By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: April 18, 2005
NYTimes E1,7
He arrived on foot, and on time,
wearing heavily grease-stained beige overalls and boots. He seemed to be in his
late 30's or early 40's, with thinning light brown hair. He had the windburned
eyes and blackened fingernails of an ironworker, along with the vaguely feral
intensity of someone on the lam.
But he hardly looked like the kind
of shadowy revolutionary figure who had once declared that his goal was to
"tear the city to pieces and rebuild it." Now, he says, smiling
weakly, "I stop at stop signs; I pay taxes; I get up and go to work and
get a paycheck."
In the New York graffiti world of
the early 1990's, he was everywhere and larger than life, sometimes literally:
the name Revs, usually accompanied by that of his partner in crime, Cost, could
be found scrawled, wheat-pasted or painted in gargantuan white letters on
overpasses, walls and roofs from SoHo to northern New Jersey. The work upended
many traditional notions of graffiti and helped inspire a new generation of
so-called street artists.
Then in late 1994 Cost was
arrested for vandalism. Revs went underground and left the city for Alaska. And
when he returned, his work went mostly underground, too - into the subway,
where he painted long, feverish diary entries worthy of a Dostoyevsky character
on dozens of walls hidden deep inside the tunnels. (He called this a personal
mission and said he did not care if anybody else saw them.)
But over the last few years, he has
re-emerged into public view and reincarnated himself in a way few of his fans
ever expected, as a legitimate and (mostly) law-abiding sculptor. He has made
dozens of works using construction-grade steel and other metal parts and has
sought the permission of building owners to weld and bolt them to the outsides
of buildings in the meatpacking district, the East Village, the Gowanus Canal
area and Dumbo, where the gentrifying but still half-deserted streets have
become a veritable Revs gallery.
Yet unlike many former graffiti
artists who have turned their street credibility into successful careers as
graphic designers or youth-market branding gurus, Revs has continued to shun,
angrily, the worlds of conventional art and commerce. He makes his living about
as far from the art world as possible, as a union ironworker, surrounded by
co-workers who mostly have no idea of his reputation as a near-mythical deity
of the graffiti world. His only gallery show, in Philadelphia in 2000, was to
raise money so he could pay a lawyer after he was arrested for the subway
graffiti. Otherwise, he has refused to sell his work or take commissions for
it.
"To me," he said
recently, in a rare interview, "once money changes hands for art, it
becomes a fraudulent activity."
He also continues to avoid
publicity. In order to find him, a reporter contacted several graffiti
aficionados, most of whom warned that Revs, whoever he was, would probably not
cooperate. Calls eventually led to Julia Solis, an author and photographer who
specializes in charting forgotten and subterranean New York. She agreed to pass
a message along to Revs. A day later, a call came to the reporter's home from a
man with a thick New York accent who agreed to an early-morning meeting in
Brooklyn, at an intersection almost beneath the Manhattan Bridge, on the
condition that his photograph not be taken and his name and age not be
revealed.
He apologized for the
cloak-and-dagger routine but said that his anonymity was still his most prized
possession. "I don't want to become nobody; I just want to do what I
do," he said, stressing, as a kind of implied message to the police,
"I'm not trying to stage a major comeback or anything." (The New York
Police Department confirms that he has not been on the radar screen of the
Citywide Vandals Task Force since his arrest in 2000.)
But Revs fans can be forgiven for
thinking a comeback is in the works. Over the last several months, pictures of
the sculptures have shown up on several street-art Web sites. This has prompted
graffiti cognoscenti to scour the streets to find - and in a few places, to
wrench loose and steal - the works, most of which are clustered in or close to
Manhattan, although some have been discovered as far afield as Queensboro
Plaza.
"He's huge, you can't deny
it," said Will Sherman, a photographer who operates a Web site called
untitledname.com and has scouted out several Revs works recently. "I have
a lot of respect for him not just as a graffiti artist or street artist but as
an artist in general."
Peter Sutherland, another
photographer, spent a year tracking Revs down. Last year, in a book of
portraits of graffiti artists titled "Autograf," he featured a
picture of the artist himself, though his face is completely covered by a cap.
"I'm a photographer and I don't usually get intimidated or impressed by
celebrities," Mr. Sutherland said. "But when I met Revs, I kind of
geeked out."
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During the recent two-hour
interview in Brooklyn, Revs conducted a proud tour of half a dozen of his metal
sculptures, only one of which he said he installed without permission: a tall,
heavy piece that spells out "Revs," welded several years ago to the
top of an abandoned loading dock. Asked how he was able to weld something so
large and distinctive to a building without attracting a crowd and eventually a
phalanx of police, he shook his head.
"I can't talk about my
techniques," he said sternly. "It's a trade secret, you know? It's my
cloaking device."
Over the last few years, he said,
he has made more than 100 metal pieces, some weighing hundreds of pounds, and
he estimated that he has installed about two-thirds of them with permission,
including nearly all his most recent sculptures. He says that while he may not
be a guerrilla street painter anymore - some of the 1990's wall paintings were
more than 10 feet tall in the middle of sheer walls, most likely requiring a
harness and ropes to accomplish - he is still a fully committed outsider, and
his work will be seen only outside, on New York City streets, as long as he
keeps making it.
He kicked one the pieces, made
from two-inch-thick steel, part of a column left over from a construction
project where he once worked near the Port Authority bus terminal.
"A car can back up into it," he said. "Somebody can get their head cracked open on it. A dog can go on it. Somebody can paint it if they want. It rusts. It's more interesting that way, you know?"
But is it any less interesting
because it's legal?
He smiled. "I might still
have a few little knickknacks scattered around in places where they're not
supposed to be, who knows?" he said. "I'm not commenting on
that."