Friday, January 30, 2009

Forklift Tony

I am fascinated by graffiti tagger lifestyle. As a tagger, you must work quickly and in secret to apply compelling and often stunning art to the public visual domain after which you have no controlling power or interest in its ultimate fate. You are an elusive phantom whose greatest success is reaching as many eyes as possible without anyone ever seeing you, and with no hope of personal profit or acclaim. Your work is but the fleeting physical manifestation of your intrinsically intangible shadow life, like the unfollowable footprints of your cultivated mystique. Your alias signature gives form to this legendary character you have unleashed into the world. You adorn your dark otherworldly creations with dark otherworldly names, "Gohst", "Fixt", "Swayn", "$tar", "Zombee", glimpses and hints of haunting depths below the surface of the world of light.

Or you could be Forklift Tony.



Forklift Tony doesn't care about mystique, or crafting a cloak of anonymity, or misspelling stuff. Forklift Tony is not an urban ghost. Forklift Tony is just a guy who likes forklifts with big engines and spotlights (for high-speed night forklifting). That's enough for Forklift Tony.

1 comment:

S.A.M. said...

That's not entirely true. Neckface, a well know graffiti artist in NY and abroad turned his fame into an actual art career. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neck_face