UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Date:______
I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:
It is entitled:
This work and its defense approved by:
Chair: ______
Fun with Vandalism: The Illegal Street Art of Shepard Fairey and Banksy
A thesis completed with Honors submitted to the
Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati
in candidacy for the degree of Master of Arts
in the Department of Art History of the School of Art of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning
May 2006
By Sarah Stephens
B.A., University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, 2002
Committee Chair: Kimberly Paice, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
“Fun with Vandalism: The Illegal Street Art of Shepard Fairey and Banksy”
by Sarah Stephens
“Street art” is a rather broad term encompassing a wide range of contemporary
artistic practices and styles. This thesis addresses the work of two loosely classified
“graffiti” artists, Shepard Fairey and Banksy, with a specific focus on the illegal nature of their artwork. Chapter one discusses previous artistic movements which serve as predecessors and inspiration to Fairey and Banksy, such as New York City’s graffiti boom of the 1970s, the décollage affichiste movement in postwar Europe, the Situationist
International movement, and practices of institutional critique. The second and third chapters discuss Fairey’s OBEY campaign via his wheat paste posters and stickers, and
Banksy’s stencil graffiti and museum interventions. By examining such pieces, I aim to show how their works constitute practices of institutional critique, which thereby represent a rejection of dominant cultural forces.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank my friends at Powerhouse Factories, Inc. for introducing me to the work of Shepard Fairey and Banksy. Without them, this thesis never would have materialized. Thank you especially to Pat Jones for lending me his personal archive of information on Fairey, and to Mike Amann for instilling in me a healthy obsession with Banksy. I also send a HUGE thank you to Shepard Fairey who took more time than I could have hoped for out of his day to allow me to interview him at his office in Los Angeles. He and his staff were incredibly gracious, helpful, and supportive.
In regards to transforming this thesis from a mere interest into a viable topic of scholarly research, I owe everything to my thesis advisor, Kim Paice. Her knowledge and constant support have guided me every step of the way in this creative process. She has been an exceptional advisor and mentor to me. I would also like to thank Miki
Hirayama and Matt Distel for serving on my thesis committee and offering so much helpful advice and constructive criticism. I would like to thank my family and friends, and especially Rob, for putting up with the unfortunate insanity that has accompanied writing this thesis. I love you all and thank you so much for believing in me when I did not, and for your ceaseless encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank my classmates, who I have so much respect and admiration for. Thank you for your criticism, advice, and mental support. I feel very fortunate to have shared this experience with all of you, and wish you all best of luck in the future!
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Roots 8
Chapter Two: OBEY 21
Chapter Three: Banksy 34
Conclusion 46
Bibliography 51
Illustrations 55
vi Illustrations∗
Figure
1. Shepard Fairey, OBEY GIANT sticker and/or wheat paste poster, first printed ca. 1995. Available from www.obeygiant.com. Accessed 12 November 2005.
2. Banksy, museum installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005. Published in Wall and Piece.
3. Banksy, girl with a gas mask stencil graffiti in Barcelona, 2003. Published in Wall and Piece.
4. Amaze, Twist, and Frost tagging tunnels in San Francisco, 1998. Photo by Cheryl Dunn. Published in Beautiful Losers
5. Graffiti by Futura, ca. early 1980s. Photo by Henry Chalfant. Published in Beautiful Losers.
6. Mimmo Rotella, Cinemascope, 1962. Decollage, 173 x 133 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany.
7. Banksy, untitled, n.d. Possible screen print. Published in Wall and Piece.
8. Hans Haacke, Shapolski et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971. 142 photos with data sheets, 2 maps, 6 charts, slide excerpts. Published in Art Since 1900.
9. Hans Haacke, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974 (detail). 7 panels, each 50cm x 61cm, brass frames (central panel shown). Published in Art Since 1900.
10. Shepard Fairey, street installation in Cincinnati, Ohio, Calhoun Ave., 2004. Wheat paste posters. Photograph by author.
11. Shephard Fairey, original style “Andre the Giant has a Posse” sticker, first printed in 1989. Ink on paper or vinyl. Available from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/75/AndreTheGiantSticker.gif. Accessed 1 December 2005.
∗ For most of Fairey and Banksy’s works I have not included dimension information, as it does not seem to be a common practice in the field. All graffiti works are presumably executed with aerosol paint as the medium. Additionally, I have only included photographer credits and/or location when they are specifically mentioned in my sources.
vii
12. Shepard Fairey, OBEY GIANT sticker and/or wheat paste poster, first printed ca. 1995. Available from www.obeygiant.com. Accessed 12 November 2005.
13. Shepard Fairey, Cianci billboard takeover, Providence, RI, 1991. Wheat paste posters. Available from http://www.impossiblefunky.com/archives/issue_6/6_g.asp?IshNum=6. Accessed 12 November 2005.
14. Shepard Fairey, AG Soda, ca. 1994-1995. Ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
15. Shepard Fairey, Sprite “OBEY” campaign takeover, n.d.. Wheat paste posters. Published in Post No Bills.
16. Shepard Fairey, Absolute Vodka billboard takeover, n.d. Wheat paste posters. Published in Post No Bills.
17. Banksy, stencil graffiti marking, n.d. Published in Wall and Piece.
18. Banksy, Dead Rat with Spray Can installation in the Natural History Museum, London, 2004. Published in Wall and Piece.
19. Banksy, stencil graffiti on Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 2006. Available from http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/index.html. Accessed 28 February 2006.
20. Banksy, stencil graffiti marking, n.d. Available from http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/02.html#. Accessed 28 February 2006.
21. Banksy, Have a nice day stencil graffiti, Shoreditch, London, 2004. Published in Wall and Piece.
22. Banksy, Bomb-hugger stencil graffiti, n.d. Available from http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/03.html#. Accessed 21 January 2006.
23. Banksy, stencil graffiti marking, n.d. Published in Banging Your Head against a Brick Wall.
24. Banksy, stencil graffiti marking, n.d. Published in Wall and Piece.
25. Banksy, Camp, n.d. Possible screen print. Published in Wall and Piece.
viii 1
Introduction
A lot of people think that scuttling around stenciling images onto buildings in the middle of the night is the action of a sad, frustrated individual who can’t get attention or recognition any other way. They might be right, but I’ve done gallery shows and, if you’ve been hitting on people with all sorts of images in all sorts of places, they’re a real step backwards. Painting the streets means becoming an actual part of the city. It’s not a spectator sport. Banksy Quote taken from Stencil Graffiti by Tristan Manco1
Shepard Fairey (b. 1970) and the artist known simply as Banksy (b. 1974) are two
of the most well-known contemporary street artists practicing today. In addition to this
fact, however, they are also friends who have collaborated artistically on at least one
occasion up to the present day.2 In an interview I conducted with Shepard Fairey, he
revealed that the previous night he had helped Banksy execute several large-scale stencil
graffiti markings in Los Angeles.3 Through strategically selected public sites and
architectural facades, in addition to the unsanctioned use of museum space, both artists
illegally utilize public spaces as their own forums of expression. So why all this
rebellion? And, more specifically what does art making that transgresses the law mean?
These will be important questions that I hope to answer in this study. To this end, I will
examine the illegal art of both artists. My study will encompass works such as Fairey’s
OBEY campaign, initiated in Rhode Island in 1990 and continuing around the world today, and Banksy’s stencil graffiti works found in Europe, the United States, and the
Middle East, and institutional interventions in London, Paris and New York. I will
1 Tristan Manco, Stencil Graffiti (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 79.
2 Shepard Fairey, interview by author, tape recording, Los Angeles, CA, 13 February 2006.
3 Ibid. 2
discuss these practices as examples of institutional critique art in relation to the writings
of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Mike Davis, and Jeff Ferrell, thus demonstrating that the illegality of this art represents a rejection of dominant cultural forces, such as the sanctity of the museum and an unquestioning acceptance of capitalistic marketing
strategies.
In the first chapter, I will trace several of the roots and influences of the
subculture they work within, loosely classified as “street art.”4 This will entail an analysis of the predominantly inner-city practices of graffiti art in New York in the 1970s and 80s, continuing to the present day. In order to accomplish this, I will largely be drawing upon James Walmesley’s essay, “In the Beginning, There Was the Word,” from
the Beautiful Losers exhibition catalogue of 2004.5 Subsequently, I will provide a brief
summary of the décollage affichiste movement in postwar Europe, as explicated by
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in his essay, “From Detail to Fragment: Décollage Affichiste,” as
well as the Situationist International movement, begun in the 1960s and continuing into
the present day.6 And finally, referring to the art of Hans Haacke from the early 1970s, I
4 I use Dick Hebdige’s book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1979) as the source of the term “subculture.” However, one must first define “hegemony” to understand subculture. He defines hegemony as “a situation in which a provisional alliance of certain social groups can exert ‘total social authority’ over other subordinate groups … by ‘winning and shaping consent so that the power of the dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural’” (16). With this in mind, subculture therefore represents “interference in the orderly sequence,” and “a metaphor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ … and actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation” (90).
5 James Walmesley, “In the Beginning There Was the Word,” in Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture, eds. Aaron Rose and Christian Strike, 193-207 (New York: Iconoclast, in conjunction with D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, c2004).
6 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Detail to Fragment: Décollage Affichiste.” October 56 “High/Low: Art and Mass Culture” (Spring 1991): 98-110.
3
will outline historical practices that involve institutional critique, and how it remains
relevant to contemporary street art.
