July 24, 2006

• "Who I am is not as important as what I want."
  

  -BORF

  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.

  
  

  • 11:25 am
  • 29 Comments