacted people.

What the hell do you think you're doing?

And I knew that when I'd seen things

like the Bob Dobbs Church of the SubGenius,

the '50s guy with the pipe,

I was like, "What is that thing?

What's the story behind that thing?

I want to know, I want to get to the bottom of this."

I just had a feeling

that it would be likeminded people

perpetuating it,

and I think that that was the effect

that my Andre sticker had on other people.

Not all of them.

There's a huge range of reactions.

I remember seeing somebody writing very small

in the negative space in ballpoint pen on one:

"Nazi shit."

Any painter, any poet,

any musician sets a trap for your attention.

That is the nature of art.

The great thing about Andre the Giant Has a Posse

is that it somehow doesn't have to mean anything

and it's still very cool.

It must be a cult, it's deviant.

There's no--there's no overt purpose.

By proclaiming this posse,

it was talking about skate posses, right,

this idea that, like, you know,

kids form tribal communities

in music and art and skateboarding, whatever.

But it was also talking about how,

on a mass cultural level,

that we are unconsciously aligning ourselves

with forces all the time.

This is my propaganda.

See, a lot of people use models for propaganda.

You associate the product

with an attractive person,

and therefore that makes it desirable.

I don't want to be as straightforward as that.

One time I was in the grocery store

behind a couple,

and the girl said,

"Hey, have you seen that Andre the Giant sticker?"

And the guy's like, "Yeah, I've seen that."