In the second chapter, I will offer an in-depth study of Shepard Fairey and a
specific portion of his oeuvre as subcultural production. Educated at the prestigious
Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey began his experimentations with the Obey Giant
sticker campaign in 1989 as an attempt to mock the cliquey skate posses of his
acquaintances. By heading this fictitious gang with the obtrusive face of a well-known
wrestler, Andre the Giant, he was subverting a contemporary cultural phenomenon
through the use of humor and absurdity (fig. 1). These graphically simplified, black and
white iconic images then evolved into a self-proclaimed “experiment in
phenomenology,” counter-advertising, and anti-corporate hegemony. Ironically, they
became wildly popular within the skater subculture – the same that he began this
experiment mocking. Today one can find his OBEY propaganda all over the world, from
Jim Morrison’s tombstone in Paris, to the streets of downtown Tokyo. Fairey owns his
own graphic design firm, has recently published a book documenting his sticker
campaign, Post No Bills (2002), and is featured in nearly every influential book dealing
with contemporary street artists.7 Additionally, he has exhibited his work in museums and galleries across the globe, and has been interviewed for numerous journals.
Recently, however, his work has come to be recognized by the institutional “art world” in
2004’s Beautiful Losers exhibition hosted by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati
and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
Similarly, Banksy, rumored to be from Bristol, England, who will be the focus of
my third and final chapter, has exhibited in a number of prestigious, world-famous
7 Shepard Fairey, Post No Bills (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2002). 4
institutions, such as the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the British
Museum in London. All of these “exhibitions” captured the attention and curiosity of the
international media because of the manner in which they came about. Instead of
displaying his works by invitation, he helps himself to his own wall space (fig. 2). For
example, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late March of 2005, he created a mock-up
oil panting of a 19th-century female aristocrat paradoxically adorned with a gas mask, and
hung it up directly on the museum walls in front of the visiting public. Thus, in museum
interventions such as this one, Banksy takes what are initially site-appropriate pieces
(such as an oil panting) and subverts the expected image by inserting an element of the
unexpected and even shocking (the gas mask). Yet previous to making such anti-
institutional demonstrations, Banksy was already a cult figure in England, and indeed
throughout much of Europe, for his iconic stencil graffiti pieces (fig. 3). To date he has
published four books documenting his cross-continent adventures in the art of the illegal.8
While the exhibition catalogue Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street
Culture, truly a decisive piece for the study of contemporary street art, places artists such as Fairey and Banksy within the graffiti subculture, it delves more into the history of how this genre came to be, rather than go into detail on these artists. The literature surrounding these two artists consists mainly of interviews in the case of Fairey, and newspaper reports in the case of Banksy. I was fortunate enough to interview Fairey myself in Los Angeles on February 13, 2006. In addition to their books, some of the most useful resources for finding information on both artists are their websites, which not
8 Banksy, Wall and Piece (London: Century, The Random House Group Limited, 2005), Cut It Out (Publisher location unknown: Weapons of Mass Distraction, 2005), Banging Your Head against a Brick Wall (Publisher location unknown: Weapons of Mass Distraction, 2003), Existencilism (Publisher location unknown: Weapons of Mass Distraction, 2002).
5
only list out of print articles and sell their artwork, but also serve as a forum for their own statements in regards to art-making and illegality, among other topics.9 In Banksy’s case,
his website is particularly useful as it seems to be the only forum where one is
“guaranteed” to find authentic statements from the artist.10 Indeed, for all the press and
recognition both artists have earned, there are virtually no scholarly assessments of their
works, nor are there studies dealing with the ramifications and meanings of the illegal art
making of Shepard Fairey and Banksy. I will address this absence by demonstrating how
and to what ends Fairey and Banksy embrace illegality in the production of art which
serves as institutional critique. In order to do so, I propose to use Michel Foucault’s
infamous and influential study Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, as a
theoretical guide.11 Originally published in 1975, Discipline and Punish mainly
examines the operations of power in society and its control over individuals. Foucault
discusses how the human sciences (such as psychiatry, criminology, and sociology)
create a regime of power – or discourse – that controls and describes human behavior in
terms of norms and deviance. He likewise entails how such divisions are institutionalized
and dispersed throughout society to create dichotomies between those who conform to
the law and those who do not. Following this methodology, I will claim that the illegal
art of Fairey and Banksy represents artistic reactions against the dominant cultural
9 Fairey’s website, www.obeygiant.com, is a particularly useful source of information for personal statements from the artist, as well as researching past articles and interviews, since many of his earlier interviews appear in smaller, independently-published magazines that are now out of print. Banksy’s website, www.banksy.co.uk, likewise lists several newspaper articles commenting on his endeavors and contains personal statements from the artist.
10 As I will discuss further in chapter three, in order to preserve his anonymity, Banksy has been known to send other people to do interviews claiming to be himself. Therefore, his books and website are virtually the only places one can assume he or she is encountering the artist’s authentic statements.
11 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1975. Reprint, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995).
6
presences of marketing, advertising and the institution of the art world, as represented by
the museum and market.
Additionally, I will utilize Mike Davis’ “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization
of Urban Space,” and Jeff Ferrell’s Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of
Criminality to show how the modern city aims to aggressively eradicate formerly-public
space, and how such policies are instigated and institutionalized by hegemony’s
“aesthetics of authority.”12 Therefore, I will show how street art critiques the construct
and mentality of the modern city by encouraging the public to realize the hierarchies and
power structures that create society’s “norms.”
The term “illegal” is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as
something “contrary to or forbidden by law.”13 Shepard Fairey and Banksy create art
which can be categorized as such due to the manner in which its placement transgresses
both the accepted rules of artistic exhibition and civic law. I am framing my argument around the illegal artistic productions of these two figures within a specific subculture because of the unique reactions such works incite in their audience. Happening upon an unexpected and, at times, unidentifiable image in a location it does not have permission to be, such as a stencil graffiti marking on the side of a building, tends to inspire quite a unique response in the viewer. Reactions may range from simple curiosity to anger at the transgression of the law, but either way, the public tends to react. In my thesis, I aim to explore further how these subcultural productions represent reactions against hegemony
12 Mike Davis, “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space,” in The Politics of Urban America: A Reader, eds. Dennis R. Judd and Paul P. Kantor (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, c1998), 317- 335; Jeff Ferrell, Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (New York: Garland, 1993).
13 The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Illegal.” 7 and their aspiration to interact with the viewer on a more intimate level than what is
“legally” sanctioned.
8
Chapter One: Roots
Whatever the terminology, the urban environment attracts artists of all persuasions – train-writers, paste-up artists, performance artists, poetic doodlers, muralists and protest artists – whose collective work adds up to a city-wide graffiti message board of art and ideas.14
For all the diverse manifestations of street art, one common thread is, in many situations,
its illegality. But what is the purpose of the illegal art of Fairey and Banksy, besides possibly the adrenaline rush associated with breaking the law? Is there even a broader purpose to consider or are all “graffiti” artists merely delinquent vandals? In order to answer these questions, I will trace former instances of illegal graffiti art, as well as several past artistic movements which bear connection with contemporary street art in an effort to show that the art of Fairey and Banksy does not merely represent instances of juvenile rebellion, but is indicative of more “traditional” motives of institutional critique.
In discussing the roots of contemporary street art, it is vital to address the urban graffiti movement by exploring the evolution of graffiti as seen in New York City in the early 1970s. These days, graffiti is more of a blanket term used to describe a mélange of different styles and types of street art, but most commonly is associated with the “hip hop” style of “tagging” that arose in New York and that was mostly associated with urban black culture. Thus it is important to discuss and clarify the urban graffiti movement in order to connect it to the contemporary street art of Shepard Fairey and
Banksy in its inherent similarities and differences.
In the essay, “In the Beginning There Was the Word” by James Walmesley, he begins his text by pointing out that graffiti has been a part of human society for longer
14 Tristan Manco, Street Logos (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 8. 9
than many realize. He connects prehistoric cave paintings to the modern graffiti
movement as they both represent an “expression of creative freedom.”15 Centuries-old graffiti among the ruins of Pompeii appear in guidebooks alongside descriptions of timeless, assumedly sanctioned, frescos. The word graffiti, in fact, has its roots in the
Italian graffiare, or “to scratch,” which refers to the earliest forms of graffiti etched into walls and trees. Grave robbers scrawled their names into the Pyramids of Cheops, and even the Bible tells the haunting tale of King Belshazzar, who received a message from
God that appeared in the form of a disembodied hand inscribing a warning on a wall.
Most early graffiti in ancient Rome, as is still true today, could be found in public toilets,
and was therefore labeled latrinalia. It is significant that Walmesley traces the roots of
graffiti back to prehistoric times because it calls to attention the fact that graffiti is not
simply a modern issue signally urban decay over the last thirty to forty years. Graffiti
markings are not necessarily confined to contemporary episodes of delinquency and
illegality, therefore, but can also be traced back throughout history as instances of public
self-expression.
From antiquity, Walmesley leaps to the modern graffiti movement, starting his
discussion with a review of the terminology surrounding “aerosol art.” Since, as
previously mentioned, the term graffiti is rather outdated and generic, many
contemporary graffiti artists prefer to use “writing” when speaking of the act of creating
graffiti art. They would then in turn refer to themselves as “writers.” The “tag” is the
nickname the artist chooses for him or herself, used in the process of “tagging,” which
Walmesley describes as “writing the name in a stylized way, but not with any discernible
15 Walmesley, 193. 10
individual style,” which serves as the basis for larger, more complex works (fig. 4).16
Oftentimes, writers opt for short, catchy tags, as haste is key to a successful execution.
Once a tag is chosen, the next phase is “getting up,” or “getting over,” which simply refers to making your mark across the city, or writing your tag in as many places as possible. Walmesley cites TAKI 183, a Greek delivery boy from Manhattan, as the first to truly expand his tag city-wide in the early 1970s, using a marker pen to get up wherever he went.17
Starting with the tag, writers expand their works to the production of large-scale
“throw-ups” and “pieces.” For the “throw-up,” the writer will enlarge the tag to about
three feet or so, and execute it in block or bubble letters, most frequently using one color
or a simple outline. “Pieces” are relatively similar, but are much larger and more
elaborate. Pieces often involve more than one writer, can have extra components besides
the tag, and therefore require pre-planning. These sorts of writings are usually done in
“wildstyle,” where as Walmesley describes, “the letters of the tag name are redesigned
and distorted, turned backwards and upside down, so the name itself becomes a work of
art.”18
As writing evolved from tagging to throw-ups to pieces to wildstyle, so the goal of each artist became to develop a unique style - one that would be recognized and respected by other writers. When it was eventually discovered that putting the cap of a
spray starch can on that of an aerosol paint can facilitated quicker execution, larger areas
16 Ibid, 194.
17 TAKI 183 created his tag as a combination of his nickname – Taki is an abbreviated version of his actual name, Demetrius – and his home, as he lived on 183rd Street in Manhattan. Ibid, 195.
