Up Against the Wall Motherfucker [Porky Pig Poster]

Butler, Wisconsin: Canterbury Posters, 1972. Offset poster printed on recto only. 35 x 23 in. Near fine. Item #5455

Large poster depicting Porky Pig from the Looney Tunes, dressed as a police officer and wielding a baton. Text at top reads “Up Against the Wall Motherfucker” with the classic Porky Pig stutter.

By the time of the poster’s printing, this phrase had taken on significant meaning in the counterculture. An order frequently shouted by police officers, the phrase had been used by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) in a poem after the Newark uprising. The phrase had then been used as a signature for the communiques of the anarchist artist collective in New York that grew out of Black Mask. Finally, Jefferson Airplane helped further popularize the phrase when they put out a song in 1969 entitled "Up Against the Wall," which took its lyrics almost entirely from a broadside produced by the New York anarchists.

This poster was inspiration in 2016 for a work by street artist and tattooist Mike Giant - though in Giant’s depiction, the nightstick has been changed to a gun, a sign of the increased militarization of the police.

A superb detournement of a classic cartoon character. Bright and in excellent condition. Uncommon.

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