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Shepard Fairey: quantity and quality
At the suggestion of The Morning News, and probably (I’ll admit) a past issue of Juxtapoz, I was pulled to Jonathan Levine last week to see some Shepard Fairey canvases all tagged up and pretty on some walls. It had the similar draw of car crashes and reality television. It had me thinking: beyond Fairey’s obvious desire for tons of cash, how does he justify such a big-money program?
The only difference [in the art being shown] in the gallery is that it’s a controlled presentation. I can spend more time on the stuff and know that it’s not going to get splashed or buffed or gone over by another graffiti artist or ripped within a matter of days. On the street, the goal is to make it as artistic as possible, keeping in mind that it’s temporary. I’ve developed technology to put up stuff that works on the street: really strong, fast to put up, and not that expensive for me to create. The thing that’s discouraging for street artists is when they spend five hours on a piece and it’s cleaned two days later. There’s not a lot of return on the investment. I made sure that the stuff that I make communicates what I want it to communicate but is fairly efficient. It’s finding a balance between quantity and quality.
I haven’t a problem with defending a career in design, but when someone this ubiquitous, whose prouder body of work had some real, albeit incredibly obvious, significance, a show like this, populated (I wish I had had a camera) by throngs of Lower East Side rabble, smelled of merchandising (CBGB tee-shirts). Instinctually I generally feel theorizing about graffiti art is a fruitless endeavor, as in some clearly maligned explorations in Juxtapoz, where social histories are tossed about with little grace. The phenomenological route however — confronting the performative processes of the work — is worth traveling. With Fairey these investigations are more than ready, and particularly with the 1986 Andre The Giant Has A Posse campaign, as the usual precocious speed and nonchalant machismo that comes with slapping a sticker, painting a stencil or writing a tag is more resonantly significant when coupled with Fairey’s recognition and amplification of societal fears of disruption and underground rebellion.
Clearly whatever freshness was abandoned as soon as his art became an enterprise (lately, Fairey has been designing for Interpol and Billy Idol). His new work at Jonathan Levine, which includes the most obvious messages of disruption in very preassembled, manufactured compositions with a shaky thematic direction, is evident of shark-jumping. But it is easy enough to forget about Fairey altogether (or not know about him at all, which I wish was the case for me) when you see his work on the street, and register the same sort of emotive quality that might have been found when those stickers were first slapped.
Remarks: 3 of 3
Remark · zbs · 16 July 2007
It seems to me the only reason Fairey is as well-known as he is (and others aren’t) is because he was always essentially a marketing act. There are plenty of graf guys who are just as strong graphically but not as astute at "branding".
Though Fairey is really behind the times with this traditional self-advertising. I can't help but observe "viral" marketing is the latest and greatest -- look at, uh, Banksy.
Remark · cmb · 16 July 2007
Now if artists could just use ‘viral marketing’ as their medium rather than whatever inane thing they started with we’d be in business.
Remark · Doyle · 8 August 2007
Isn’t marketing of ones self in such a manner a form of viral marketing (although to me most if not all marketing is viral in a sense). Getting up is a form of communication marketing to those, in its early stages, who know what they are looking at. Fairey has done a successful job of marketing himself over the years as his campaign has spread across the world. Selling out is a natural part of popularity in America and he is not above it. His work might be dated and has ran its course 2 to 3 times over but it still draws a crowd and pays his bills. That’s probably all he looking to do these days, or at least I should hope as beating a dead horse never accomplished anything.