But that’s just because they’re associating it with Russian constructivism, which was such a powerful graphic design. The funny thing is that a lot of people have told me that my work looks communist. But advertising is often packaged in a way that’s friendly, so people don’t think about the I AM NEAR or OBEY element.

A banner like the one you’re describing is going to set you on that course pretty quickly. I thought it would make people think about all the mechanisms of control out there. So what I was doing was crystallizing that into something tangible. When I came up with the tagline OBEY for my work, it was based on the idea that there are forces all around us that have agendas, but they are frequently unspoken. It’s just open-ended enough to be spun whatever way is useful. “If you’re thinking of defecting, don’t do it because I am near-I am looking right over your shoulder.”įAIREY: In a paternalistic, protective way. I assumed the banner was referring to the leader.įAIREY: There are so many ways that could be interpreted. I still don’t know what it meant, but it was on a banner that was strung from an expressway overpass, and it just said, I AM NEAR. But how can we do this in a positive way? We’ll encourage people to drink milch!” There was another one that I remember seeing the first time I ever drove into East Germany.

But obviously someone in Germany must have thought, “Well, there’s advertising in the West, and we haven’t got any, so we better catch up. It was a milk bottle and it had a slogan, in German, which essentially said, DRINK MILK! DRINK MILCH! It used to fascinate me, because growing up in Michigan in my particular town, we had Milky the Clown-this clown who drank lots of milk. The one in Berlin that I liked best was about seven stories high. They had imagery there on the walls of the buildings-sanctioned imagery-that was the nearest thing to some of your Andre the Giants and some of your other larger, simpler imagery. POP: I lived in Berlin when the wall was still up, and East Berlin was the communist zone.

Iggy pop 70s