From Wiki: 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.
I was fascinated by the form of Fairey's art. Originally the art has started out as a inner joke between Fairey and his fiends. In the most part, they were just trying to have fun. But with this uncleared intention they've created an unique kind of art. Unlike the commercialized billboards and ADs, The art OBEY is distributing a message with uncleared intention which resulted an open-ended interpretation. Therefore the audiences were forced to analyze the art only based on the image. This might be frustrating for some people, but to me it's all about having fun expressing ourselves.
Looking at Shepard Fairy's art in part inspired me on my thesis project. I've been searching for ways to change today's design mentality in the field of architecture. I'm against both design for maximum efficiency and stylistic architecture. I despite stylistic and iconic architecture because these are just cheap ways to promote the clients, the designers and their architecture. Low class stuff. Designing for maximum efficiency is a rude way to treat our guests with high taste. Lame. I'm passionate about making expressive, sophisticated and friendly architecture. And it shouldn't be cheap.