18Ibid, 194. 11
could be covered in shorter periods of time, thus leading to the creation of
“masterpieces.”19 In the midst of so many innovations and new styles, New York writers quickly moved from city walls to subway trains. Working at night, groups of artists
would most commonly create “top-to-bottoms,” which covered an area from the bottom
of the car to the top but not its full length, and “end-to-ends,” which similarly cover the
length of a car, but not the height (fig. 5). On occasion, “whole car” works were
executed with much time and paint, and the most ambitious of all were “worms,” or the entire train (usually about five cars).
Throughout this early evolution of the graffiti writing movement in New York, many names stand out as pioneers: Cornbread (who actually worked in Philadelphia, but influenced the New York style), Top Cat, SuperKOOL, Priest 167, and Pistol 1, are some figures cited by Walmesley. The raison d’etre for all these figures was the same: getting up or getting noticed. Walmesley makes an interesting claim about their work that seems to align these early New York writers to Shepard Fairey and Banksy, although these more contemporary artists work in a different style. He states “Despite what many mayors, community leaders, and anti-graffiti campaigners will have you believe, writers are not vandalizing. They are advertising.”20 Therefore, these taggers are not committing
destructive acts of malicious intent, but are simply using the means they have available to
self-promote in the very same spaces (city walls and subway cars, for example) that
corporate advertisers utilize.
One major difference between the art of Fairey and Banksy and that of early
graffiti writers, however, is their target audience. As Walmesley states, “Graffiti is for
19 Walmesley attributes this discovery to SuperKOOL around 1972, 196.
20 Ibid, 195. 12
other graffiti artists.”21 As many writers will claim, graffiti writing is not a hobby, it is a
way of life that requires total commitment; therefore, a major purpose of “getting up” is
to gain the respect and admiration of your fellow artists. The more figurative street art of
Fairey and Banksy, on the other hand, targets the public at large with no specific
audience in mind. Theses two figures utilize enigmatic, iconic, and satirical images to
reach as many people as possible and encourage others to challenge authority.
In the early 1970s, the majority of writers came from low-income, poverty-
stricken areas of New York, and thus likewise used graffiti as a means of defiance. As
hegemonic authority labels graffiti writing as deviant, disruptive behavior, the tag can
therefore “be read as a challenge to the ruling class, a statement of presence” and of
reclamation.22 Thus, while the street art of Fairey and Banksy does not recall that of
early writers in style, they are unified in their spirit of defiance against hegemony, specifically the leasing of public (advertising) space for corporate profit.
In addition to the urban graffiti movement in 1970s New York, contemporary street art is likewise rooted in the European postwar street art of the décollage affichistes.
This movement, lead by figures such as Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, and
Mimmo Rotella constituted a transformation of the collage aesthetic as it was used by
Dadaist and Surrealist artists. Décollage is the process of ripping and tearing through successive layers of paper, in particular, street affiches (posters), bills, or advertisements
(fig. 6). Benjamin Buchloh describes the significant difference between the production of the affichistes versus that of previous artists working with the collage aesthetic: “If in… the dadaists’ work the found materials from the street had ultimately only invaded the
21 Ibid, 207.
22 Ibid, 198. 13
space of the painting, in the work of the décollage artists, the street is the site where the
artistic intervention actually takes place.”23
In Buchloh’s discussion of the evolution of the urban environment post-World
War II, his sentiments directly reflect the contemporary aims of Fairey and Banksy. He
posits that following the liberation from German Fascism, the city walls (assumedly of
Paris) “would become the site of a rather different form of propaganda and subtler form
of violence: the newly devised strategies of advertising, initiating the reemerging
consumer culture of the 1950s.”24 As formerly public urban spaces were increasingly rationalized and planned around areas of consumption and production, so the public became constantly bombarded with images of the commodity, usually exemplified in the form of the billboard or poster. However, increased urban rationalization likewise led to derelict spaces of urban leftovers, and “sites of urban public display” (such as the aforementioned mediums) became outmoded in a short period of time in favor of forms of advertising that directly penetrated the privacy of one’s home, via the radio, television, and magazines.
By shredding through the layers of public affiches thereby rendering the
commodity image meaningless and unintelligible, the décollage affichistes, therefore,
performed a “gesture of rebellion in an abandoned urban space in a medium of
obsolescence.”25 It is important to note that the artist engaging in post-war décollage is
23 Benjamin Buchloh, “From Detail to Fragment: Décollage Affichiste,” October 56 (“High/Low: Art and Mass Culture” Spring 1991): 98-110.
24 Ibid, 99.
25 Ibid, 101. 14
intervening in public space as an “anonymous vandal of urban product propaganda,”26 a facet that has distinct correlations to the contemporary practice of Banksy and Fairey.
The décollage affichistes are therefore significant in the development of contemporary street art because their works intervene often in public space, representing a reaction against consumer culture (as manifested in public advertisements) and urban regimentalization.
As author Adam Barnard posits, the artistic practices of street artists such as
Shepard Fairey and Banksy are evocative of the ideas and motivations of members of the
Situationist International (SI).27 Begun in 1957 and dissolved fifteen years later in 1972,
a small group of artists and intellectuals originally formed the SI by combining the avant- garde organizations the Lettrist International and the International Movement for the
Imaginist Bauhaus. Headed by French theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord, the SI also included artists, architects, and writers such as Constant Nieuwenhuys, Ralph Rumney,
Asger Jorn, Michéle Bernstein, and Alexander Trocchi. The SI consisted of artists and political theorists such as the above-mentioned individuals who, with methods reminiscent of Dada and Surrealism, aimed radically to redefine the role of art by integrating it into everyday life. Members of the SI believed that art must be revolutionary not only in spirit, but also physically and actively. Therefore members of the SI participated in the Paris student revolts in May 1968, and they agitated to use art in a social revolutionary situation. This revolt is significant to the realm of contemporary
26 Ibid, 106.
27 Adam Barnard, “The Anger Management Is Not Working,” Capital and Class 84 (Winter 2004): 125-128. While the author does place Banksy as a modern-day Situationist by positing that he continues the subversive trend begun by the Situationists, this article mainly provides an overview of Banksy’s works without going into any in-depth analysis of either his works or how exactly his practices align with those of the SI. 15
street art because activists, students, and members of the SI graffitied city walls with
slogans, such as “never work,” supporting their cause, and they pasted up revolutionary-
minded posters in these same spaces.
Several theoretical ideals formulated by the SI bear specific relevance to the
illegal artistic productions of Fairey and Banksy. The first of these terms is
détournement, which Ken Knabb defines, after Guy Debord’s writings, as “deflection,
diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning
aside from the normal course or purpose.”28 Détournement involves “the reuse of
preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble” and has two fundamental laws which are
the loss of importance of each détourned autonomous element — which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense — and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.29
In practice, therefore, détournement involves taking a common cultural image and
performing alterations so that the new message is no longer conducive to the original, but
rather supports a more revolutionary or oppositional implication. Contemporary journals
such as Adbusters practice this ideal by détourning advertising or pro-consumer messages
thereby creating “subvertisements.” Shepard Fairey’s “AG Soda” pieces from 1995-1996
subvert a particular Coca Cola marketing campaign, (which I will discuss in further detail
in chapter two), and therefore stand as a perfect example of how détournement is relevant
to, and practiced in street art. Banksy likewise engages in détournement by hijacking
28 Ken Knabb in a footnote to “A User’s Guide to Détournement” by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolfman (1956) in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 371.
29 Guy Debord, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude,” Internationale Situationniste #3 (1959), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 55. 16
images of classic, seemingly harmless American icons and endowing them with sinister
attributes (fig. 7).
Additionally, the concepts of dérive and psychogeography are likewise significant
to the goals and aims of street artists such as Fairey and Banksy. A dérive is defined as
“a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique
of transient passage through varied ambiances.”30 This kind of practice, carried out
contemporaneously by groups such as the Surveillance Camera Players, involves
aimlessly wandering the streets, and is very much linked to psychogeography. The
Internationale Situationniste #1 defines psychogeography as “the study of specific effects
of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and
behavior of individuals.”31 These practices inspire a renewed, unique, more personal
interaction between the individual and the urban environment, and likewise serve to study how one reacts to the surrounding urban cityscape. As I will discuss further in chapter two, these concepts bear relevance to Shepard Fairey’s OBEY campaign and experiments with phenomenology, which endeavors to “reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment,” and to “bring people to question … their relationship with their surroundings.”32 Additionally, as I will show in the conclusion, graffiti art encourages
people to gain an awareness of their relationship or connection to the urban landscape:
one that, according to sociologist Mike Davis in “Fortress Los Angeles,” is being increasingly militarized and regimentalized.
30 “Definitions,” Internationale Situationniste #1 (1958), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 45.
31 Ibid.
32 Fairey, 54. 17
In relation to the SI which performs subversion aimed at critiquing societal
hierarchies, Fairey and Banksy’s contemporary street art also bears strong connection to
practices of institutional critique in art, a kind of practice that predates and yet also
occurred synchronously with the urban graffiti boom in New York City. The work of
Hans Haacke (b. 1936) in the early 1970s particularly resonates with the aims and works
of street artists such as Fairey and Banksy. One instance which aptly displays the tenets
of institutional critique is the last-minute cancellation of Haacke’s retrospective
exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. On this occasion, Haacke had planned to
present what he termed “real-time social systems” as manifested through certain real
estate holdings in Manhattan. The two controversial works, Shapolski et al. Manhattan
Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, (fig. 8) and Sol
Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social
System, as of May 1, 1971, consisted of recorded facts collected by the artist from the
New York Public Library and presented in a matter-of-fact, non-accusational manner. In
these works, which served to track the holdings, illegal practices, and connections
between tenement housing owners, Haacke exposed the structure of slum empires.
