MANILA, Philippines - Stickers probably earned their street cred as a form of street art thanks to Shepard Fairey, who bombed his college town in Rhode Island with the now-famous “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” campaign, back in 1989, a sort of in-joke among the skater crowd. To see how far this provocateur has come, you know that iconic Obama poster used during the 2008 presidential election, with the words “hope” emblazoned beneath a pensive-looking Barack? He did that. Now it’s part of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. But back to the stickers — they were a quicker, stealthier way for graffiti types to tag up the city with whatever cultural, political or aesthetic statements they were trying to make.
“Their function as a branding tool and as necessitated by free market capitalism build up to a hypertextual landscape of meaning, desires, systems and neuroses,” writes Lena Cobangbang, one of the curators of “Stick With The Enemy,” a sticker show that opens tomorrow, Oct 10 at 6 p.m. at Mo Space Gallery, Bonifacio High Street, Taguig. “Contemporary life seems stuck from this surfeit of surface treatment so that walls scream dread of horror vacui, holes howl of vapid voids.” Tag or be tagged. -ANC