Giant steps

State of the Art

by Carly Carioli

Ten years ago this past summer, a Rhode Island School of Design student named Shepard Fairey drove to Boston and plastered the city's thoroughfares with a crudely fashioned sticker he'd designed featuring a drawing of a dead professional wrestler topped by the ominous/absurdist slogan "Andre the Giant Has a Posse." In a very short time, the original Giant stickers were joined by a host of knockoff sticker designs, posters, and spraypaint stencils, and a very odd advertising campaign had been launched (Fairey still calls it a campaign, though he may also have in mind the word's wartime connotation). Although Giant would eventually lead him to a career in graphic design, in the beginning Fairey wanted to remain anonymous. He wasn't a fan of the dead wrestling star -- in fact, he'd recognized Andre as a kitsch icon waiting to happen, as a receptacle for vast free association. So what he initiated was sort of an advertising campaign without a product. Eventually it became a campaign in which the advertising was itself the product, appropriating elements of graffiti art, punk flyering, skate fashion (which likes to appropriate corporate logos in the service of grassroots urban style), and corporate street promotion (which attempts to harness renegade urban style in the service of faux grassroots direct advertising).

These days Fairey, who returns to Boston after a long absence for a gallery show this weekend at Smash City on Newbury Street, is co-owner of a San Diego-based graphic-design company called Blk Mrkt, whose clients have included record labels, movie studios, Napster, and US Robotics, all looking to attract the attention of his rampantly cynical Giant generation. When Mountain Dew wanted to reposition itself in the youth market and tap into the extreme-sports crowd, it hired Fairey to redesign the logo and provide skate-punk pointers. But he's also continued to produce Giant stickers, posters, stencils, and T-shirts, and they've spawned various bootlegs and parodies, as if the campaign were a pop song. There was a surge of publicity for Fairey and Giant in the mid '90s, but things are quieter on the media front lately, and the word about Giant passes, much as it used to, from person to person.

"You can't really stay elite in the underground forever," Fairey explains over the phone from the Blk Mrkt offices. "As soon as something gets a little popular, the über-hip reject it, so my goal has been to stick to my art style and keep the integrity of that and let the thing have its own life and go where it goes. If there's a demand, I'm going to fill it. The funniest thing would be if Giant enjoyed major commercial success -- that's not a reflection of my goals and desires, but the purpose of this thing was that by sheer volume and osmosis an image would begin to be embraced by the mainstream."

Many attempts have been made, several by Fairey himself, to come up with a grand explanation of the Giant campaign. But they all come back to Andre's flabby, blank face: if there's a point, it's simply that images, like melodies, can get stuck in your head. Or planted there. This being an election year, the latest Giant campaign -- made to look like Soviet propaganda posters, with Andre's face overshadowed by the word "Obey" -- even carries a little political resonance.

"I don't think it's reached its peak," says Fairey. "I'm not bored with it yet either. For every generation that gets into it and then gets bored, there's always another crop of freshmen. It's self-sustaining. Now that I have more connections in Hollywood, it's grown in a lot of ways. There's bands that use it and movies where it get slipped in. It gets more mainstream exposure -- not like a goofy product [placement], it's more in the background -- but it's still got its subversive side. And I'm curious to see how far it can go."

Shepard Fairey exhibits artifacts from his Giant campaigns at Smash City, 304 Newbury Street, this Saturday, September 16, from 8 to 11 p.m. Call 536-0216.