However, before the exhibition could even reach the public, Museum Director
Thomas Messer chose to cancel the show when Haacke (and the exhibition curator)
refused to remove the afore-mentioned pieces. In Messer’s objections to the inclusion of
these pieces, he called them “work that violates the supreme neutrality of the work of art
and therefore no longer merits the protection of the museum.”33 This transgression of the institution’s neutrality refers specifically to Haacke’s singling out of particular individuals as opposed to an anonymous system. Messer stated that “social issues should
33 Foster, 546. 18 only be engaged artistically through symbolism, generalization, and metaphor, thereby disqualifying specificity about the identity of a system as well as of individuals.”34 Thus,
Messer’s objections
Broaden the concept of site to embrace not only the aesthetic context of the work’s exhibition but the site’s symbolic, social, and political meanings as well as the historical circumstances within which art work, spectator, and place are situated.35
Several other works by Haacke from the early 1970s likewise serve to confront the status of the museum as a neutral entity, and recontextualize museum-displayed art within larger cultural practices. They were also found unacceptable to the museum officials. A work from 1974 entitled Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of
Trustees (fig. 9) directly confronts the motives and associations of the museum as represented by its board of trustees. Here, Haacke reveals the connections between many trustees at the Guggenheim and the Kennecott Copper Corporation in Chile. This is quite a significant correlation since Chile’s democratically-elected president had just been overthrown and murdered in a coup conducted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), and one of the driving factors behind the CIA intervention was the threats posed to
Kennecott by the Chilean president’s intent to nationalize copper mines.
In a second work from 1974, Haacke traced the provenance of Edouard Manet’s painting Bunch of Asparagus (1880) in a series of ten panels for the “Projekt ‘74” exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in his hometown of Cologne, Germany. The most controversial panel was one that presented an analysis of the museum chairman,
34 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate, and the Museum,” in Hans Haacke, Unfinished Business, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, c.1986), 32.
35 Ibid, 22. 19
Hermann Josef Abs’, background, as he had been instrumental in bringing the piece to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. In this panel, Haacke revealed that Abs had been the most important banker and financial advisor to Adolph Hitler’s Reich from 1933 to 1945, and that after the war he had been reinstated to positions of similar influence and power that continued right up until the time of the donation of Bunch of Asparagus.36 Thus, it was this particular panel, “revealing him as an ex-Nazi and showing how easily the posture of cultural benefactor allows an individual to ‘launder’ their more-than-problematic past,”37 that contributed to the scandal and resulted in Haacke’s proposal for the installation being denied by the Museum’s administration.
Works such as these are representative of practices of institutional critique, a kind of practice heralded by artists such as Haacke, Marcel Broothaers, and Daniel Buren. In the words of Rosalyn Deutsche, “against the prevailing dogma that works of art are self- contained entities possessing fixed, transcendent meanings, these artists counterposed an exploration of cultural processes of meaning attribution.”38 Artists such as these, therefore, “pursued an investigation of the institutions that mediate between individual works of art and their public reception, eventually exploring appropriate means of intervention in institutional spaces and discourses.”39 In the previously-discussed examples of Haacke’s work from the early 1970s, the work of art had been
converted into a vehicle for revealing rather than masking the artistic context in a work that provoked public scrutiny of the concealed economic structure of the cultural institution and the interests of those who control it.40
36 Foster, 547.
37 Ibid, 548.
38 Deutsche, 21.
39 Ibid, 22.
20
In addition to Haacke, artists such as Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, and Fred
Wilson continue practices of institutional critique into the 1990s and today. The works of
artists who create art representative of institutional critique are highly relevant to this
thesis, as they
Revealed that the institution of art was not only a physical space but also a network of discourses (including criticism, journalism, and publicity) that intersected with other discourses, indeed with other institutions (including the media and the corporation).41
Haacke’s institutional critique is therefore significant to the work of Fairey and Banksy because both artists are using illegality to the same ends which Haacke used his controversial exhibitions – to confront power structures. Instead of directly targeting the museum and its hierarchy of control, Fairey and Banksy utilize illegal street art to critique and expose social power structures at large.
By citing New York’s urban graffiti movement of the 1970s, the work of the décollage affichistes, and practices of institutional critique as exemplified by Hans
Haacke as influences and precursors to contemporary street art, I am therefore aligning the work of Fairey and Banksy within artistic traditions that embrace illegality and the medium of public space in efforts to undermine authority and those who wield it.
40 Ibid, 26.
41 Foster, 624. 21
Chapter Two: OBEY
Shepard Fairey is virtually a living legend in the realm of street art. His OBEY
campaign, also referred to as sticker or poster bombing, has currently been active for
fifteen years and is a global phenomenon. Because of his “World Domination Tour,”
1998-2000, in which Fairey traveled to galleries and museums showing his work, while
pasting up posters and stickers in his spare time, Fairey’s work can now be found in the
urban centers of nearly every major U.S. city, as well as in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London,
and Barcelona (fig. 10). With the city streets as his galleries, Fairey aims to inspire a sense of disorientation, confusion, and even thoughtfulness in passersby with the unconventional and illegal placement of his artworks on the sides of buildings, billboards, and street signs, for example. By hanging and pasting his pieces without paying for advertising space in locations that are not sanctioned by law, Fairey is indeed transgressing the law by committing vandalism, yet he views such acts as a reclamation of public space. The OBEY campaign, therefore, represents a negation of hegemonic law, a call to question the automatic acceptance of legally sanctioned corporate advertisements, and an examination of whether “public” space is truly public.
The focal image of the OBEY campaign is the face of deceased professional wrestler, Andre the Giant (1946-1993). The original image was taken from a newspaper article advertising a wrestling match in Providence, Rhode Island in 1989. At that time,
Fairey was a sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), working at a skate shop, making stickers and t-shirts with paper-cut stencil designs. In the process of trying to teach a friend how to cut a stencil, he came across the wrestling advertisement. After 22
the heading “Andre the Giant” Fairey scrawled “has a posse” and printed it out on
stickers at the local Kinko’s (fig. 11). He then distributed these roughly
2 x 2 inch stickers in bulk to friends and posted them all over town, thus initiating the
campaign that continues to this day.
Growing up in a fairly conservative section of Charleston, South Carolina in the
1970s and 1980s, Fairey has stated that some of his first, and most enduring, passions and
hobbies are skateboarding and punk rock. According to various interviews, he maintains
that he had a minor interest in drawing while he was growing up and that he transferred
to a high school in California for his senior year in order to study art more seriously.
During high school, Fairey experimented with stencil design, creating t-shirts of his
favorite punk bands and icons, including Sid Vicious and the Misfits. However, he didn’t
see this artistic production as “having any connection to fine art.” 42 It was in high school
that he was able to compile a portfolio consisting of photography, graphic design pieces
and drawings to apply to the Rhode Island School of Design.43
At RISD, Fairey acquired knowledge of the screen printing process that he would
use when he opened his own screen printing company, Alternate Graphics, during his
junior year. During college, he dedicated himself to experimenting with multi-media,
42 Interview with Shepard Fairey, Project X [journal article online] (publisher information unknown, n.d., accessed 6 November 2002); available from http://www.obeygiant.com/articles/shepard.html; Internet. Fairey’s website contains an archive of nearly all the interviews he has ever done, as well as the articles written about him and his work. In circumstances where I was unable to locate print copies of the articles cited on his website, I cite the page from which I downloaded the articles instead.
43 Interview with Shepard Fairey, Sex Sells [journal article online] (publisher information unknown, December 1997, accessed 27 November 2005); available from http://www.obeygiant.com/main_new.php?page=articles&article=i11; Internet.
23
specifically in the combination of photography, Xerox art and illustration. As he states in
an interview with Project X magazine:
As I learned more about screen printing, I learned how to do photo-emulsion screen printing … and took some two-dimensional design. I started doing a lot more Xerox art, so all of a sudden, you could see how illustration and photo could connect in the middle with Xerox and screen printing. You can kind of manipulate a Xerox to where it’s partially drawn and partially photographic, so that’s what I started doing.44
According to this interview, Fairey’s original OBEY GIANT sticker consisted of
illustration (or in this case, adding script) incorporated with a Xerox print, which was
then transformed into a sticker.
Initially, Fairey created the “Andre the Giant has a posse” sticker as a joke. He
chose this particular wrestler as an iconic figurehead for the skate clique he was a part of at the time, mainly because “Andre was just so ugly and funny looking, and we wanted to make our little skate clique called the Andre Posse because it would sort of make fun of
all the other posses who thought they were cool.”45 Thus, even though he was admittedly
a part of the skater subculture, he chose the unappealing, “un-cool” image of Andre the
Giant to mock the self-importance that lots of skate cliques adopted. However, he
purposefully allowed for a certain ambiguity of meaning in order to confuse his audience
and to create controversy surrounding the icon. While it was initially meant as a joke it
also aimed at critiquing the hierarchical structure of skater groups, and the phenomena of
OBEY GIANT quickly spread.
Once Fairey noticed the debate and discussion that these images caused around
town, he began mounting his campaign all over the East coast with the help of friends. In
44 Project X, http://www.obeygiant.com/articles/shepard.html.
45 Sex Sells, http://www.obeygiant.com/main_new.php?page=articles&article=i11. 24
fact, he has since noted how much more dialogue they elicited once he changed the
medium from paper to vinyl stickers, as people began to take them seriously or to believe that they had a “legitimate” purpose.46 In addition to printing stickers, Fairey also began
printing the Giant face on 11 x 17 inch paper, which he would then post up on buildings
and billboards by coating both sides of paper with wheat paste and either rolling or
brushing them onto surfaces. Around 1995 Fairey decided to simplify the image that had
become the cornerstone of his work. What started out as a picture resembling a mug-
shot, including the shoulders and neck (of Andre the Giant), was simplified to a
silhouette-like, two-dimensional face that has been compared to a Rorschach inkblot (fig.
