The Mark Of Borf

The mysterious, ubiquitous and eminently destructive graffiti artist
known as Borf was arrested yesterday ( July 14th, 2005) after waging a months-long
campaign that may have been intended to enlighten Washington, but
mostly just confused us.

The man primarily responsible for Borf
is, it turns out, an 18-year-old art student from Great Falls named
John Tsombikos, according to D.C. police inspector Diane Groomes. He
was arrested along with two other young men in the wee hours of
yesterday morning after officers received a tip that graffiti artists
were spray-painting at Seventh and V streets NW.

Approached by a reporter at D.C. Superior Court yesterday, Tsombikos
refused to comment. One of the other men arrested, Richard Lee, 18,
said, “Borf is dead.”

Well, yes and no. According to Tsombikos’s
mother, Kathleen Murphy of Great Falls, Borf was the nickname for a
close friend of her son’s who committed suicide about two years ago.
The Borf face featured in his graffiti — which many who’ve walked
through Dupont Circle would recognize, and which looks somewhat like TV
actor Jerry O’Connell — belongs to that young man. Murphy suggests
that for her son, the Borf face and moniker came to stand for all that
he felt was wrong with the world.

Many who saw Tsombikos’s
graffiti — including a huge five-foot-high Borf face that appeared on
a Roosevelt Bridge sign this spring, and a 15-foot “BORF” above a
Dupont Circle cafe — might suggest that, far from making the world
better, he cost the city of Washington a lot of money.

Dennis
Butler of the D.C. Department of Public Works said the Borf tag
prompted almost daily phone calls to the city call center. “He’s just
all over the inner city,” Butler said.

“Citizens are ecstatic about him being caught,” Groomes said.

Tsombikos
was arrested with Lee and another man who has not yet been identified,
though Groomes says she believes Tsombikos is the primary Borf culprit.
Leah Gurowitz, a D.C. Superior Court spokeswoman, said that Tsombikos
and Lee were charged with a misdemeanor for defacing public or private
property in connection with yesterday’s arrest.

Over the past
year, Borf graffiti became a touchstone for the city. Following the
graffiti became a kind of urban Easter egg hunt. People took pictures
of his work and posted them on Web sites. Bloggers speculated on the
culprit’s identity and his motives. Was he man or woman, one person or
many? What did Borf stand for?

Some people were enraged and
others were cheered by that mischievous Borf face and by the whimsical
sayings like “BORF IS GOOD FOR YOUR LIVER,” or “BORF WRITES LETTERS TO
YOUR CHILDREN.” (Borf seemed quite conscientious about matters of
spelling and punctuation. )

In four interviews over several
months, a young man claiming credit for the Borf graffiti spoke
extensively about why he did it. He did not give his real name. The
Post was able to ascertain his identity as John Tsombikos
independently, but did not publish a story because the man’s condition
for granting interviews was anonymity. He agreed, however, that if he
was arrested or his identity became public, The Post would be released
from this condition.

Over and over, the man who wanted to be
known simply as Borf said his identity was not important. What was
important was his message — an earnest though sometimes muddled mix of
progressive politics filtered through a lens of youthful optimism.

f you followed Borf graffiti carefully, and there are those in this
city who did, you’d have noticed that he sort of disappeared in the
last few months. That’s because, according to Borf himself in past
interviews, as well as his mother yesterday, he was traveling in
Europe, stopping off in Scotland to protest the G-8 summit. He returned
to the Washington area Monday, his mother says.

Reached at home,
Murphy said she didn’t know her son had been arrested until a reporter
called. She said he graduated from Langley High School in McLean in
three years, and went to the Corcoran College of Art + Design last year
before taking some time off. She said he had been avidly involved in
peace marches and other protest efforts, and his graffiti appeared to
be an outgrowth of that. She said she appreciated his artistic effort,
though she told him that it wasn’t right to deface property.

In the spring, Borf said in an interview that he was aware many
people didn’t understand why he’d been defacing buildings, signs and
newspaper boxes all over this city. It’s clear he liked being
enigmatic, but he didn’t like being misunderstood. That’s why, on that
particular day, he said he was mulling some sort of public explanation,
perhaps in the form of a poster campaign.

“I’ve got plans,” he
said ominously, sitting out on U Street, eating a vegetarian burger
from Ben’s Chili Bowl. “Maybe like a manifesto.”                                                         

He wiped
veggie-chili-covered fingers on his jeans, which were dotted with
flecks of colored paint, then pulled out a silver paint pen and wrote
EL BORFISMO on the rim of a garbage can.

Borf would often tag
things like that as he walked through the city, in broad daylight on
busy streets. Because he did it openly and casually, passersby seemed
not to notice. He cultivated the air of being everywhere but nowhere.

He
said he liked listening to people talk about the Borf phenomenon. One
time, he was in a computer lab when the women behind him started
Googling “Borf.” It made him feel quite powerful.

“I feel like Batman or something,” he said.

If
you’ve seen Borf’s graffiti — the stencil of the little girl who holds
a sign saying “Grownups are Obsolete” or the impish face that appears
throughout the city — you, too, might be wondering what Borf’s message
is. Once upon a time, Borf said, he was “just, like, some liberal, like
anybody,” but then he started reading, and found out he really wanted
to be an anarchist. He decided he doesn’t believe in the state,
capitalism, private property, globalization. Most of all, he doesn’t
believe in adulthood, which he considers “boring” and “selling out.”

“Growing up is giving up,” he said. “I think some band said it.”

