Blue Lights & Hash Browns

Shepard Fairey

WK Interact

HuskMitNavn

Lokiss

Faile

Blue Lights & Hash Browns

I rarely pay much attention to art hanging in the street - street art. But I notice the art, and generally the figures and words on walls and lampposts are a welcome input when I move through the city.

I would survive if street art didn’t exist, but the fact that it does is wonderful for this reason: it reminds me that a lot of people I don’t know run risks and cut sleep to send me messages I wouldn’t otherwise have received.

I’ve asked six street artists to talk about the most memorable challenge they’ve faced getting their work out there.

André the Giant was a once famous wrestler from France who grew so big physically that in the end he died of growth. For 17 years American artist Shepard Fairey has been keeping the memory of the giant alive by illegally covering walls in cities worldwide with posters and stickers showing an image of the face of the giant. Name of project: the Obey campaign. Since 1989 the American authorities have been trying to stop Fairey. Here he talks about the ninth time he got arrested.

In 1996 I got arrested in New York by the Vandal Squad for putting up one of my posters on the street. They are very strict about this sort of thing in New York. They won’t let you go with a fine but send you directly to jail for an indefinite period of time. You are not permitted to leave your cell on bail but have to wait in prison until you are going to court. I’m a diabetic, but I was refused to take my medication so I became very sick. I went to the hospital, and that was one of the times I really feared for my life. But I got out alive, and I was ok, and I continued doing my thing.

In the year 2000 I went on a short trip to New York to put up posters. During the time of my visit I managed to do a lot of really big pieces and needed to do only one last piece before going back to San Diego where I was living at the time. Have you been to New York? Do you know the huge DKNY-ad on the corner of Houston and Broadway? The billboard is probably the best spot for advertising in the city. Right above it there is a big piece of empty wall where I had wanted to hang a poster for a long time.

I’m with my cousin at the time and a friend from San Diego. Carrying a broom and a stick and a bucket with wheat-paste we manage to get past the guards in the DKNY-building and get up on the roof. On the poster we’re carrying is a black and white close-up of the face of Andre the Giant, framed by a thick triangular border. The poster measures 2 X 3 meters, but is divided in two halves. As I’m leaning over the edge of the building, struggling to paste the first half of the poster on the wall, my cousin realizes that by mistake we have brought the same two halves of the poster. He roles up the half that he’s ready to give me, puts it back into my bag, and runs down to the car to get the second and right half of the poster. He returns, we finish our job and then cross the street to see the result of our work.

Standing on the corner of Houston and Broadway with a beer in our hands, congratulating each other for our achievement, each of us put up a Giant-sticker on a lamppost. The next thing I know is that three undercover cops pull out their batches. It takes a second before I realize that one of the officers is the same guy who arrested me back in 1996. He doesn’t recognize me but remembers the Giant-stickers from back then. The man searches my bag, finds the 300 stickers I’m carrying, but fails to examine the rolled-up poster sticking out of the bag. The officer puts the three of us in handcuffs, hands behind our backs, and throws us as well as the bag in the back of the police car.

While my cousin, my friend and me are sitting in the car, the officer remains standing outside. Suddenly he says, “Shepard, I bet you have no idea of what I’m looking at right now”? I say, “Ahh, what are you looking at”, but of course I know. He opens the door, pulls me out of the car, shoves me hard against the side of the car and points at the huge Giant-poster on the façade above the DKNY-ad on the other side of the street. He says, “I guess you have NO idea of how that got up there”? I say, “No, I have no idea of how it got up there. I just ordered some stickers on the internet, I don’t know how anyone would manage to get it up there. Don’t you think it’s a legal sign? Don’t these guys have a clothing line or something? They probably have an office where the poster is”. And he says, “I cannot be sure, but I suspect there is a connection between your stickers and the poster up there”.