12). It was at this point that he sometimes added the words “OBEY” or “GIANT”
beneath the face. The reason was linked to readability and ease of production, and, as
Fairey stated, “I enjoy converting complicated graphics into two-dimensional patterns.
What I want to do is to turn it into an icon which people will recognize immediately
when they look at it. Also, simpler patterns can save a lot of time!”47
After he pared down the Andre head to a more graphically simplistic image, his
use of copy machines in mass production also dictated his color aesthetic. Since the copy
machines at the Kinko’s near his home in Providence only printed red, black and white,
and this was the most cost-efficient way for him to work, Fairey adopted these three
colors to mass produce stickers and posters. Fairey simultaneously began researching
activist art as inspiration. As he stated in an interview in 2001,
I like the style of … artist Barbara Kruger. She always uses a lot of red in her slogan designs. I therefore use the same red for my Obey slogan … Later on, I
46 Project X, http://www.obeygiant.com/articles/shepard.html.
47 Kit Chan, Sky-H (Hong Kong: PCC Skyhorse Limited, 2001), 45. 25
decided that my works should be done in only black, white and red. Rather than seeing these three colors as my limitation, they became my style, my specialty. I researched into art history and found that a lot of revolutionary works in art have been done in the colors of black, white and red. I have been using the colors since then.48
The influence of agitprop, as exemplified in the art of Kruger (b.1945) and in
Soviet propaganda, is apparent in more than Fairey’s color palette, however. Kruger
juxtaposes curt, declarative statements with fragmented and enlarged newspaper
photographs which function to “suspend the viewer between the fascination of the image and the indictment of the text, while reminding us that language and its use within culture... and history reinforce the interests and perspectives of those who control it.”49
These days, propaganda “implies manipulation, politization, and a pure instrumentality that heralds the destruction of subjectivity.” 50 In Communist Russia, it was used as a
tool to disseminate communist ideals and urge the public to obey Soviet leaders. Fairey,
therefore, employs the techniques of agitprop along the same lines as Kruger – instead of
promoting unequivocal submission, as was the case in Soviet Russia, he encourages the
viewer to question authority and its motives.
Fairey’s junior year of college, 1991, saw his first large-scale installation. During
the mayoral campaign in Providence, Fairey chose a strategically located billboard, one
that the majority of the population would see, and performed some alterations to the
political advertisement. Originally, the found billboard pictured the candidate appearing
diminutive in stature, waving his right hand, placed next to the slogan, “Vote for Cianci,
48 Ibid, 45.
49 Holliday T. Day, Power: Its Myths and Mores in American Art, 1961-1991 (Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1991), 69.
50 Hal Foster, et al., Art Since 1900 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 173. 26
he never stopped caring about Providence.” Fairey intervened by pasting a four-foot
Andre-head over that of the candidate, and changing the slogan to “Andre never stopped
caring about Providence.” When the city covered Fairey’s work two days later, “they
cleaned it and made Cianci twice as big. His hand was going off the top of the
billboard.”51 Yet this only further motivated Fairey to act again. He measured the new dimensions and created a tiled face consisting of sixty-four 11 x 17 inch copies, placed a sign in Andre’s hand that read “Join the Posse,” and added “7’4” 520 lbs” to the figure’s lapel (fig. 13). This second version stayed up for a week, and prompted much attention from local newspapers, television stations, and radio. Fairey’s reaction to the uproar over his work in Providence reveals crucial details about his approach:
All I was really doing was trying to make people laugh and give more significance to the small stickers by doing something on a larger scale. But people read so many different things into it … People thought, this must be a comment on how he’s (Cianci) a brute or an asshole. Supposedly he had mob connections, and people thought maybe it was a comment about that. And I just thought, people’s curiosity is so powerful, it gets this dialogue going that you can’t even get going with a traditional debate …There’s a lot more power in this absurd image … than there is in some really direct political commentary. The whole town was in an uproar, and I just thought ‘that was so easy.’52
By using an absurd image commanding one to “Obey” an unidentified cause or persona,
Fairey aims to inspire the public to stop and think about the advertising and marketing that people ingest every day in our consumption-driven society. He views his illegal sticker and poster campaign as an exercise in reclaiming public space, and an effort to make people understand that the messages they ingest through the hegemonic cultural practices (such as marketing) are filtered through a particular agenda.
51 Sex Sells, http://www.obeygiant.com/main_new.php?page=articles&article=i11.
52 Ibid. 27
According to his rationale, people have no choice but to look at and absorb the
messages of billboards and other public advertisements encountered on the street. In
structuring the public sphere with spaces that are reserved for advertising, such spaces may seem public yet the law discriminates against those who lack the money to pay for its use. In other words, access to public space is biased towards expressing the opinions of those who can pay to make themselves heard. But what about those who do not have the monetary means to use space that is theoretically public? Fairey conjectures that, in regards to public advertising and his OBEY campaign:
Whether it’s nonsense, like what I do, or an ad for an actual product, both can be taken offensively, and neither is more or less offensive than the other. I’m just reclaiming the public space. If others did the same maybe it wouldn’t be accepted as illegal.53
Therefore he is negating the common claim that his work is offensive because it is
illegally placed in the public eye. He encourages fellow street artists to use public property, such as the sides of buildings, street signs, billboards, and poles, or private property, only when it has been abandoned or lies vacant. He urges others to have respect for their environment by not pasting over previous works and by refraining from placing works where they could de-value private property. In his eyes, what is deemed as
“illegal” by law is actually helping to beautify the surrounding environment. Thus, while
his work may illegally traverse the bounds of the law, it is not, in fact, tantamount to
vandalism; rather, he aims to create a new social collectivity.
In a project similar in style to the Cianci billboard takeover, Fairey’s next large-
scale installation targeted corporate America. In the summer of 1994, Fairey’s father
53 Interview with Shepard Fairey, The Fridge [journal article online] (publisher information unknown, n.d., accessed 27 November 2005); available from http://www.obeygiant.com/main_new.php?page=articles&article=i3; Internet. 28
gave him a Time magazine article about Coca Cola’s newest product, “OK Soda,” which
was shortly to be test-marketed in a few select cities. Fairey’s father gave him the article
thinking that this could be an opportunity for his son to do some freelance design work
for Coca Cola, not so that he would initiate a large-scale campaign takeover, as he did.
The idea behind this new product was to target “Generation X” by using more
noncommercial, street-oriented graphics, as a means of under-promising the product;
seemingly the opposite of most traditional marketing strategies by labeling it as “OK.”
To pursue this hip, younger audience, the OK Soda advertisements recall the style of
underground comics, and played upon the works of earlier avant-garde artists such as
Andy Warhol and his Dance Diagrams from 1962. In this manner, it seems Coca Cola was attempting to reach out to the “slacker” generation.54
Indignant because he thought that his subculture was being insulted, Fairey decided to intervene. Two of the ten U.S. cities where OK Soda was first launched were
Providence and Boston, thus giving Fairey ample opportunity to get his own version of
OK in the local public eye. His ultimate goal was to short circuit the clear message that
Coca Cola would put out, by immediately sabotaging the OK marketing campaign, before it had the chance to become recognizable and meaningful. In Rhode Island, Fairey hung
up his own posters promoting “AG Soda” before OK began its promotion, which did,
indeed, instill mass confusion in consumers (fig. 14). When OK Soda turned out to be a
flop in Providence, Fairey felt that, “by having my stuff out first and parodying it (OK
54 Description of OK Soda paraphrased from interview with Fairey in Sex Sells, http://www.obeygiant.com/main_new.php?page=articles&article=i11. 29
Soda), a lot of people saw that I was making fun of what it was trying to do. And I felt
that maybe I had a hand in people’s not accepting it.”55
In Boston, he used similar tactics after the OK marketing had already been made
public. In this situation, Fairey and some friends printed out replicas of the OK ads
substituting “AG” for “OK,” and the OK Soda character for Andre, using identical colors
and graphics. The group took 200 posters, boarded the Boston subway trains, and spent
an entire night sliding the fake AG ads over the top of the OK ads in the reserved
marketing slots, hopping from train to train. Fairey claims this was his first “really well- planned and executed total commercial sabotage.”56
After these early forays, Faired moved to San Diego, California in 1996, where he
eventually moved to sabotage the marketing campaigns of Sprite and Absolute Vodka.
By substituting “Your Thirst” with the Andre face, both minimalist and original style, in at least a dozen Sprite “Obey Your Thirst” billboards in Southern California (fig. 15), and transforming “Absolute Sighting” to “Absolute Giant,” inserting an Andre-head (fig.
16),57 Fairey effectively and illegally worked at the expense of corporate advertising
promotions. Yet for all his rhetoric surrounding such corporate marketing practices, he
himself designs for corporations. In 1996, Fairey met fellow street artist Dave Kinsey,
and together they formed BLK/MRKT Design. With this company, which eventually
moved to Los Angeles, paradoxically, Fairey began designing for corporations. He rationalizes his actions, however, by saying that if he didn’t do it, someone else would.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Locations unspecified but presumably also in Southern California. 30
Since this time, Fairey resides in Los Angeles, has split with Kinsey, formed his own
design firm, Studio No. 1, which houses a contemporary art gallery, Subliminal Projects,
on the first floor. He has also begun publishing Swindle magazine, a publication focusing
on popular culture and lifestyle by highlighting artists, musicians, and designers who
have a more highly revered subcultural, as opposed to pop-cultural status. One of these
artists, in fact, is Banksy who Fairey interviewed personally for an upcoming edition of
the magazine.58 In addition to these businesses, he continues to “liberate” billboards and
buildings around the nation.59 He justifies his sabotage-like actions in an interview with
Print magazine saying:
I don’t like the way advertising tries to manipulate, to make people insecure. It’s very, very competitive psychological warfare with no rules of combat. It’s definitely fair game for vandalizing and critiquing, especially the national campaigns.60
Here Fairey reveals his illegal acts of vandalism as a retaliation against the way
advertisers and marketing companies play on people’s insecurities for their own gain.
