André the Giant Has a Posse: Encyclopedia - André the Giant Has a Posse

André the Giant Has a Posse

André the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on an original design by Frank Shepard Fairey and Michael Meinhart, created in 1989 while Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). At the time Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology." Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide pataphysical movement, following in the footsteps of Ivan Stang's Church of the SubGenius and populist WWII icon Kilroy Was Here. At the same time, Fairey's work has evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant campaign.

André the Giant Has a Posse - History

Fairey and campaign co-creators Blais Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mongo Nikol created paper and vinyl stickers with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States.

By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as New York City, Atlanta, Austin, and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Greece, London, Mexico, Florida and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image profoundly irresistible.

Threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. in 1993 spurred Fairey to stop using the copyrighted name André the Giant, and to create a more iconic image of the wrestler's face, now most often with the equally iconic branding, OBEY and DISOBEY.

Over time, Fairey's artistic imagery has evolved into a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, parody of a range of iconic styles, mostly a juxtaposition of popular political propagandas and multi-national commercialism. It usually bears the text OBEY Giant, DISOBEY, or most commonly OBEY.

In addition to countless small stickers, OBEY Giant has been spread by stencil, murals, and large wheatpaste posters, covering public spaces from abandoned building faces and street sign backs, to commercial spaces such as billboards and bus stop posters. Furthermore, the popular "OBEY" slogan and stylized Andre The Giant face continues to be reproduced on products ranging from art and clothing to home accessories and decor, considerably expanding the impact of the campaign through iconology based on an allegence to media and popular culture in the guise of counterculture.

Fairey later used stencils to make posters on old wall paper: 'a simple way to make art for people who had seen my stuff on the street and wanted a piece'. As demands on his time grew, Fairey needed help disseminating his work. Gerardo Yepiz helped make stencils of many of Fairey's designs, and also found a die cutter to mass-produce the two most used Giant icons.

André the Giant Has a Posse - Meaning

The essential appeal of the campaign is its parody of propaganda, both political and corporate, that permeates modern American culture. The ubiquity and placement of the André the Giant/OBEY GIANT imagery resembles an advertising campaign, a campaign for a non-existant product. Fairey has succeeded in mocking the idea of branding by creating his own fake brand, subversively using advertising techniques to elevate André the Giant's image to iconic status.

Similarly, the campaign parodies government sponsored propaganda by invoking Orwellian language (e.g. "OBEY") and the artistic style Soviet propaganda posters. These styles are strongly associated with the spread of misinformation, and paired with the André the Giant image indicating the joke nature of the message, reinforce the idea that governments have methods to spread misinformation.

Fairey occasionally creates work with actual messages (one OBEY graphic declares "Make Art Not War") but most of Giant's pictures have no text. The campaign's self-description on OBEY products is filled with doublespeak: "Frequent and novel encounters with OBEY propaganda provoke thought and possible frustration, revitalizing the viewer's perception and attention to detail."

André the Giant Has a Posse - Splinter movements

In recent years Fairey has profited the popularity campaign by selling merchandise. As a result of a perceived commercialization of the OBEY Giant movement, the Creative Commons-licensed World Giant movement was created in 2005, which seeks to alleviate concerns that Fairey's commercial success was nullifying the movement's momentum and unfairly capitalizing on the labor of the original co-founders and anyone around the world who had ever put up a sticker. This split was made public via a video meme of a humorous manifesto produced by Giant/World Giant co-founder Mongo Nikol for an internet contest sponsored by media art activist group Contagious Media.

André the Giant Has a Posse - Parody stickers

The original "André the Giant has a posse" sticker format has been widely imitated for humorous intent. In these parody stickers, the image of Andre the Giant has been replaced with a similarly stylized black and white photo of some other person or character, along with the new figure's height and weight. For example, the sticker "Tattoo the Midget has a bigger posse" features the image of Hervé Villechaize, the character "Tattoo" on Fantasy Island, while Colin Purrington's "Charles Darwin has a posse" stickers promote the teaching of evolution. These parody stickers are a further extension of the original joke, and thus are most likely to be found in locations where the original Andre the Giant iconography is already familiar, such as SoHo, Manhattan.

André the Giant Has a Posse - Appearances in American pop culture

Fairey's original goal of raising the image of André the Giant to an iconic status has been some what of a success, as evidenced by the appropriation of this imagery by others.

• In Batman Forever, a distorted image of Giant's face is visible on a Gotham skyscraper as Batman flies the Batplane nearby.

• Obey Giant images appear in two of Joel Schumacher's films:
  • In 8mm (1999), an "Obey Giant" poster is clearly visible on the outside of an alleyway door the protagonist enters.
  • In Phone Booth (2002), several stenciled images of the "Obey Giant" image are visible on the corner of the building behind the phone booth in which Colin Farrell becomes trapped.

• An "OBEY" poster appears on a wall in the Berlin, Germany stage of the video game Tony Hawk's Underground 2.

• Posters of the stylized face appear on the wall on the main menu screen of the video game Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. They also appear on the level Hollywood, where a lot of them pasted at once, and East L.A, where one huge poster right in front of the entrance.

• In an episode of the television program Family Guy, Peter Griffin paints an outsized image of the stylized "Giant" face emblem on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in an ostensible renovation effort. (Show creator and television producer Seth MacFarlane was a student at RISD at the same time as Frank Shepard Fairey.)

• Fairey's iconic Andre the Giant face is a tattoo schema.

• In the PC video game Half-Life, players can choose André the Giant as a spraytag to mark walls or floors during multiplayer matches.

• The whole phenomenon was the subject of a short 1996 documentary by Helen Stickler.

• In 2004, the Georgia Institute of Technology (who made the NCAA Championship Basketball Game that season) had a popular unsanctioned movement based around tshirts and stickers bearing the faces of their center, Luke Schenscher.

• In the movie "Max Keeble's Big Move" when the bully of the movie opens his locker, two OBEY stickers can be seen in it.

• In the first episode of season four of Alias, red and black OBEY posters can been seen plastered all over the nightclub walls.

• In the music video for Rise Against's "Give it All", the Obey sticker can be seen on the guitarists guitar throughout the video.

• Serj Tankian of System Of A Down recently wore a OBEY tshirt at their performance at last year's Big Day Out concert.

• Cartoon Network's between-show bumps depict a single city in which all of its cartoon stars seem to dwell. In one of these bumps, a picture of Aku, villain from the Samurai Jack series, can be seen with the word "OBEY" underneath it. This picture stylistically resembles the Obey Giant sticker.

• BBS: The Documentary has been promoted with a poster that reads "Ward Christensen has a Posse / 300 baud / S-100 bus."

See also

• Culture jamming
• Graffiti
• Sticker art
• Pop art
• populist party
• Schwa (art)
• meme
• Guerrilla art

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