"Supply and Demand," the expansive installation of Fairey's deliriously chic activist art opening today at the Institute of Contemporary Art, tests these propositions, and many more besides, to the max.
I loved it. The ICA's galleries have been transformed for the occasion and bobble now with so many eye-catching works of such variegated scale that the smallish, boutique-like galleries seem suddenly vast and enveloping.
The show has been well over a year in the planning. But now that it's open, it feels almost scorchingly timely. Fairey, a 38-year-old street artist, graphic designer, and political activist, came to prominence in the early 1990s with his "Obey Giant" campaign of stickers, stencils, and posters. But as seemingly everyone now knows, he also designed the posters in red, white, and blue of Barack Obama, emblazoned with the words "HOPE," "PROGRESS," and "CHANGE," that were used in the president's election campaign. (A glass display case here contains, alongside the artist's tattered black sneakers, a silkscreen stencil, and a cover of Time magazine, a typed letter from Obama: "I am privileged to be a part of your art work and proud to have your support," it reads.)
Only a relatively recent blip on the art world's radar, Fairey appears to be riding not just a popular swell but a veritable tsunami of cultural change. His smart, peppy, decoratively frenetic visuals are as ubiquitous as you can get without buying up great swaths of advertising space (and these days who has the money for that?).
More than any other artist of his generation, except perhaps Banksy, a fellow street artist from Britain (described by Fairey in the catalog as his "favorite artist"), Fairey has managed to capture and shape public consciousness. And that, for a visual artist, is no small thing.
And yet in many ways Fairey is so right-on it hurts. Here's a guy capable of celebrating the linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky with a street poster that reads, in part, "I lived with the system and took no offence/until Chomsky lent me the neces sary sense"; a man who talks humorlessly about the "semiotics of consumption," "empowering yourself," and "making a difference."
