jimikeen: Shepard Fairey

The summer has officially started for me, which start with a trip to Boston, where I saw Shepard Fairey's show and my first Red Sox game ever! I am a official New Englander now. I have had a day where I have got to do nothing but sleep and veg, something I never do and every once in a while, a person has to day that. I did watch the remade, some what lame and mildly entertaining, Journey to the Center of the Earth. Which I found bearable to watch and I enjoyed it.
I like his art because it is bold, it is political and iconic. It has a message and takes a stand!!!

"These Sunsets Are to Die For!" stencil collage and mixed media on canvas.

In one of the most stunning and powerful pieces, "These Sunsets Are to Die For!" a man and a woman hold hands on a rock in the left foreground, watching as a city across a bloody river shoots polluted smoke and fire into the sky, the huge canvas bathed in (communist) red, with the title words at the bottom signifying that the American dream is now a living nightmare.

I havn't seen bold, polical and relivant political art like Shepard Fairey's since I was living in NYC in the eighties. I have seen alot of his art though. I lived in RI where he was a student at RISD and live in NYC and I have seen his stickers everywhere in both places.

The later added the word OBEY to his art, borrowing it from the cult classic “They Live” - a film starring another wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. OBEY quickly turned into an international fad, and the moniker became Shepard Fairey’s calling card.

In the show I saw a manifesto on Shepard's Experiment in Phenomenology and it said this...

The process of letting things manifest themselves. It attempts to enable peopel 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."

I wasn't going to go into this but I just found this image while I was in Iraq, watching the Republican's Convention (on the internet!). I thought of it while at the show yesterday. The movie They Live also had an impact on me and as I watched the Republicans manipulate images and use slogans, manifesting consent (well, attempting to), I made the connection on a similar level that Fairey does when using Obey so often in his art work. I feel a conection to what he is saying through many of the images that he is creating and I agree with many of his public statements he has made in the press on how he feels and the way that things are in America.

He had this to when he was promoting a couple of his shows last year in NYC.

He had this to say about Giuliani. Fairey and I agree on Giulaini and what he is all about. I definitely don’t want Giuliani; I hate Giuliani. Giuliani got a lot of credit after 9/11 but it’s just because he seemed like he maintained his composure and was a leader or whatever – which was his fucking job. And he was a totally Nazi about people having an open container on the street or doing graffiti or doing any of that stuff. His quality of life and zero tolerance regulations – I mean if this is going to make me look bad because everyone loves Giuliani don’t print it but he’s a fucking piece of shit.

When asked about how his work has grown more political during the Bush administration, he had this to say.

I’ve spent a lot of time in New York, I have a lot of friends who are new Yorkers and I was really distressed by 9/11 – as much as the next person. But I think it created a climate of fear that was an easy way for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld to push through an agenda that ordinarily wouldn’t have gotten through. And so there’s one side of me that’s totally sympathizing with the idea that maybe there is some sort of benefit in the placebo of finding a scapegoat and everyone’s venting. But it just went way, way too far.