Barack Obama is visual culture’s number-one subject right now.
Combining fine art, street art, and folk art—
YouTube seems
as good a folk medium as any—the output is unprecedented: There
has never been this much art made about a presidential candidate.
One artist has set up a website called Obama Art Report to track it.
A Flickr set of Obama street art has 479 items and counting, including
political cartoons, stencils, and stickers galore; a watch with Obama
in the role of Rosie the Riveter; a portrait of the worldly candidate
made entirely of world maps; photographs of Obama images printed large
and laid in a grid on a public lawn like the AIDS quilt; and layered
prints reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1960s-era mashups. At
Comic-Con in San Diego recently, comic-book artist Alex Ross unveiled
his Superman Obama print, which looks just like a velvet painting.
Barry Blitt tried out a limp Obama satire on the July 21 New
Yorker cover, featuring Barack and Michelle Obama dressed as
terrorists, doing the infamous fist bump. It quickly became a meme,
generating dozens of knockoffs, like Obama’s charismatic dances on
Ellen, or his behind-the-back basketball dribble, which was the
climax of last week’s YouTube mashup featuring the new Ludacris song
“Obama Is Here.”
Chicago artist Ray Noland has been making Obama art since 2006, but
the current explosion really kicked off in February, with Shepard
Fairey’s blocky, graphic view of Obama’s face—depicted in
red and slate blue, gazing into the future, above the word “PROGRESS”
(or “HOPE,” or “CHANGE”). A stencil collage version of the print
commanded a high price in a benefit auction a few weeks ago at Russell
Simmons’s house in East Hampton: $108,000. That was a few days after
the Wall Street Journal reported that 889 Obama-related art
items had sold on eBay since mid-May with an average selling price of
$127. Six pieces of McCain art went on eBay, for an average price of
$57.
Fairey’s image is interesting largely because it has attracted such
a following—especially given its vaguely totalitarian propaganda
style. Much better for prolonged looking is Ron
English’s recent
Abraham Obama, a merging of Obama’s and Lincoln’s faces that
sold out online as a limited-edition print for $200 on
www.upperplayground.com.
(Fine-art auction house Bonhams will sell one of the prints in the
fall, with a presale estimate of $2,000, according to the Wall
Street Journal.)
Upper Playground is a streetwear retailer in San Francisco that has
a gallery; the gallery has commissioned several Obama prints, and
English made this one in June not by digitally superimposing the two
men’s faces but by overlaying them freehand in paint. For a recent
gallery opening in Boston, English created a 100-foot Abraham
Obama mural and the gallery handed out copies of the image for
free. Before long, the city was so covered with it—it had been
plastered everywhere, including on homes—that the gallery put out
a statement asking Obama supporters to stop.
Abraham Obama is coming to Seattle as part of a West Coast
tour. In September, a
giant mural of it will grace the exterior of
the Belltown building that houses BLVD Gallery and Roq la Rue. BLVD
owner Damian Hayes says he supports the candidate, but he questions why
so many artists are making these. “I don’t know if I’m being cynical,
but sometimes it feels as though some artists are capitalizing,” he
said. “I mean, it always works to go with the winner.”
Hayes sees Abraham Obama as “creepy.” It is, in part because
it leaves the impossible impression that Obama’s and Lincoln’s faces
are actually similar. Obama is perhaps the best-looking man ever to run
for president; the Ichabod Crane–ish Lincoln wouldn’t even place.
Obama said as much himself last week when he reminded a crowd of the
obvious, powerful truth: “‘He doesn’t look like those other presidents
on the dollar bills'”—including Lincoln, on the five.
The precedent for Abraham Obama in fine art is dark: Nancy
Burson’s 1983 digital composite photograph of the faces of Stalin,
Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, and Khomeini. As in Abraham Obama, what
makes Burson’s image unsettling is that in a single visage you can see
more than one face. They emerge as you pick each of them out, then they
retreat back into Burson’s grotesque, black-eyed mask. Abraham
Obama is warmer—it’s meant to support a candidate still
running and still vulnerable, after all—but by making such a
grand claim for Obama, it plays into the hands of Obama critics.
(There’s a whole series of YouTube videos comparing archival footage of
Hitler’s supporters to contemporary Obamania.) It also triggers a fear
of Obama supporters—that he can’t possibly be as great as he
seems.
There is no Obama art yet that rises to the level of the best
political, or even presidential, art. Nothing like Andy Warhol’s
pitch-
perfect green-faced Nixon with the words “Vote
McGovern” scrawled along the bottom in 1972. Or Robert Colescott’s
1975 fearless blackface version of the 1851 history painting George
Washington Crossing the Delaware. Or even the 2003 video We
Shall Overcome, of artist Dave McKenzie wearing a Clinton mask and
pressing flesh on the streets of Harlem, where past president
Clinton—”the first black president,” right?—had rented an
office.
Right now, art is being made for Obama. Eventually, it will
be made about him. It’s begun with a tiny, unimpressive trickle.
This spring, a New York artist named Yazmany Arboleda played (and
preyed) on fears in a show he called The Assassination of Hillary
Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama. He mounted it in a
vacant storefront and said it was intended to examine the media’s
character assassination of the candidates. He was rewarded with a visit
from the Secret Service and later responded by parading a giant black
penis along New York streets, followed by a sign that said “Once you go
Barack.” The penis piece had been in the show, which was shut down by
the Secret Service and NYPD; now, the performance is on YouTube.
For his senior project last spring, David Cordero, a student at the
school of the Art Institute of Chicago, made Blessing, a
full-size sculpture of Obama as a smiling Christ, with a blue neon halo
over his head. The awkwardly executed face and hands were just barely
recognizable, but the Obama-as-savior theme was plain. “It could be
dangerous, I think, to assign all these expectations to one person,”
Cordero told reporters. His testimony underscores art’s willful divorce
from its age-old flame, iconography—and it’s not coincidental
that the fall of iconography in art coincides with the rise of the
image-
controlling totalitarian leader. The fall of iconography in
Obama art will coincide with his election or defeat. Come November,
he’ll become a real, sturdy subject for art. 
Yes We Cult