Andre the Giant Has a Posse
Andre the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on a design by Frank Shepard Fairey created in 1986 in Charleston, South Carolina. Distributed by the skater community, the Andre stickers began showing up in nearly every big city across the U.S.A. Later, when Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), he released his manifesto. 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 movement, following in the footsteps of Ivan Stang's Church of the SubGenius and populist World War II icon "Kilroy Was Here". At the same time, Fairey's work has evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant campaign.
History
Fairey and campaign co-creators, Michael Meinhart, Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mongo Nikol created paper and vinyl stickers and posters 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 Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Greece, London, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, 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 compelling.
Threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. in 1993 spurred Fairey to stop using the trademarked 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. The "OBEY" slogan was not only a parody of propaganda, but also a direct homage to the "OBEY" signs found in the 1988 cult classic film, They Live, starring Roddy Piper.
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. 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 André 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 allegiance 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'.
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 André 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 parody sticker "Tattoo the Midget has a bigger posse" features the image of Hervé Villechaize portraying the character "Tattoo" from Fantasy Island. Colin Purrington's "Charles Darwin has a posse" stickers, featuring a black and white photo of Charles Darwin, promote the teaching of evolution. Numerous other parody stickers can be found featuring different pop culture figures, including the Homestar Runner character Strong Mad.[1].
![[1]](http://www.hrwiki.org/images/f/f5/SM_has_a_Posse.PNG){kind=link}
These parody stickers are a further extension of the original joke, and thus are most likely to be found in locations where the original André the Giant iconography is already familiar, such as SoHo, Manhattan, or South Street, Philadelphia.
Tenacious D produced stickers with the slogan "Obey the D" and stylized images of their members, Jack Black, and Kyle Gass, over their initials.
Appearances in North American pop culture
- During his time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jackie Manuel had shirts made of a similar fashion touting his own posse.
See also
- André the Giant
- Che Guevara (photo)
- Culture jamming
- Graffiti
- Guerrilla art
- Kilroy was here
- Meme
- Pop art
- Schwa (art)
- Sticker art