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When I was in high school, the work of Shepard Fairey inspired and radicalized me in many ways. I would drive to locations around the suburbs with a stack of obey stickers and a stack of my own stickers bearing my tag name, as well as anti- sweatshop/ nike and anti- taco bell stickers. I would sticker the heck out of an area, whether it be my high school or a shopping area and head back deeper into the suburbs towards home.
Coming from a place of class privilege, this was a safe exercise for me. My transition into radical politics was not so much empowering as liberating from the constrains and expectations of middle classdom. Though being white and middle class means i could get away with stickering, even when i got caught. Though these experiences defined me as an activist, the problematic side of my radicalization was that it was never framed in how to be an ally or how to be accountable. The artwork of Shepard Fairey, and similiarly the works of Crimethinc., did not help me address privilege as an activist but further ignore it, (ab)using these entitlements in different ways.
The original stickers stating “obey” were ironic, subversive, and in themselves a critique of consumeristic culture. Moving away from the famous wreslter, Fairey has made a comfortable living off co-opted radical images from the likes of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Vietnamese freedom fighters, among others. Its like some backwards psudeo-faux-irony that is just, as Favianna Rodriguez put it, “straight up sad.”
Please do not maserade your art as something radical or progressive if you are going to turn around make shit like the image above. There is a gaping gorge between working for social change and selling out the people, not a thin blurry line.
Favianna Rodiguez wrote a post far more articulate than this one. Link to it here:
http://favianna.typepad.com/faviannacom_art_activism/
It was only this morning I saw the work of artist Nick Cave and I am already completely enamored. The work blurs the line between visual art and performance and is reinforcing positive culture both modern and ancestral.
See the post at the Wooster Collective blog (link to right) for more videos.