Black’s Law Dictionary defines “vandal” as follows: “A malicious destroyer or defacer of works of art, monuments, buildings, or other private property.” Likewise, it defines
“vandalism” as:
1. The willful or ignorant destruction of public or private property, especially of artistic, architectural, or literary treasures. 2. The actions or attitudes of one who maliciously or ignorantly destroys or disfigures public or private property; active hostility to anything that is venerable or beautiful.
Since laws about vandalism are largely enforced by police officers and punishable according to local mandates throughout the world, Fairey is breaking the law not only by
58 Shepard Fairey, interview by the author, tape recording, Los Angeles, CA, 13 February 2006.
59 He states that he has “liberated” over 200 billboards as of 2002. Fairey, 55.
60 Michael Dooley, “He Might Be Giant,” Print 54 (May/June 2000): 75. 31
defacing property, but also, according to this general definition, for de-beautifying the
urban environment. This particular breed of crime and criminal has always been harshly
punished, as Michel Foucault argues in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, that vandals and thieves were the motivating factors behind the reforms of
European laws and prisons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As society placed
“a higher juridicial and moral value … on property relations,” so incurred “an extension and a refinement of punitive practices.”61 With these facts in mind, Fairey’s OBEY
campaign is not a simple reaction against corporate marketing, but represents a call to
reexamine societal perceptions of what makes public objects (such as buildings)
venerable and violable, as capitalism and claims to personal property progress or
increase. In other words, he is simultaneously negating the laws around private property
and the standards of beauty that the law uses to reinforce claims to private property.
Additionally, he negates the common view that the placement of his stickers and posters
is a malicious action that defaces and disfigures property, and the idea of public property
as a sacred realm.
In the opening statements of Fairey’s book, Post No Bills, he asserts that the goal
of the OBEY GIANT campaign is “to encourage dialogue, not anarchy or the reckless
vandalism of property (though vandalism is subjective).”62 He addresses the challenges
of the contemporary street artist working outside the law by issuing a “Warning,” in
which he calls for fellow street artists to use consideration when choosing a site to
61 Foucault, 77.
62 Fairey, 1. 32
display their work. Thus he encourages others to respect their environment while, critics
would say, they are simultaneously destroying its beauty.
However, Fairey also acknowledges the viewpoint of the opposition by posting a
“Beware” message elucidating the goals of the Anti-Graffiti Task Force of New York
City:
Educating the public on the subject of graffiti and its permanent removal will continue to be our goal for this year … Only you can stop graffiti vandalism, and put the perpetrators of these crimes where they belong: BEHIND IRON BARS!!!63
These two contradictory statements show the stark opposition of the viewpoints of
Fairey versus those of the hegemonic culture who would label his art as destructive and
illegal. Some individuals, whether they be normal citizens or police officers, view
Fairey’s OBEY GIANT campaign as an affront to law-abiding society and its citizens,
while Fairey views his works as unconventionally-placed art. Still, his public displays of
art have landed him in jail on thirteen occasions, as of February 2006.
The fact that these works are illegally posted for the public gives them a certain
unexpected quality which is all part of Fairey’s experiment in phenomenology.
Phenomenology is a kind of bodily knowledge of the world which involves perception.
Fairey describes his work’s relationship to phenomenology in his manifesto:
63 Anti-Graffiti Task Force, [database online] (publisher information unknown, n.d., accessed 27 November 2005); available from http://www.obeygiant.com/main.php?page=warning; Internet. Although he does not state outright, he is referring to the New York Police Department Anti-Graffiti Initiative since, in the manifesto that Fairey has published on his website, he refers to New York neighborhoods. This particular task force merged the Special Operations Division Anti-Graffiti/Vandalism Unit of the NYPD with the Transit Bureau’s Vandals Unit to form the Citywide Vandals Task Force. In addition to this governmentally-sanctioned group, the Task Force is also extended to community and volunteer groups on the Mayor’s Community Assistance Unit website [database online] (publisher information unknown, n.d., accessed 19 November 2005); available from http://www.nyc.gov/html/cau/html/anti_graffiti/main.shtml; Internet.
33
(Martin) Heidegger describes Phenomenology as ‘the process of letting things manifest themselves.’ Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation. The first aim of phenomenology is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment. The Andre the Giant sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the product or motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with the sticker provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer’s perception and attention to detail. The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react…64
Therefore, the strategically-chosen placement of OBEY propaganda is of the
utmost importance in Fairey’s work, which aims to inspire not only confusion, but also
introspection and curiosity in the viewer. His practices of détournement, which hijack corporate marketing campaigns by subverting their messages, endeavors to encourage the public to question authority, rather than blindly obey. Whether it be a billboard, the basin of a water tower, the side of a building, or a face of an electrical box on a crowded city street, placement is everything, yet placement is also what renders his art illegal. Since one must pay to utilize “public” property, however, a feat not all citizens are able to do,
Fairey therefore views his unsanctioned placement of his pieces as a reclamation of
“public” space.
64 Fairey, 54. 34
Chapter Three: Banksy
British street artist Banksy is a cult hero around the world, known for his
provocative, amusing, and politically-charged stencil graffiti, as well as his highly
publicized museum “interventions.” By museum “interventions,” I am referring to the
occasions in New York, London and Paris, where Banksy entered at least seven museums
in disguise and hung his own artistic creations on the walls – without permission. While
only a handful of people claim to know who this elusive figure is, he is known worldwide
for such actions and artwork, praised by some, and seen as a scourge to society by others.
Often labeled in newspapers as a “guerrilla artist,” or even an “art terrorist,” his artwork
has gained fanatical popularity not only for its ingenuity and wittiness, but also because of its illegal nature.65 While Banksy has held several gallery shows, overall he seems to
prefer city streets, buildings, cars, national monuments, uninvited museum spaces, zoos,
and even live animals themselves to display his work. Although Banksy’s oeuvre
consists of more than illegal works such as these,66 I would like to center my discussion
on his museum installations and stencil graffiti because of their relation to institutional
critique, as discussed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, and by Jeff Ferrell in Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of
Criminality. Through this methodology, I will detail how, like Shepard Fairey’s work,
65 I have encountered these labels in many newspaper articles, such as Sam Jones, “Art Attack Spray Can Prankster Tackles Israel’s Security Barrier,” The Guardian (London), 5 August 2005, and Talya Halkin, “UK Graffiti Artist Tags Wall,” The Jerusalem Post (Jerusalem), 10 August 2005.
66 Banksy’s also sells screen printed posters and large-scale paintings in galleries in London and on several websites. 35
Banksy’s illegal street art calls to attention the hypocrisy of political and corporate ownership of, and authority over “public” space.
The easiest way to ascertain if one has, indeed, encountered a Banksy is by the presence of his unique, block-like signature; a common accoutrement to his work (fig.
17). Even this signature, however, does not guarantee authenticity, as many fans and fellow graffiti artists have taken to replicating his work across the globe. Stylistically, since his pieces are most frequently executed in a single color (black), Banksy therefore
relies heavily on positive and negative space to create figural depth and a sense of three-
dimensionality. Since his forms and common characters are frequently reminiscent of
other street artists – his figural compositions are similar in style to French stencil graffiti
pioneer, Blek le Rat, for example – without his signature, it appears that the only way to
positively to identify Banksy’s work is to investigate what he claims as his own in one of
his four books.
One of Banksy’s most recurrent themes is that of the rat. However, this subject
appears in a multiplicity of forms. Take, for example, the rat installation in the Museum
of Natural History in London in early April of 2004 (fig. 18). In this “exhibition,”
Banksy set up a stuffed dead rat in a glass case, equipped with sunglasses, a gold chain
around its neck, a backpack, a microphone, and a can of spray paint. Above the rat was
scrawled the message, “our time will come.” Banksy labeled this work “Banksus Militus
Ratus,” and included a brief explanatory paragraph stating, “Attributed to an increase in
junk food waste, ambient radiation and hardcore urban rap music, these creatures have 36
evolved at an unprecedented rate.”67 Additionally, he included a quote from a “bogus”
professor that claims, “You can laugh now… but one day they’ll be in charge.”68
Like artist Christy Rupp’s “Rat Patrol” project of 1979, where she wheat pasted
life size posters of rats at street level, at the bottoms of buildings, in New York city,
Banksy likewise invades the urban environment, or more specifically architecture, with
images of rats. In his stencil graffiti work involving rats, Banksy frequently places them,
as in the Natural History Museum installation, in positions of defiance. He depicts rats, paintbrushes or spray cans in-hand, with messages in graffiti at their sides (fig. 19), or
engaging in generally rebellious behavior (fig. 20). Thus his pieces portraying rats in such a manner stand as a societal critique and call for a reversal of power. As he states in his book Existencilism, “I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up
together. That all the vermin will get some good equipment and then the underground
will go overground and tear this city apart.”69 By using rats, timeless symbols of societal
outcasts, Banksy’s stencils and museum interventions encourage anarchy, in that they
incite the “powerless” (assumedly the poor, minorities, members of subcultures, and
revolutionaries) to question existing structures of authority and hegemony (dominant
political parties and corporations), and fight for a redistribution of power.
In addition to his rats, Banksy likewise utilizes irony and humor in other
iconographic images to confront societal power structures. These works range from
military helicopters wrapped in a pink bow wishing viewers to “have a nice day” (fig.
67 Vikram Dodd, “Natural History Museum Exhibits Unnatural Specimen,” The Guardian (London), 8 April 2004.
68 Dodd, The Guardian. This quote recalls other stencil graffiti works featuring chimpanzees with signs tied around their necks stating, “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.”
