Saturday, August 15, 2009

Other Obamanation posters.

I liked this one.

But for impact, you can't beat this:


Anonymous said...

The Shepard Fairey "Hope and Change" poster is powerful modern-day iconography. Obama looks steely-blue resolved, redly empathetic and the wig-powder white hints at his aristocratic transcendence.

The O-Joker poster forcefully deconstructs the Obama myth, picturing him instead as a smirking sociopath.

There is a lesson to take from this iconoclastic broadsheet.

In Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, The Great Man's picture was everywhere, suggesting Big Brother saw and knew whatever you did or thought, and while he was a loving father-figure, malingerers and wreckers were judged without mercy.
These posters were a powerful force for social control.

If Stalin or Mao's socialism had been artistically represented as an abstraction (as a hammer and sickle, for instance) their immediacy (and psychological control) would have been significantly reduced.

Goal: Reduce Obama's persona to an abstraction. Political cartoonist Gary Trudeau does good work in this arena, if you haven't noticed. Dan Quayle is reduced to a disembodied voice, George Bush 43 is a feather.

The patriot movement has ample talent for the task at hand. Let the art show begin.


Jim said...

Obama as an abstraction...

Picture a chocolate brown tampon. No?

How about, in Trudeau fashion and picture him as a pimp hat complete with peacock feather. No?

Can you abstract a vagina???

Anonymous said...

"[P]icture him as a pimp hat complete with peacock feather."

That's not too bad for a first effort. It's a little weak on political connotation, though.