Plasma Pool

I own a mug with a farmer’s face faux-stenciled across it. I bought the mug because it seemed so out of character for my local coffee roaster to slap a farmer’s face on a mug and sell it, and I wondered what made them think this advertising tactic was wise. I carried this question with me for a couple weeks until, on my third or fourth time seeing the mugs, always stacked neatly into a pyramid on a shelf next to french presses and vacuum pots, I decided to buy one.

I hold in high regard the roaster that sells the mug, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, and have refrained from drawing parallels between the farmer depicted on my mug, Arturo Aguirre, and, say, Juan Valdez, that famous Colombian coffee farmer who graces the cover of the tin coffee cans in your local supermarket. Arturo Aguirre is the owner of Finca El Injerto, the first farm with which Stumptown Coffee Roasters established a Direct Trade program, a model of coffee sourcing that involves coffee roasters like Stumptown buying their beans directly from the farms that grow them, rather than from brokers. The model emphasizes constant and close communication between the buyer and the grower, and, in most cases, results in higher quality coffee for the buyer and higher revenue for the producer. This method of cutting out the middleman represents an improvement upon certification programs like Fair Trade and Organic, since Direct Trade programs, in addition to being economically beneficial, usually lead farmers to improve coffee growing conditions well beyond the requirements those certification programs call for. In short, the Direct Trade model of buying coffee is widely considered by many coffee professionals to be one of the most–if not the most–socially and ecologically responsible way to purchase high quality coffee beans. It’s a win-win relationship.

Given that background, my hypothesis from the first day I saw the mug has always been a simple one: Stumptown put Arturo’s face on a mug to show their respect for him and demonstrate their pride in his coffee. Of course, not everyone knows enough about the coffee industry, or Stumptown’s role in that industry, to understand the image immediately. Suggesting the exploitation of the farmer’s face for capitalist gains, the mugs seem specifically designed to provoke Portland consumers. Since the mugs were sold in Stumptown’s Annex, though, a calm and quiet space with no loud music or espresso machines, designed specifically to educate consumers about Stumptown’s coffees, anyone with questions could turn around and ask an employee what that farmer’s face was doing on a mug, and, in response, likely get a ten minute talk about Arturo’s farm and his growing processes, as well as a taste of one of his coffees. The mug is odd, but, with enough information, it makes sense. It’s an effective tool for provoking and engaging consumers.

What didn’t make as much immediate sense to me is what I saw about a year after purchasing the mug: Arturo’s face graffitied on a brick wall. The stenciled image is next to a Stumptown cafe’s side door, and, like the mug, bears the text “Arturo.” That’s all the image tells us: It’s not slapped across a mug, for sale in a cafe, and there’s no indication of its association with an artist, a movement, a website, a company–no context whatsoever.

In her TED talk, Alison Jackson, a photographer, touches on her experience using her artwork for Schwepp’s ads. Jackson essentially used the same images she calls art and slapped a Schwepp’s logo in the bottom corner. About how this framing of her work changes its interpretation Jackson says:

…the meanings changed in the sense that, you know, with the logo on, you’re closing all the lines of interpretation down to selling a product, and that’s all you’re doing. When you take the logo off, you’re opening up the interpretations and making the work inconclusive, [as] opposed to conclusive when you are advertising.

What’s fascinating about the Arturo image is that it is an advertisement without the stamp of a logo. Failing to provide explicit context in advertising creates more room for interpretation of the ad. Like Jackson says, the absence of a logo opens up the lines of interpretation and makes the work inconclusive; it is not branded by a company’s logo, not directly connected to a product. Without the stamp of the Stumptown logo, however, the image itself–the face and the name–become the logo, but a vague one, something that stands not exclusively for Stumptown-the-coffee-seller, but for a range of principles and ideals. Arturo’s face is higher wages, better coffee, fairer practices: His face is the face of Direct Trade coffee.

The decision to take Arturo’s face to the streets is indebted to Shepard Fairey’s ’90s street art campaign, “Andre the Giant Has a Posse.” For that campaign, Fairey, along with Ryan Lesser and others, created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text “ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7′ 4″, 520lb”, as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subcultures. Threatened by a lawsuit, Fairey later created a more iconic image of the wrestler’s face, an image of which the Arturo stencil is reminiscent. The artwork was plastered across signs and buildings in Providence, Rhode Island, and in other major cities along the East Coast. The campaign quickly spread around the world–in culturally influential cities like New York and San Francisco, as well as in tourist-heavy places such as Paris and Greece, Argentina and Japan.¹To spread its message, Fairey’s campaign depended on a group of people who were aware of the project’s manifesto:

The OBEY campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. The first aim of Phenomenology is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment. The OBEY campaign attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the campaign and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with Obey propaganda provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer’s perception and attention to detail. The medium is the message.

The face of Arturo takes from the OBEY campaign the methods for stimulating curiosity and reflection on our place in a consumerist society and uses those methods to sell a product, namely Direct Trade coffee. While the image’s immediate lack of context opens up “the lines of interpretation,” as Jackson would have it, we ultimately find that Arturo’s face, though not immediately perceptible, stands for Stumptown’s Direct Trade program; the image is still a branded one, not so much an “inconclusive” work of art as an advertisement whose motives, while not obvious, still work towards selling a product.

Perhaps the most popular image that borrows from the OBEY campaign in circulation today is the Obama Hope poster. It should come as no surprise that Fairey himself is behind this one. The poster, which depicts an Obama gazing heavenward, seems designed specifically to avoid eliciting a single, universal reaction. Surely it’s meant to promote Obama for President, but its failure to provide a specific way to support Obama signifies something much broader. Rather than calling for a specific action–”Vote Obama,” e.g.–the poster gives us a much broader imperative: “Hope.”

The image represents Hope in the same abstract but unmistakable way that the Arturo image represents the Direct Trade program. The beauty of the Obama Hope posters, and what makes its message more complex than the Arturo image’s, is that even when we have an idea of what Hope is applied to, we still have to figure out what having Hope in Obama actually means, a process that, unlike uncovering what the Direct Trade program stands for–a set of principles that could be laid out for us in a paragraph, or a ten-minute talk–is largely personal. Whereas the Arturo image, however obliquely, stands for a new way to do business, the Obama poster leaves you with something undefined, something waiting for you to make it your own.

To be hopeful for something or someone is an emotional state that doesn’t necessarily involve a deliberate thought pattern.² The American Heritage Dictionary defines hope as “a belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one’s life; the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.” What’s inspiring about the Obama campaign is that, with the help of these posters, they’ve inspired millions, through an OBEY model, to personally reflect on what Hope means to them. Perhaps the most concrete representation of such personal reflection is the explosion of creativity from individuals across the country. The poster, accessible both because of its message of Hope (a vague one) and because it’s relatively easy to reproduce, caused us to see this representation of Hope in more places than just on campaign posters. Facebook users changed their profile photos to the image of the poster; homemade stencils were created and used to spray Obama’s portrait, usually loosely based on the Fairey poster, all over town.

Without a clear-cut message, the poster allows each of us to make its message our own. We can spraypaint a stenciled image on the sidewalk to show our endorsement for Obama, but also, in doing so, grant those who see the image the mental space to reflect on whether they, too, endorse him. We can paint the town with ads without cramming our collective mental thinking space. Indeed, we can create ads that force us to take a moment to think.

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1. Wikipedia: Andre the Giant Has a Posse

2. “Hopefulness is somewhat different from optimism in that hope is an emotional state, whereas optimism is a conclusion reached through a deliberate thought pattern that leads to a positive attitude.”