69 Banksy, Existencilism, 18. 37
21), to smiling children gleefully embracing nuclear weapons (fig. 22), to animal-like
surveillance cameras interacting like curious puppies (fig. 23). Another branch of his
stencil graffiti which exemplifies this anarchical, defiant quality is his work depicting
British police officers. By portraying officers of the law in compromising situations,
Banksy endeavors to undermine their roles as figurative symbols and enforcers of
authority. In a stencil from 2002, Banksy executed the life-size, tri-colored image of a palace guard urinating on the wall of a building, his machine gun resting at his side (fig.
24). Not only did he chose to portray a symbol of hegemonic power and authority in an embarrassing situation, but he also chose to highlight illegality (in public urination or public indecency), thereby effectively stripping the guard of his power through the use of irony.
In his writings, Foucault addresses hegemonic structures of authority such as those that Banksy critiques. Foucault details how the structuring of discursive spaces of specialized institutions, such as military camps and monasteries, has infiltrated not only the structure of prisons, but the rest of society as well. By the turn of the twentieth century, criminal punishment had moved far from public humiliation and/or torture to enforcing extreme discipline as codified by military practices and medieval monasteries.
More effective than bodily injury, institutionalized discipline proved an invaluable way of wielding power over individuals and populations, and it had led to the internalization of surveillance through its capability of exercising social control, which we experience today.
Furthermore, Foucault continues to outline the development of how soldiers in the military over time attained a “bodily rhetoric of honor” that is indicative of their roles as 38
wielders of power and authority. 70 In a chapter entitled “Docile Bodies,” he details how the human body, an inherently malleable object, can be constructed as a machine-like symbol representative of a greater power (in this case, the military). This is executed largely via the countenance of the body: how the subject holds his head, thrusts his chest forward, aligns his heels, etc. Along this same line of thought, therefore, a modern day police officer (or palace guard) can immediately be identified as a symbol of the greater power of the state not only by his or her countenance, but also by his or her distinct uniform. This is to say, society continues to mold and decorate the human body in a manner which makes their authority instantly evident.
Banksy apparently echoes Foucault’s theories on the bodily construction of power, when he states,
Policemen and security guards always wear hats with a peak that comes down low over their eyes. Apparently this is a psychological technique because eyebrows are very expressive, they let you down if you’re lying or trying to bully somebody. You have far more authority if you keep them covered up.71
In fact, Banksy uses this bodily rhetoric to his advantage in creating his work as “it makes it difficult for your average cop to see anything more than six feet off the ground.
Which is why painting rooftops and bridges is so easy.”72 Therefore, not only does
Banksy use his knowledge of the “bodily rhetoric of honor” of law enforcers as a precondition to his illegal graffiti art, but also exploits it to undermine the power of hegemonic authority in the art itself.
70 Foucault, 135.
71 Banksy, Existencilism, 34.
72 Ibid. 39
While Banksy encourages the anarchical rejection of social power structures, he does not do so as a public figure. On the contrary, to this day his identity remains a mystery. In a 2005 article from the British newspaper The Independent, Stephen
Lazarides, manager of www.picturesonwalls.com,73 stated that he had known Banksy for
eight years, and that he was one of the “hardest working people I’ve ever met.”74 When I personally inquired about Banksy, however, Lazarides claimed to have never met him, and said that he had simply been selling Banksy’s work for “awhile.”75 Lazarides’
response serves as a perfect example of the mystery and intrigue surrounding the life of
this artist. The most biographical information I could garner from anyone, in fact, came
from author and close friend of Banksy, Tristan Manco. In his book Stencil Graffiti,
Manco states that Banksy, born in 1974, grew up in Bristol, U.K., son of a photocopier
engineer, who was apprenticed to a butcher at a young age.76 When I wrote to Manco
inquiring as to the veracity of this brief biography, he had the following to say:
I happen to know that Banksy is not in the U.K. at the moment but he is uncontactable generally. The biog of Banksy in the Stencil Graffiti book is slightly tongue-in-cheek; he wrote it for me but I don't know if anything in it is true at all. I do know him personally but then that puts me in a difficult situation - because anyone who knows him has to play along with the game. Different stories do leak out - but the truth and his working methods are not always the most useful things to say about him - in the end it’s all about the work. In the beginning he would send different people to be interviewed pretending to be Banksy including a girl - I think in general everyone knows he is a he - he is from Bristol born and bred ... Banksy is
73 Pictures On Walls is one of two website/galleries that sells Banksy’s artwork direct from the artist and publishes his books.
74 Louise Jury, “The Art of Making a Statement: Guerrilla in our Midst,” The Independent (London), 6 August 2005; 12.
75 Steve Lazarides, interview by author, email, 6 January 2006.
76 Tristin Manco, Stencil Graffiti (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 76.
40
completely proficient in the traditional style of graffiti but he came to stencils quite by chance and soon he realised it was perfect for what he wanted to do.77
A commonly-held theory as to the reason for such secrecy is the fact that Banksy is a wanted man. Considering the fact that Banksy’s stencil graffiti is technically deemed vandalism, British police are eager to catch him in the act. Although he admits to being
arrested in his youth for misdemeanor charges related to tagging, he claims that he has
never been arrested as “Banksy.” However, the artist himself has a much more romantic
rationale for maintaining anonymity:
The time of making art to be famous is over… You find that people who know you rarely listen to a word you say, even though they’ll happily take as gospel the word of a man they’ve never met if it’s on a record or in a book. If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask.78
By addressing his anonymous persona, Banksy directly critiques the cult of genius
that has dominated the art world since the Renaissance. Yet these statements contain
more than a hint of contradiction, for while he denies the importance of the creator, he
likewise expresses a desire to disseminate his personal opinions and ideas not only in this
quotation, but also in the fact that he “signs” many of his works. By invading the public
domain and the museum system with his graffiti art and installation pieces, Banksy is,
indeed, making his voice known and becoming quite a celebrity in the process. He has
77 Tristan Manco, interview by author, email, 16 January, 2006. Manco also had the following to say in regards to Banksy’s background and artistic beginnings: “At the time (1998) before Banksy there was only one stencil in Bristol! - we actually talked about it together because it was quite unusual - once Banksy started doing stencils in Bristol then it wasn't long before others joined him - including myself. I don't feel comfortable telling you too much about his past but I think it is fairly common knowledge that around the mid 90s was the era of the illegal and legal raves that were happening up and down the UK - he was hanging out with one of them and soon found himself painting banners and trucks for them and flyers. You will notice that in his books there is a lot of work at festivals such as Glastonbury... I could tell you more but I am sworn to secrecy!!!! One day it will all become common knowledge - but right now we have to respect the persona.”
78 Banksy, Existencilism, 1. 41
worked with high profile recording artists such as Blur, designing the cover for their
album “Think Tank,” he creates screen printed posters which sell for hundreds of pounds,
and his large-scale paintings are fetching five to six-figure prices. Therefore, while he
may not have begun creating illegal art as a ploy to become famous, international
reknown has certainly been one result.
In his books and website, Banksy is loquacious and has much to say about the
purpose of graffiti. Although he offers different manifestos in each of his three books,
the one which he permanently displays on his website (also present in Existencilism) is a quote from British Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin. Gonin, who was one of the
first soldiers to liberate a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, recalls the horrors of
witnessing
Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere…to relieve themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman…washing herself…in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated…One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count.79
It was the unexpected arrival at the camp of a large quantity of lipstick that was to alter
this situation, having unforeseen and positive effects on these survivors. Although Gonin
was originally frustrated by such a seemingly useless commodity when so many other
supplies were needed, he eventually recognized the request for lipstick as the “action of
genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance.”80
Women lay in bed at night with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips…At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they
79 Extract from the journal of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO from the Imperial War Museum, in Existencilism, 49-50.
80 Ibid, 50.
42
were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm…That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.81
Banksy interprets Gonin’s recollection of this incident as an example of “how the
application of paint can make a difference”82 (fig. 25). Therefore, Banksy uses this excerpt from Gonin’s memoir as a justification of graffiti’s social worth. Just as the
Colonel initially did not find any value in the shipment of lipstick, many citizens today
cannot find any inherent worth in graffiti, and even view it as a detriment to the urban
landscape, indicative of deviant, criminal behavior. Yet the Colonel eventually saw how
the application of lipstick returned a sense of individuality to a people who had been
stripped of their humanity. By citing this work, therefore, Banksy is attempting to impart
the benefits of graffiti: that it enhances the urban landscape with a unique sense of
individuality, and actually has the inherent power to positively effect the lives of those
who encounter street art.
Thus Banksy, like his friend Shepard Fairey, views graffiti as more than a
criminal act of vandalism. Both figures interpret this art form as a way of linking
criminality to beautification and enhancement of the urban environment. Both artists
likewise see graffiti as a means of expression for those who are the victims of poverty
and oppression. Banksy offers quite a romantic, mockingly wistful vision of the
possibilities of street art on his website:
Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colors and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the estate agents
81 Ibid.
82 Simon Hattenstone, “Something to Spray,” The Guardian (London), 17 July 2003. 43
and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet.83
Banksy also interprets graffiti art as a direct assault on corporate advertising tactics. He turns vandalism laws upside down with his own theory of “Brandalism,” a
concept that identifies “The Advertisers” as the real villains and criminals. Following
this construction, public advertising is a more vindictive, manipulative form of
vandalism, as it invades public space and infiltrates public opinion without the permission of the general public. Indeed, he and Fairey are in agreement as to the unjust
distribution of public space. For example, corporations are allowed by law to advertise
on buses, billboards, benches, etc., because they have the money to pay for such an
intrusion, as “trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright laws mean advertisers
can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.” He effectively negates
their authority (and essentially legality):
Any advert in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours … You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head … They [the companies] have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.84
In these comments, it is apparent that Banksy attempts to justify his illegal graffiti art by
villainizing hegemonic cultural signifiers, such as corporate advertisers, and the manner
in which they wield their influence.
