Post No Bills
Words: Dawn Dumpert
Photo: Kiino Villand
Fairey's methods of exhibition are similar to Conal's - "I steal public space," says Fairey bluntly - and his followers are likewise legion. But where Conal, a self-professed former "stone hippie," makes work that's motivated by left-wing politics, Fairey is much more concerned with the issues that would naturally mean more to a skate kid who came of age in the '80s - namely, the intersections of pop culture and capitalism. "When I saw that it had the potential to affect people," Fairey says of the Giant, "I really started thinking about the dynamics of image consumption." Ironically, it's those very dynamics that, as the giant has grown more popular and pervasive - Fairey also shows his work at a prestigious LA gallery - have gotten the artist into ideological trouble with those who feel that he's become too famous. "Some people say, ‘Oh, in your ambition to demonstrate this project, you've become absorbed by the system you're critiquing,'" he notes. What many seem to overlook, however, is that, like most guerrilla artists, the one person most in thrall to the work and its dissemination is Fairey himself.
Then again, that these artists are becoming internationally known at all is a relatively new reality. You could trace American guerrilla art back to the illustrations on incendiary pamphlets in the pre-Revolutionary colonies, and the roots of modern US sniping can certainly be seen in the boom of political postering in the '60s, when activists appropriated the machinery of WWII government propaganda to protest Nixon and Vietnam. But the history of guerrilla art is, by its very nature, elusive - how to document, after all, an anonymous artistic phantom that leaves his or her stamp mysteriously in the night?
The answer, of course, is a keyboard away. The relatively instantaneous visual communication afforded by the Internet - not unlike the mechanics of guerrilla art itself - has naturally extended the dimensions of contact and dialogue. Artists and audiences are finding their way to each other without leaving home, and disaffected kids in the 'burbs, and around the world, can request posters and stickers from their favorite sniper to coat their own home town, or even find the inspiration to set out on their own projects. Which is what almost any guerrilla artist would tell you is the whole idea in the first place. "What my thing does," says Fairey enthusiastically, "is provide a template. I send 'em a package with stencils and stickers and some literature about what I'm trying to do. They look at that, figure out how the stuff's made and then go and do their own thing." When Conal first started sniping, he figured, "Oh, this is gonna be so cool - I'll put this up and then people who disagree with me will put up posters and we'll have a poster war!" If that didn't happen exactly as Conal imagined ("I realized that you have to be a maniac," he admits), there's no denying that the guerrilla artist's desire for public discourse is being met in ways he probably couldn't have foreseen. "There are so many talented kids out there," says Conal, of the next potential generation of guerrilla artists, "and they have so much on their minds. I wish I could make them understand how easy it would be for them to do this."
