>> Cover

Marked for life

>> Ahead of the Sneaker Pimps Montreal event, graffiti legend Futura 2000 reflects on
tagging as urban telecom, cancelling
the art-star ego trip and his baptism
of fire in the bowels of the Big Apple

SPRAYED AND DISPLAYED: A Futura 2000 canvas

At the turn of the 1970s, New York City teenager Lenny McGurr was intrigued by the tagging fad, the crude public territorial markings of compulsive scribblers like the infamous TAKI 138. To stand out, McGurr brought a calligraphic flair to his tag and adopted a pen name that fused a typeface and a Kubrick wink—Futura 2000.

Along with a handful of fellow “writers,” he was transforming graffiti from mere marker mischief to a definitive visual folk-art modality of the post-war era. Of course, he had no idea of it at the time. He just wanted in on this funky guerrilla intercom system.

“Today, kids got PDAs and cell phones,” says McGurr, reached in Toronto following his live painting session at the Sneaker Pimps event there last week, an action repeated here this weekend. “Thirty-something years ago, the means to express yourself and communicate were very limited. So we had markers.”

As graffiti’s aesthetics evolved, so did its status. Assuming an elemental position in the nascent hip hop culture, it went from ghetto telegraphy to gallery fad, metastasizing subculture to ubiquitous design language with countless global dialects. And on every milestone along that path, dashed off quick and unobtrusive, is the name Futura 2000.

Bombs and burns

After the early scrawls on walls came bombing, or spray-painting, the train cars of the MTA. “Graffiti had found the speed at which it needed to be seen,” McGurr reflected in a 1996 essay, acknowledging at once the excited impermanence, kinetic energy and broadband signal of the medium. With capably executed pieces, the kids could go all-city, heralding their names at billboard size throughout the boroughs before rivals or cleaning crews wiped them away.

“If you look at some of what I call the bibles of subway art, Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper, their photos of paintings on subways trains,” says McGurr, “and you think about how the movement spread like wildfire, it was because it was being done on these moving trains, and that was a genius thing. If it would have just been local bombing of buildings or schoolyards, it wouldn’t have happened.”

McGurr’s career in graf and its tangents might not have happened either. Labour Day weekend of 1973, he and his best friend Marc Edmonds, aka ALI, felt ready to make their first foray into bombing, and descended into the subway tunnels under Harlem. What happened there—a live third rail igniting dozens of aerosol cans, engulfing Edmonds in flame—was fictionalized in the seminal hip hop flick Beat Street.

While Edmonds in fact survived with third degree burns, he told the New York Times that McGurr had abandoned him—a confounding falsehood spiting McGurr, who’d managed to get him to the hospital.

“It was all too weird,” recalls McGurr. “I wondered how that story was fabricated, yet I couldn’t confront him because he was in critical condition.”

Shaken, McGurr did a volte-face and enlisted in the U.S. Navy—a military steez informs his work to this day. Oddly, it was Edmonds who contacted McGurr when he returned to NYC in 1977, just as graffiti’s rise accelerated. A cathartic return to the fateful tunnel reanimated Futura 2000, though the wound between McGurr and Edmonds would remain unspoken until they reconnected by chance in Tucson, AZ, in the early ’90s. Edmonds was cheerfully MCing an art show featuring Futura 2000, and seized the moment to come clean. “I was in tears,” recalls McGurr. “Dude did the right thing.”

Two days later, Edmonds died of an overdose. “In my mind, he had done what he needed to do.”

Tags to riches

A seasoned world traveller, it’s nonetheless been years, decades, since Futura 2000 has hit walls with any regularity. While not too proud to fulfil the demands of a family with mundane jobs at times, his blip on the art-world radar never entirely went out, and today it pings louder than ever.

The initial New York frenzy of the early ’80s, when punk, hip hop and the avant-garde intersected so briefly and brightly, made McGurr a known quantity among art dealers. His sleek, abstract, understated style translated well to canvas. “It’s not like I was up everywhere,” he says of his tags and pieces. “My thing was more quality than quantity.”

That heady period also connected him with British punks the Clash, whose thirst for Big Apple b-boy flavour he’d quenched, leading to album-sleeve art and even a record of his own.

“They had done their homework. They were socially conscious, so they probably understood more than we did. To outsiders, our movement always appealed more than to New Yorkers.”

Indeed, Futura’s rep was growing to iconic status abroad, in Europe and Japan, among can-toting kids and cognoscenti alike. Until last year, he had French fashion designer Agnès B. as a patron, underwriting his studio. A 1992 visit to Berlin linked McGurr up with James Lavelle of the Mo’Wax imprint and his U.N.K.L.E. project, soon branded with Futura 2000’s sketchy space-vampire commandos.

More recently, ahead-of-the-curve activities like an early placing in the vinyl toy sweepstakes and wise design for Nike, Burton and his own Japan-based Futura Industries among other garment gigs, have kept him occupied, and while firmly grounded in pre-digital tropes and techniques, he’s kept his finger on the pulse of technology and its creative potential.

Uncomfortable with much of the adulation now showered on him—“I don’t drink that Kool-Aid”—McGurr attributes his success to luck, or rather to many serendipitous events underscored by his knack for the right moves in the right place at the right time. “That’s how my life has been, this series of weird, amazing events, and in the middle, I do me.”

At Sneaker Pimps Montreal at
le Studio on Saturday,
Feb. 9, 9 p.m., $12

Sneak peek

>> Finding your footing at Sneaker Pimps Montreal

The world was scandalized in 1986 when Imelda Marcos, wife of the deposed Philippine dictator, was revealed to have hoarded 1,060 pairs of shoes while her people struggled and starved. Marcos would have been humbled, though, by the spread of footwear showcased at the fourth Canadian passing of the Nike Sneaker Pimps touring event, touching down in Montreal this weekend.

Over 1,500 pairs of sneakers, from fabled old-school rarities to exclusive artist customizations (including kicks designed by Doze, Bigfoot and Shepard “Obey” Fairey), will be racked to draw drool from urban footwear fetishists. That’s hardly the only eye candy, though, as the Mirror’s cover subject Futura 2000 joins fellow NYC original Stash and French second-wave crew 123 Klan in busting out big artworks, live on the spot.