The officer doesn’t know that I’m Obey and the guy he is looking for, and starts telling me about my own project. He says, “Yeah, the Giant-project started on Rhode Island in 1989, and the guy has got his own web page, and he sends stuff to people everywhere”. He asks, “Why do you support this guy when you could get a broad drunk in a bar and take her home with you”? The officer brags about how he had caught the man behind the project in ‘96. “The Andre-guy, yeah, I nailed’em. He had stickers, posters, stencils, spray-glue, I nailed’em”.

With these words the officer throws me back in the car and locks the door. The window on my right side is open because it’s hot. His belly is just in front of my face. I know that as soon as we reach the station, he and his colleagues will take a closer look at the content of my bag, and, when they find the poster, realize that I’m the guy behind the project. Terrified by the prospect I lean down towards the bag lying on the seat next to me, grab the poster with my teeth, let it fall on the floor between my knees and SHOVE it under the front seat - without having the guy seeing or hearing me.

The officers can’t have found the poster in their car because we were released two or three days later. When I was released I immediately went out to put up more stickers and posters, because the longer time you wait doing more stuff after having been arrested, the more hesitant you’ll become. I’ve been arrested nine times, but in the year 2000 was when I was most afraid of the consequences. That night was really intense. I had wanted to get my poster up there on the building for five years, and I succeeded, but got arrested. Highs and lows. Big accomplishment, and then… a lot of fear.

www.obeygiant.com

WK Interact is 36-years old. At the age of 22 he moved from France to New York to prove his talents as a painter. Since then he has made his mark on the city in the form of a number of expressive, black and white cartoon-like wall paintings of people jumping, fighting, screaming and having sex. WK Interact lives for his characters. Here he recounts how one day they almost killed him.

At the age of 22 I traveled to New York from France. I couldn’t speak English back then, and knew no one in the city. I didn’t have a place to stay, I had no money, no green card, I was completely alone. I didn’t eat properly, didn’t sleep properly and received help from no one. But I knew what I was doing, and I never complained. I had come to New York to paint

The city made a huge impact on me. I became fascinated by its unpredictability, its violence, its noise. In spite of the fact I was having a hard time, the city inspired me like no other city had ever inspired me, and I promised myself to give back to the city what it was giving me.

In the nighttime I started to express my fascination for the craziness of the city on walls and façades in the form of paintings of bank robbers, shootouts, people fighting, screaming, moving. But because what I was doing was illegal I was prevented from spending as much time on each painting as I wanted to.

One day I was walking past a parking lot on the corner of Prince Street and LaFayette on Lower Manhattan. The L-shape of the wall on the parking lot fascinated me. The wall was six meters high and 40 meters long and was a perfect backdrop for a huge wall painting.

I rushed home, made a quick drawing, returned and got hold of the owner of the parking lot and showed it to him. I said, “I want to paint your entire wall. It won’t cost you anything. In return you’ll let me paint this drawing on the wall”.
The man was a grumpy, old Italian-American emigrant. He looked at the sketch, then at his watch, saying: “Today is Friday. If you can coat the wall twice before Monday morning, I’ll let you make your wall painting. Otherwise the answer is no”.

Suddenly I was in a hurry. I had no scaffolding, I had no ladder, I had no money to buy paint for. But as it sometimes happens when you’re pressed, you make decisions that under other circumstances you would never have made.
A couple of months earlier I had been working in a paint shop on 75th street for six dollars an hour. Having this one thought in my head that I had to be finished two days later, I went to see my boss on the pretence that I had come to pick up a couple of shoes.
In the backyard behind the shop I found a bucket containing seven liters of white paint. I managed to get the bucket out on the street without him noticing me.
From then on I worked 56 hours non-stop. I didn’t sleep, I ate only little because I had no money to eat for, and didn’t go home at any point to change or take a shower. For 56 hours I ignored the physical exhaustion and the painful feeling of hunger I experienced while working to meet the man’s deadline.
Before long I ran out of paint. But I was lucky. Incredibly lucky. The man who owned the building next to the parking lot had seen me working day and night, and finally he came up to me to hear what I was doing. I told him about the agreement I had made with his neighbor. He said, “I’ll give you the paint you need to finish your job if in return you paint the lower part of the façade of the block I live in”. I promised him.