In his book Wall and Piece (2005), he comments on the public’s perception of
graffiti artists as villainous criminals:
83 Banksy, personal statement from the artist [database online] (accessed 21 January 2006); available from http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/index.html; Internet.
84 This quote and the previous from Banksy, Cut It Out, 33. 44
Crime against property is not real crime … Graffiti writers are not real villains. I’m always reminded of this by real villains who consider the idea of breaking into someplace, not stealing anything, and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of.85
Thus Banksy is denying the malicious, destructive intent that hegemonic authority posits
as the motivating factors fueling the production of graffiti, while simultaneously, and
perhaps more subtly, pointing out how figures of authority have the power to shape
public perception. Sociologist and criminologist Jeff Ferrell discusses this concept more thoroughly in his book, Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality.
Drawing from previous studies on the sociology of deviance, he quotes Howard Becker:
It is an interesting fact that most scientific research and speculation on deviance concerns itself with the people who break the rules rather than with those who make and enforce them. If we are to achieve a full understanding of deviant behavior, we must get these two foci of inquiry into balance.86
This particular case study of the graffiti crackdown in urban Denver in the 1980s takes into account the influence of society’s “moral entrepreneurs,” or those “in the upper levels of the social structure…who, in the process of constructing an anti-graffiti campaign, have…constructed graffiti writing as a crime.”87 Ferrell details how moral
entrepreneurs, such as mayors and other politicians, aided by local police forces and
business owners, form an ideological construct placing graffiti writers as immoral,
vindictive, and even dangerous criminals, and claim this construct as an indisputable fact.
Therefore, “once constructed, this moral panic has served as… a useful control strategy –
85 Banksy, Wall and Piece, 205.
86 Jeff Ferrell, Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 106.
87 Ibid, 115. 45
a sort of epistemic clampdown, a narrowing and restricting of the range of explanations for graffiti.”88
Ferrell’s research in Denver can thus serve as a kind of case study of Foucault’s
analysis of the institutionalization of discipline. In this study, Ferrell shows how a
discursive space, or ideological construct, is institutionalized through laws in the justice
system, and through the internalization of discipline for individual citizens. When
Banksy negates the veracity of crime against property as a “real crime,” and downplays
the image of graffiti writers/artists as true villains, he is therefore negating the ideological
constructs established by hegemonic authority. Thus Banksy uses illegality in his street
art and museum interventions as a counter-cultural intervention that works against the
hegemonic control of the ideology of criminality, and the utilization of public space.
88 Ibid, 134. 46
Conclusion
Contemporary street art is a broad field which, through its myriad forms, resists a
singular definition. Shepard Fairey and Banksy are two of the more well-known figures
within a subculture that is constantly expanding. Indeed, this seems to be a trend with no
signs of slowing down, as ARTnews has recently named street art one of the top ten
trends in contemporary art.89
One of street art’s most important functions is the manner in which it critiques the
construct and mentality of the modern city. This trend is best explicated by Mike Davis in his article “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space,” and Jeff Ferrell in Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality. Davis describes the construct of contemporary Los Angeles as indicative of a greater happening in urban planning: how the defense of luxury has given rise to city planning that enforces restrictive social boundaries, consequentially destroying democratic public space. As
Davis details, urban form and architecture in the contemporary city has followed a repressive function, serving to protect enclaves of the wealthy within gated communities against the “mean streets,” populated by the underprivileged occupants of impoverished neighborhoods. The new city is constructed to eradicate the democratic mixing of classes in order to foster “middle-class work, consumption, and recreation, insulated from the city’s ‘unsavory’ streets. Ramparts and battlements, reflective glass and elevated pedways, are tropes in an architectural language warning off the underclass Other.”90
89 Rebecca Spence, “How Street It Is,” ARTnews 105 (February 2006): 110-112.
90 Davis, 321. 47
In terms of architectural structures, more and more the idea of the Panopticon,
Jeremy Bentham’s model prison constructed so that a single guard could observe all prisoners at all times,91 is utilized as a means of protection and fortification. As a visualization of this trend, Davis cites the architecture of Frank Gehry, in particular the
Goldwyn Library, as indicative of repression, surveillance, and exclusion. Gehry’s
“innovation” in this structure was to employ a high-profile, low tech approach that would render the building “inherently vandal proof.”92 As a means of employing this high-
profile approach, sentry stations guard each side of the structure, while its fifteen-foot
concrete walls, complete with anti-graffiti barricades covered in ceramic tile, project a
feeling of “sheer aggression.”93 This fortress-like approach to contemporary architecture
serves to internalize surveillance in the viewer by visually discouraging “seedy,” or
sordid behavior. Not only is this ideal manifested in Gehry’s architecture, but also in what Davis labels the panoptic malls of the inner city. Malls such as the King Shopping
Center in Watts are
Surrounded by an eight-foot-high wall, wrought-iron fence comparable to security fences found at the perimeters of private estates and exclusive residential communities. Video cameras equipped with motion detectors are positioned near entrances and throughout the shopping center… The service area… is enclosed with a six-foot-high concrete-block wall; both service gates remain closed and are under closed-circuit video surveillance…operated by a remote control from a security “observatory.”94
These two structures exemplify how public spaces are becoming regulated by a
military-like obsession with security and the protection of wealth. It is also apparent how
91 The Panopticon is outlined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, 195-231.
92 Davis, 327.
93 Ibid, 326.
94 Ibid, 328. 48
the hegemonic structures behind their construction aim to criminalize entire communities
by policies of exclusion. As Gehry planned the Goldwyn Library with the specific intent
of deterring “vandals,” it therefore becomes clear how street artists effectively confront
and critique the mentality of the urban environment. By illegally “defacing” city walls,
landmarks, billboards, etc, street artists attempt to reclaim the ideal of a public,
democratic space open to all classes of society. As Jeff Ferrell succinctly states,
Graffiti writing breaks the hegemonic hold of corporate/governmental style over the urban environment and the situations of daily life. As a form of aesthetic sabotage, it interrupts the pleasant, efficient uniformity of “planned” urban space and predictable urban living. For the writers, graffiti disrupts the lived experience of mass culture, the passivity of mediated consumption.95
Like cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, Ferrell similarly posits style as a subcultural
weapon used by graffiti artists to confront hegemony. In Crimes of Style, he asserts that the illegal practice of graffiti art challenges the “aesthetics of authority.” This term can be loosely defined as the visuality of hegemony, or the manner in which those in power make the rest of the population see or understand something.96 For example,
Clean buildings, and the appreciation of them, are as much a part of authority and control as police patrols and prisons; and the markings of graffiti writers are as much a threat to this as are protest marches and rent strikes.97
Graffiti writing and street art in general, therefore, stylistically challenge the
values posited by hegemonic power structures (i.e., graffiti is bad). Ferrell exposes the
fact that public perception is molded by the dictates of those in power. In other words,
“assertions as to graffiti’s ‘ugliness’ vis-à-vis ‘well-groomed’ communities, fears that
95 Ferrell, 176.
96 I credit the useage of this term from Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988).
97 Ibid, 184. 49
graffiti somehow ‘breeds’ lawlessness and decay,” are actually the fears and perceptions
of those holding political or social power, not necessarily those of the general public.98
In an interview, Shepard Fairey claims that undermining the visuality of authority is the
fundamental aim of the OBEY campaign. Instead of labeling his art as graffiti or
vandalism, he prefers to refer to his actions as an “urban renewal” campaign – a
categorization authority figures would most definitely object to. A central tenet of his
work is to make the public understand that everyone has an agenda, and to realize that the
messages the public is subject to, whether they be expressed through advertising or urban
planning, have been filtered as such.99
Fairey and Banksy are friends and collaborators whose central tenets are largely
similar: critique the institutions and hierarchies of power that dominate society.
However, they do have different views as to the means of their artistic output. According
to Fairey, Banksy refuses to participate in the production of “anything less than a
masterpiece.”100 In other words, he refuses to lend his works and/or time to corporate
agencies for profit, as he views this as “selling out,” or contradictory to the message of his artwork. Fairey, on the other hand, has had to endure this label from time-to-time from fans disillusioned with his corporate collaboration. It is crucial to understand then that Fairey is not just an artist, but a business savvy entrepreneur who has started at least three graphic design/screen printing companies, a gallery, a magazine, a clothing line, and an artistic “brand.” He does not, therefore, view the profit he makes thanks to
98 Ferrell, 179.
99 Shepard Fairey, interview by author, tape recording, Los Angeles, CA, 13 February 2006.
100 Ibid. 50
corporate collaboration as selling out, but rather as part of his “any means necessary”
approach to disseminating the ideals of the OBEY campaign. After discussing his
distaste for being labeled a “sell-out” in a February 2006 interview, Fairey went on to
discuss his friendship with Banksy and remarked, “I’m not really sure why he likes me …
I think he sees me as an original, as the first to do what I’ve been doing and everyone else
is just copying my style. I guess he respects that.”101
Throughout the course of this study, I have discussed past artistic movements such as the urban graffiti boom in 1970s New York city, the décollage affichistes of postwar Europe, the SI movement, begun in 1957 and continuing today, and practices of institutional critique in an effort to place Fairey and Banksy’s works within a broader theoretical and practical context. I have also directly addressed the work of Fairey and
Banksy, showing how they use their illegal artistic practices to confront hegemony and encourage the public to question authority. It is my hope that this study, like Fairey and
Banksy’s art, will encourage not only an alternative understanding of street art, but also of the goals and motivations fueling its production. Although I did not address the topic in this thesis, a future study could engage questions of how race relates to public perception of graffiti art, and also how it connects street art to the market (i.e., all the artists of the wildly successful “Beautiful Losers” exhibition are white, and this fact may indicate a shift in motivations and practices of graffiti artists since the 1970s, for example).
101 Ibid. 51
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