The Perceived Power of an Empty Command

The “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” street art movement, later shortened to simply OBEY Giant, was borne out of college induced boredom in 1989, when RISD student Shepard Fairey was rushing to make a stencil for class, and happened across an advertisement for the then popular wrestler. By the early 90s, this single stencil had been turned into thousands of stickers and posters, littering cities around the world and leaving passersby wondering, obey what? In a 2008 interview, Fairey admitted that in fact, this command— blared so convincingly beneath the empty, hanging eyes— means nothing, is entirely open to interpretation. And here in lies the true genius of the OBEY poster— it derives real power from “perceived power” (as Fairey described it), spawning fear of the unknown, the misunderstood, and thus spreading. OBEY functions as an experiment in social phenomenology—the study of how one perceives and processes external stimuli, a final conclusion resulting from a war waged between one’s own initial, objective response and any subconscious, socially derived opinions. Essentially, viewers see the image everywhere and see others processing the information and so they themselves assume it has a meaning, that there is something to process. If dialogue is sparked, and the question is obviously left unresolved, people simply assume there is resolution somewhere, that someone has an answer, so they keep talking, keep asking, and real power is borne. The melting black lines of an unknown face, coupled with the confident, senseless command thus create an enormous feedback loop to which viewers, at the center, are blind to but spurred on by. This loop, due to a lack of a message, paradoxically allows OBEY to convey an actual message, to reveal an enormous societal shortcoming: the subjectivity of human perception— our openness to propaganda and eagerness to assume meaning.