Image Obama

The creator is Shepard Fairey, an L.A.-based artist and marketing designer who became known to some people at least in the early 1990s when he made stickers portraying a stenciled image of professional wrestler Andre the Giant. Capturing a style that might be described as Bolshevik constructivism meets skate-punk graffiti art, the stickers, which included the words 8220;Obey Giant8221; and which he slapped on every surface he could find, quickly ascended to the realm of underground art phenomenon. Fairey, who8217;s been arrested on charges of defacing billboards and other property, eventually parlayed the sticker enterprise into a not-so-underground T-shirt business.

The Obama poster has spread Fairey8217;s fame, but is the image good for the candidate? Like the photograph-turned-icon of Che Guevara 8212; which graces the T-shirts of countless hipsters who barely know who the guy is 8212; Fairey8217;s Obama poster is rooted in the graphic style of agitprop. There8217;s an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image, a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is a a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; b a controversial American figure who8217;s been assassinated; or c one of those people from a Warhol silk-screen that you don8217;t recognise but assume to be important in an abstruse way.

This cannot be the Obama campaign8217;s idea of good public relations, I think as I stare at one of the ubiquitous Fairey posters while waiting for my soy chai latte. It8217;s just too bohemian and too vulnerable to misinterpretation, too much the visual equivalent of your parents smelling incense and thinking it must be pot.

As it turns out, the Obama folks think it works just fine. That even goes for the candidate, who wrote Fairey a letter in February that included the line, 8220;I8217;m privileged to be a part of your artwork.8221; A photograph of the letter appears on Fairey8217;s website. At that time, Fairey had just one 8220;Progress8221; version of the poster that, despite a run of only 350 copies, had gone viral on the Internet.

Then the Obama campaign asked Fairey to do another version using the word 8220;Change8221; and showing the candidate8217;s face from a different angle in Fairey8217;s own editions, Obama8217;s head is tilted; in the campaign8217;s version, his head is straight, a classic three-quarter portrait.

When I called Fairey to ask if he worried whether the proselytical style of his work 8212; not to mention his penchant for self-promotion 8212; would undermine Obama8217;s campaign, he emphatically said yes. He8217;d initially shown Obama8217;s likeness wearing a lapel pin that depicted the Andre the Giant graphic, he explained. But when the image began to get traction, he took it off, worried that that alone could be misinterpreted. 8220;I didn8217;t want to hijack his awesomeness,8221; said Fairey, whose enthusiasm for Obama now extends to T-shirts, stickers and a 16-by-30-foot banner on the side of his office building in Echo Park. 8220;As for the propaganda aesthetic, it has been called a communist poster. But people tend to categorise things in a lazy way. The Works Progress Administration that FDR set up used the same aesthetic. They just didn8217;t use the colour red. I used red because

I intentionally used a derivation of the typical USA political colour palette.8221;

Fairey told me he thinks it8217;s solely his use of red that makes some people uneasy. I8217;m not so sure. He8217;s an artist; his adoption of propaganda tools 8212; the graphic style, the underground distribution, and, OK, the colour red 8212; is at least in part ironic, a comment on political-machine communiques, a subversion of them. Although, let8217;s be honest, most people don8217;t look at the world through the meta-tinted glasses that this genre of art requires. They may get a whiff of critique, but what if they get a stronger whiff of something they can8217;t quite identify? And what if that confusion leads to some form of heebie-jeebies when it comes to Obama?

Still, the most radical aspect of this whole phenomenon is not the artwork itself but how it conveys Obama8217;s divergence from the generic, easily digestible cultural coding that8217;s always been associated with getting elected. As Fairey says, Obama has 8220;radical cachet.8221;

But if you like Obama and you8217;d like to see him elected president, it8217;s worth asking yourself exactly why none of the other candidates has dipped an ironic toe into agitprop, and whether their freedom from images that conjure mass idol worship, however archly, might not help them in the end.