Fairey Tale

Shepard Fairey isn't getting any younger. None of us are, and the legendary wheat-pasting-rebel-cum-international-design-guru is no exception. His joints don't ache after he scales buildings to put up his enormous, cryptic "Obey Giant" posters, but he's 34, and he can see that day coming.

Being a street artist for nigh on two decades comes with its own particular conundrums. According to Fairey's 1990 manifesto, for example, his posters are like psychological tests. The now-iconic "Obey" poster has no actual meaning, the manifesto explains. It's just an imposing face with a command to obey, but no indication of what or whom to heed. Therefore, Fairey concludes, what people see in his work says more about viewers than about his images. But that kind of surprise-inspired questioning of our own perceptions doesn't happen when we've seen the same images for more than ten years.

When Fairey's posters appeared on downtown Kansas City buildings last month, my first reaction was neither favorable nor unfavorable. A companion and I saw the "Obey" poster when we were driving to the West Bottoms.

"Wow," my friend said. "He made it down here, too."

"Yeah," I replied.

We got a vague kick out of tracking the well-known artist's paper trail and seeing that he had explored the coolest parts of our city. But that was it. Neither of us said, "Hey, that kind of makes me think about all the visual commands I'm fed on a daily basis."

Our reactions might have been milder than hoped for by an artist who risks incarceration to display his work. A handful of others responded strongly enough to make up for it, though.

Fairey had been in town to give a lecture at the Kansas City Art Institute on November 4. His visit, spurred by a student-driven initiative, was timed to coincide with Fairey's fine-art opening at the Paragraph Gallery the next night.

"I'm in a position now where if I don't do street art, people are going to be disappointed," Fairey tells me now. During his first trip to Kansas City in 1998, he'd posted a couple of items in the West Bottoms and one in midtown. Before his most recent visit, Fairey says, a youngster eager for his arrival told him, "You've got a big following here from all the shit you put up before."

Now, Fairey doesn't want people to think he did the street art just to catapult himself into the gallery world or to get the visibility he needed to land big design clients such as Mountain Dew. He knows that he didn't get where he is today by brown-nosing in the system. He got where he is by making himself public enemy No. 1 in Providence, Rhode Island, getting arrested and everything else.

So he shows up at Paragraph Gallery to install his kick-ass show and along comes a local fan delivering wheat paste and climbing equipment. Gallery operator Hesse McGraw lets Fairey know that his space is funded by the Urban Culture Project (a nonprofit foundation that's installing art in once-empty downtown spaces) and that there will be trouble if he hits downtown, especially in the vicinity of the Paragraph.

That night, eight old-school "Obey" posters went up on what the visiting artist assumed were unused urban structures. One building was being gutted. The other had busted-out windows. The parking garage was empty. The billboard? Blank. "I was like, No problem -- no one's going to care," Fairey tells me. Besides, he notes of his paper-and-paste creations, "The stuff comes off in the weather anyway."

But few if any structures in the Crossroads remain unspoken for. Gutted means "being rehabbed." A parking garage empty at night? All downtown parking garages are empty ... at night.

And as for no one caring? If Fairey's work is a psychological test, our city's response indicates symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, provoked by that etching-cream incident a few years back, when artists expensively messed up people's windows, offering no redeeming aesthetic value in the meantime. Soon thereafter, our supermod pride and joy -- the once deteriorating but now awesome red TWA building -- was hit by graffiti. It left downtown property owners feeling burned, and the City Council passed anti-graffiti ordinances.

The day after Fairey's recent wheat-pasting escapade, he gave his lecture at the Art Institute. He likens what happened during that talk to the footage of George W. Bush finding out that the World Trade Center had been hit by planes. One person got onstage and whispered to another, who whispered to another, and so on until the lecture was over. The school was worried about getting in trouble, and McGraw was concerned about his gallery's partnership with downtown developers.

The school considered sending its students to remove the art they'd just discussed and talked about whether to ask Fairey to issue a statement saying that he'd acted against the wishes of the school and the gallery.

Fairey offered to pay for the cleanup, thinking that would calm everybody down. "I took responsibility for my actions," he says. "That it had so many fucking ripples seems insane. I had no idea that the Kansas City ecosystem was that fragile."