He arrived on foot, and on time, wearing heavily grease-stained beige overalls and boots. He seemed to be in his late 30s or early 40s, 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 1990s, 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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
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 New York's 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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
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. 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, emphasizing, 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," Sutherland said. "But when I met Revs, I kind of geeked out."
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 kilograms, 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 1990s wall paintings were more than 3m 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 of the pieces, made from 2-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."
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