Andre The Giant Sticker

Street Art is absolutely everywhere, and that statement is only a little hyperbolic. Countless cities across America all feature similar calling cards and stickers on the walls of skyscrapers or on the backs of street signs. From the sprawling cities of New York and Los Angles to smaller metropolitan areas like Charlotte or Charleston, no matter how different the city is, all anyone needs to do is look on the side of a telephone pole or the back of a crossing light to see dozens of stickers made by countless artist. To me, however, one sticker has always stood out and greeted me in each city, and it has always perplexed me. It’s a sticker of the wrestler Andre the Giant, and I always wondered what the point of the sticker was. Sometimes it

Fairey was born in Charleston in the 1970’s and started his artistic career by working in street art (Novak). One of his first forays into street art was the Andre the Giant sticker which was made in response to a friend saying that Andre the Giant was not cool and not worth making a stencil of. The stickers became widely popular and ended up everywhere, stuck to everywhere in sight, and eventually Fairey expanded his outreach by making larger and larger versions of the Andre the Giant stencil, most with the word “OBEY” underneath his face. In the Bansky film “Exit through the Gift Shop” Fairey says that the whole point of the “OBEY” series was to show the power of repetition, stating that the more the artwork was seen made people question what its meaning was. This repetition, Fairey says, gave the work power from its “perceived power”, even though the stencil, in the end, was pretty much an inside

The mural itself, although difficult for me to understand at first glance, is effective in getting its political message across and promoting green energy overall. The familiar motifs or calling cards of Fairey in this work, in particular the Andre the Giant face in the star, I feel work against the main meaning of the piece for people who are unfamiliar with Fairey’s work. The face of Andre the Giant in the mural, however, did make me curious to figure out what his relevance was in the meaning of this mural, so it is entirely possible that the face in the star actually works toward the benefit of the piece, with Fairey employing the power of repetition in his work once again to raise curiosity. Regardless of why, be it the striking colors, the position in the middle of campus, or the face of Andre on the mural, all of these things work directly to draw curiosity about the meaning, and even to draw awareness to the idea of green energy as a