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When Copenhagen refused to Obey
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When Copenhagen refused to Obey
by ALEC DUDSON on Nov 22, 2011 • 2:57 pm
Shepard Fairey has been a big name in street art for some time now, with his first tentative steps on the scene being the initiation of the ‘Andre the Giant has a Posse’ sticker campaign all the way back in 1989. Soon evolving into the ‘Obey Giant’ and interestingly inspired by the John Carpenter cult classic film ‘They Live!’, Fairey spent many a year ensuring that the Obey Giant became an instantly recognisable image that is synonymous with the stencil and paste-up street art movement that in recent years has seen the unlikely twist of gallery shows for the likes of Shepard and his Brighton-based luminary Banksy.
In saying that gallery shows featuring street-art were unlikely, I am suggesting that five or ten years ago that this was very much the case, since the birth of the spray-can and indeed the first act of vandalism (I’m not even going to attempt to put a date on either of those), street artists have never been ‘accepted’ by the high-art scene that gallery spaces are used to commissioning. In this respect, Banksy, it could be argued, paved the way for others to have their work considered by the art scene, holding his first exhibition in Los Angeles in 2002, although with this and the incredible amounts of money that his pieces have commanded at auction, the Bristolian is often pilloried by his peers for ‘selling out’. These days however, it is not nearly as unusual for street artists to hold exhibitions and in August of this year Shepard Fairey headed to Denmark for a solo exhibition at the V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, unaware of the controversy that one of his planned murals was going to stir up.
Whilst the gallery show itself was a real success, the second collaboration with the V1 for Fairey who had worked with them for a previous show in 2004, the issue arose with the creation of a mural on the side of a building overlooking the site where the legendary Ungdomshuset youth hostel once stood. The building at Jagtvej 69 was, for a long time, the base of operations for Copenhagen’s left-wing community and on 1st March 2007 around 7am during an operation from police special forces which included the assistance of a military helicopter Ungdomshuset inhabitants were cleared out. Rioting ensued over the following days with a reported 690 arrests being made in the space of three days with the building being demolished on the 5th of March with both that act and the events that had led up to it enraging thousands of Danish people, with numerous conspiracy theories circulating, including one that the operation had been undertaken as a means for the Danish police to ‘test’ their anti-terrorist forces.
Despite working with people from the V1 Gallery in the planning of his murals, Fairey’s decision to depict a dove with the word ‘Peace’ and the number 69 (in reference to the address of Ungdomshuset) saw him come under violent scrutiny from locals who still very much remember the events of March 2007. Unexpectedly, the declaration of Peace was interpreted in the manner that the residents and supporters had gone peacefully and that there was a forgive and forget tone to the message, both of which inspired the ranker of those affiliated with the building and saw the mural defaced overnight. Two revisions later, (to my knowledge) the mural finally was deemed acceptable but Fairey wasn’t yet out of the water. At a party for the exhibition near to the V1 Gallery at Kødboderne 18, Fairey and one of his colleagues (the magnificently named Romeo Trinidad) were assaulted by a group of young men who were accusing them of being ‘Obama illuminati’ and urging them with swinging fists to ‘go back to America’. Somewhat routinely, the entire trip had been filmed in order to capture the creative process of setting up the gallery installation and working on the murals but as a result, some really interesting footage was captured and has now been released in a commendably frank manner by Fairey and can be watched (albeit in four separate parts) below.
When Copenhagen refused to Obey
by ALEC DUDSON on Nov 22, 2011 • 2:57 pm
Shepard Fairey has been a big name in street art for some time now, with his first tentative steps on the scene being the initiation of the ‘Andre the Giant has a Posse’ sticker campaign all the way back in 1989. Soon evolving into the ‘Obey Giant’ and interestingly inspired by the John Carpenter cult classic film ‘They Live!’, Fairey spent many a year ensuring that the Obey Giant became an instantly recognisable image that is synonymous with the stencil and paste-up street art movement that in recent years has seen the unlikely twist of gallery shows for the likes of Shepard and his Brighton-based luminary Banksy.
In saying that gallery shows featuring street-art were unlikely, I am suggesting that five or ten years ago that this was very much the case, since the birth of the spray-can and indeed the first act of vandalism (I’m not even going to attempt to put a date on either of those), street artists have never been ‘accepted’ by the high-art scene that gallery spaces are used to commissioning. In this respect, Banksy, it could be argued, paved the way for others to have their work considered by the art scene, holding his first exhibition in Los Angeles in 2002, although with this and the incredible amounts of money that his pieces have commanded at auction, the Bristolian is often pilloried by his peers for ‘selling out’. These days however, it is not nearly as unusual for street artists to hold exhibitions and in August of this year Shepard Fairey headed to Denmark for a solo exhibition at the V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, unaware of the controversy that one of his planned murals was going to stir up.
Whilst the gallery show itself was a real success, the second collaboration with the V1 for Fairey who had worked with them for a previous show in 2004, the issue arose with the creation of a mural on the side of a building overlooking the site where the legendary Ungdomshuset youth hostel once stood. The building at Jagtvej 69 was, for a long time, the base of operations for Copenhagen’s left-wing community and on 1st March 2007 around 7am during an operation from police special forces which included the assistance of a military helicopter Ungdomshuset inhabitants were cleared out. Rioting ensued over the following days with a reported 690 arrests being made in the space of three days with the building being demolished on the 5th of March with both that act and the events that had led up to it enraging thousands of Danish people, with numerous conspiracy theories circulating, including one that the operation had been undertaken as a means for the Danish police to ‘test’ their anti-terrorist forces.
Despite working with people from the V1 Gallery in the planning of his murals, Fairey’s decision to depict a dove with the word ‘Peace’ and the number 69 (in reference to the address of Ungdomshuset) saw him come under violent scrutiny from locals who still very much remember the events of March 2007. Unexpectedly, the declaration of Peace was interpreted in the manner that the residents and supporters had gone peacefully and that there was a forgive and forget tone to the message, both of which inspired the ranker of those affiliated with the building and saw the mural defaced overnight. Two revisions later, (to my knowledge) the mural finally was deemed acceptable but Fairey wasn’t yet out of the water. At a party for the exhibition near to the V1 Gallery at Kødboderne 18, Fairey and one of his colleagues (the magnificently named Romeo Trinidad) were assaulted by a group of young men who were accusing them of being ‘Obama illuminati’ and urging them with swinging fists to ‘go back to America’. Somewhat routinely, the entire trip had been filmed in order to capture the creative process of setting up the gallery installation and working on the murals but as a result, some really interesting footage was captured and has now been released in a commendably frank manner by Fairey and can be watched (albeit in four separate parts) below.
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