Boxing Andre

Andre the Giant has a posse.

You may have seen stickers proclaiming this fact. Or you may have seen posters, fliers, hats, backpacks, or billboards, in New York, Tokyo, Pere-Lachaise or the Advocate bathroom. Over the past 10 years, Andre's posse has become a worldwide phenomenon.

Started by a Rhode Island School of Design student named Shepard Fairey, the campaign was originally a joke. Fairey plastered Providence with a sticker bearing a stylized Andre as a prank, and it grew from there--gaining curiosity, notoriety, converts, and a self-consciously totalitarian aesthetic (including lone block-typed words like "buy" and "obey").

Though it has been credited with political statements from anarchy to fascism, Fairey maintains the campaign's neutrality. "The reason Andre works is that it has no agenda," he told the Boston Phoenix in 1995. "All I've tried to do is--like Warhol--make the run of the mill into an icon."

But it is not so simple. By virtue of its idiosyncrasies (and well-targeted vandalisms of certain billboards), the Giant campaign has become a token of solidarity among those dissatisfied with modern pop culture. It is, of course, ironic that a symbol of nothing could become so quickly a symbol of symbolizing nothing.

Fairey's website, obeygiant.com, lays out his mission and philosophical allegiances with surprising simplicity: "The GIANT sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as 'the process of letting things manifest themselves.'...Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the product or movie is not obvious...encounters with the sticker provoke thought and possible frustration." Almost as an afterthought, the site notes that "[b]ecause Giant has a Posse has no actual meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who view it reflect their personality and the nature of their sensibilities." The result is a foreshadowing of almost any result the Giant campaign will have--the Rorschach properties of knowledge are not at all unique to the Posse.

And no symbol is entirely arbitrary. For the record, Andre the Giant, born Andre Rene Roussimoff in France, stood 7'4" and over 500 lbs. Besides a laudable wrestling career, he also starred in such memorable roles as Fezzik in "The Princess Bride." A man of few words, his size, novelty, and appearance in cult films nevertheless made him a cult figure. The idea of a posse was borrowed from the skateboarding culture Fairey was active in at the time.

Neither of these facts alone, however--neither Andre's iconic status nor the posse's street cred--can account for the symbol's tremendous, explosive success. Paper magazine senior editor Carlo McCormack recently explained to Salon that "[Fairey]'s really tapped into something. People, without even understanding phenomenology, get in on this elaborate joke of putting out this empty signifier."

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the symbol's growth is that, in an age of electronic proliferation, Andre's playground is not the Internet. Instead, it's the old walls, billboards and utility boxes of ordinary physical cities. The viral proliferation usually associated with chain e-mails is instead a visual play of images in three dimensions--a rare phenomenon if only for the simple reason that paths cross much more often electronically than they do across the world. Postering the world to get a message out is, as most student groups have found, much more difficult and erratic than sending an e-mail.

As a result, the phenomenon's success has depended in large part on unreal amounts of dedication from Fairey and company. Fairey himself has spent most of his free time over the past 10 years printing, plastering and running from the law. (This when he's not running a successful graphic design company, BlkMrkt, with clients like Levi's and Sprite.)

This is not the forum to debate Fairey's "acts of vandalism" in defacing billboards or the place of street art vis--vis advertising. My point is simply that a marvel which requires years of effort from thousands of volunteers should be considered as much a marvel of organization as of mimetic contagion. What's curious is simply the sheer amount of will that goes into making a cultural phenomenon: a lesson for seniors who want to change the world.

In light of its cultural-iconic status, the Fairey campaign has been read by some as a manifestation of media guru Marshall McLuhan's notorious judgment that "[a]dvertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century"--that art, in other words, is neither political nor representational so much as transactional and economic.

Against this bleak picture, Andre's face looms with its stylized series of commands: Buy. Obey. The verbs' object is, of course, left blank. In the end, it seems, what we have bought into is not the product or the image at all but the movement--a movement which, ironically, consists exactly of those who have bought into the image. Postmodern cynics might even say we have bought into buying itself. Caveat emptor.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.