never has.” Although it may appear easy to parody a kitsch image, Wright
states, “It’s never enough to just start with a great poster...Sometimes I
have to struggle with a striking image for weeks to find the perfect news
story to attach to it, or it might take a while to wrangle the perfect turn of
phrase to substitute on the poster.”
It took him six months, for instance, to figure out what to do with
the famous Rosie the Riveter We Can Do Itposter. “I just knew I didn’t
want to waste that poster on a tag line that didn’t make me laugh,” he
recalls, “and a conceptual breakthrough came one day when I was up late
and it suddenly struck me that it looks like Rosie is not only rolling up her
sleeve, but could also be giving someone the international ‘up yours’ move.
From that realization, it was a short jump to ‘Up Yours, Bush! I’m Keeping
My Right to Choose!’”
Wright wants people to see the posters and laugh, but surprisingly
(and unintentionally), they’ve started selling too. Wright claims over
150,000people have visited the Web site since last August, and says he has
sold 1,260copies of different images, which are offered as prints, T-shirts,
and coffee mugs. He further notes that two thousand people have sent him
letters, and of that number, “probably 1,900are extremely positive...
people are genuinely pleased to see someone who believes in the ‘verboten’
—e.g., that Bush is a moron, that Ashcroft is pushing us all toward an East
German–style snitchocracy, and that the current administration is using
Osama as the boogeyman to scare people into voting for them.” The other
one hundred are, he says, “the most vituperative, hate-filled, ill-educated
psychotics you’d never care to meet.”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1