Borf
recently turned 18, a fact he revealed with hesitation because “I’m
against age. It’s just another way of dividing people.” At least until
recently, he lived at home — where exactly he would never say — and
cut cardboard stencils on his parents’ living room floor. He spoke
sneeringly of “rich people,” though sometimes when he parked in the
city his parents gave him $14 for the garage.

Borf’s graffiti
appeared in unexpected places — the base of the Key Bridge, or a brick
wall along a lonely, glass-strewn alley by the 9:30 club.

Some of the work is in such well-trafficked places that you wonder
how he didn’t get caught before. Granted, it takes only seconds to
spray a stencil — press the cardboard cutout against the wall so
there’s no drip, wield the can with your other hand — but still. On
pillars outside a bakery just north of Dupont Circle on busy
Connecticut Avenue? On the sign over the Roosevelt Bridge? For that
one, Borf had to get onto a catwalk that’s maybe 20 feet in the air and
spray not one but two layers of paint to make a three-dimensional
half-face that seemed to have just peeked in front of the sign. The
eyes danced, as if asking, “Do you really want to go to work today?”

(After
a few weeks, the stencil was “buffed,” which is the word graffiti
artists use when someone removes their work. Borf didn’t seem to get
nearly as upset about buffing as he did when peers scribbled their
graffiti over his, which he considered exceedingly disrespectful.)

Borf considers himself a crusader for youth; he drew inspiration
from the children’s author Shel Silverstein and from something called
situationism, an obscure avant-garde movement popularized in 1960s
France.

He said in the spring that he’d been reading a book by
the situationist Guy Debord “about modern capitalism” and “how the
status quo is maintained and perpetuated by a series of spectacles.”
Borf often finished his graffiti early in the morning, just in time to
see a spectacle he despises — rush hour. “People all heading
downtown,” he said. “Like, it’s ridiculous if you think about it. Like,
Orwellian-ridiculous. And they do this with so-called free will.”

His clothes are usually frumpy and speckled with paint, and the baseball cap covering his dark hair has a broken band .
He is fond of phrases like: “Property is theft, as Prudhomme says.” He
labels the Cosi cafe chain “boojy” (for bourgeois) and despises
Starbucks. (“Instead of police on every corner we have Starbucks on
every corner,” he says.) He thinks young people have it really bad. He
hated high school, which is why he finished early, taking his last few
courses online. It bothers him that those younger than 18 can’t vote,
“as much as I don’t believe in voting or anything.” He complained that
folks in stores assume “all young people shoplift,” and when he’s
reminded that he himself shoplifts spray paint, he says that’s just
more evidence of how messed up society is.

He said he was an
activist long before he got into graffiti. The first protest he
attended was against capitalism in September 2002. It’s possible he
would have been arrested if he’d gotten there on time, he said, but the
protest was “too early.”

Borf scrupulously followed media
coverage and Internet rumors about him and was pleased to be contacted
by a reporter (“wow!” he typed when first messaged through the graffiti
Web site StencilRevolution.com). But he refused to reveal his real
name. For one thing, he feared getting arrested. He also knew much of
his appeal lay in the mystique — he is Borf, master illusionist,
omnipresent but invisible. To maintain the mystery, he sidestepped
questions about what “Borf” meant, if anything, and how he scaled
rooftops. He offered clues and then backtracked, contradicting himself,
or shrugging and saying “secret.”

He imagined himself like the
Zapatistas, the Mexican rebels who cover their faces. “Who I am is not
as important as what I want,” he said.

Some time ago, someone
placed an “I Saw You” ad in the Washington City Paper, saying, “Who are
you BORF? . . . Let’s meet.” On Flickr.com, a Web site where people
share their photo collections, there were hundreds of photos of Borf’s
graffiti, with comments such as, “He keeps me entertained as I ride the
metro. go borf!” and “Are you sick of this dork yet?”

The face is
Borf’s most striking signature in the District. There’s a playfulness
to the expression and an artistry to the image. Sometimes the face
appears alone and sometimes in different contexts, like on the image of
a teenager holding a can of spray paint.

Because of the very nature of graffiti, it’s hard to know how much of the Borf oeuvre
can be attributed to this one teenager. To bolster his claim that he’s
the real guy, he brought along his hand-cut cardboard stencils to
Capital City Records on 10th and U streets, where he was spray-painting
an installation for a street art show organized by a graffiti artist
named Cory Stowers. Borf unfolded a cardboard stencil crusted with
spray paint and almost as tall as his own 6-foot-1 frame. It was the
Borf face on the body of Black Panther Huey P. Newton holding a rifle.

The graffitist himself, albeit disguised, next to one of his tags on U Street.

Borf
claimed credit for graffiti in New York City, Raleigh, N.C., and San
Francisco. He is familiar with Manhattan, he said, having lived on the
Upper East Side until he was 10. As for San Francisco, he said, he and
a friend took Greyhound.

Over time, there was so much of his
graffiti, a Borf backlash emerged. Borf said he’s not responsible for
graffiti saying “Borf is gay,” and he certainly didn’t write “Borf
hates God” on a church. In February, a 27-year-old man was arrested for
writing anti-Borf graffiti on the back of a sign in Logan Circle. He
got as far as “Borf is a do-” before the police caught up with him.

Borf
considers this his unwitting legacy: He’s democratizing graffiti.
People are decorating the District’s streets, even if it’s just to make
fun of him.

What will he do when he gets older? he was asked months before he was arrested.

“I’m not older,” he said.

To see more of his Art <—–Click here.