Andre the Giant bombs the world!
From London to L.A., Tokyo to Philly, guerrilla artist Shepard Fairey's ironic, iconic postering blitz featuring the long-dead WWF star has become a global phenomenon.


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By Stephen Lemons

June 22, 2000 | LOS ANGELES -- It's late on a muggy Saturday night in Hollywood, and guerrilla artist Shepard Fairey is hanging by his fingers from the ledge of an abandoned building. Moments earlier Fairey was pasting an 8-foot-high portrait of the late World Wrestling Federation star Andre the Giant on the building's wall, but things have suddenly taken a dramatic turn.

Fairey got about half of the colossal poster up before some rent-a-cops came a-callin'. In full Wu Tang-ninja "they'll never take me alive" mode, he hid from view, scrambling to the edge of the ledge while the private security guards radioed for backup.




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Before the donut patrol surrounds the block, Fairey drops 12 feet to the concrete sidewalk below and hightails it across the street where other members of "the posse" wait.

"This kind of thing almost never happens," explains Fairey, 30, panting from the run. "It's very rare that I have any problems in L.A. -- especially this soon out."

Fairey, who looks like a smaller, less menacing version of punk-rocker Henry Rollins, had just begun a weekend of "bombing" L.A. -- rolling with his crew and a carload of posters featuring the homely mug of monolithic wrestler Andre Roussimoff, who died in 1993, rendered in Fairey's totemic style and emblazoned with such Orwellian slogans as "Obey Giant," "You Are Under Surveillance" or simply "Obey."

It's a few minutes shy of midnight on a run that's supposed to flow until dawn. But already the posse's attracted heat. Fairey's had to temporarily abandon both his car, on a corner near the building, and a ladder and bucket of wheat paste up on the ledge.

"If they want to arrest me, they'll have to catch me," says Fairey of cops, rented or otherwise. "And I don't plan to let them catch me."

He can abandon the ladder, but he doesn't have that option with the car. If he leaves it, it might get impounded. But if he or any of his crew approach the vehicle, they risk being nabbed as the car is full of Giant paraphernalia. That's when Fairey's girlfriend, Amanda, a saucy brunette with more moxie than a '40s-era gun moll, grabs the keys and offers to give it a whirl. Knowing the value of a pretty face and trusting his girlfriend's gift of gab, Fairey lets her go.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes later, Fairey's gal speeds to the corner, tires screeching, where the posse's cooling its heels. When the security guys asked her about the Andre stickers stacked on the back seat, she told them it was for a local band. They grilled her a bit but didn't seem motivated enough to get the real cops involved.

The evening is saved, and Fairey's band of merry pranksters is off to paper L.A. red, white and black -- the dominant colors in most Giant posters.

Not to be outdone, before Fairey returns to his home base in San Diego the next morning, he and the posse double back to the abandoned building, finish the huge Andre head and retrieve the ladder. The bombing run has been a success. Though many of the scores of posters Fairey has put up will be removed in the coming week by city cleanup crews, he'll be back next Saturday to bomb L.A. anew.

Such run-ins with authorities are part of the game for the South Carolina-born Fairey, whose nearly 11-year-old Giant campaign is a worldwide phenomenon.

It all started when, as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late '80s, Fairey -- on a lark -- designed a black-and-white sticker using the image of Andre the Giant and started putting it up all over Providence.

The stickers and posters, which boasted, "Andre the Giant Has a Posse," drew the ire of authorities as well as the adulation of the skate punks and other anti-authoritarian youth. Fairey made more stickers, sending them to friends nationwide and asking them to post them. Suddenly the Andre the Giant thing mushroomed into a movement far beyond what Fairey ever imagined.

"I realized that a lot of people didn't know what it was about," he explains later, during an interview at Black Market Design, the successful graphic arts firm he co-owns in San Diego. "But they liked it because they knew that the conservative people hated it. Initially, I wanted to elevate Andre out of the wrestling subculture to be on par with more mainstream cultural icons. That was the coup -- to raise Andre out of a subculture he should be embedded in."

"Even my very first print ad in 1992 was a picture of Elvis with 'Big' underneath and then a picture of Andre with the word 'Giant.' So it was saying that Andre is bigger than Elvis. I also did a shirt called 'The Famous Dead People Shirt,' which was a grid of nine people with Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Bob Marley, Sid Vicious and Andre the last one in the corner."

Think of it as Phase 1 of the Giant campaign: the drive for icon-like status. In this phase, Fairey got people to like Andre by associating him, often humorously, with other adored pop-culture figures: Andre as Gene Simmons, Andre as Jimi Hendrix and so on. But it was a limited gag. So, around 1996 Fairey moved into Phase 2, borrowing heavily from communist propaganda, Russian constructivism and old-fashioned Madison Avenue hucksterism to blow Andre up into an Orwellian Big Brother figure -- ironically appropriating the most powerful aspects of each of these schools for his own anti-authoritarian campaign.

Fairey streamlined Andre's features and began to use the new Big Brother face in provocative ways. One image shows a police officer holding up a photo of "Big Brother Andre," with the slogan "Always Remember to Obey Law Enforcement Officials, Giant." Another shows a paranoid-looking man, who bears some resemblance to Orwell himself. Above his forehead is a series of Andre stencils in orange and black. To the right is the question "Am I under surveillance?" And below, in large block letters, is rendered "7'4" 520LB GIANT OBEY," the measurements being a reference to the deceased Andre's proportions.