You might even call him an avant-garde graffiti writer from Texas.”įormer Houston graffiti writer David Flores, aka Skeez181, told me he’s impressed by Toeflop’s productivity and geographic range. It seems to me that Toeflop is doing the same thing. “There’s no way that any rational person can confuse you for a gang member who’s demarcating territory and willing to violently defend it. “You pick the most absurd of names to convey that you’re actually engaged in this kind of performance street art,” he explained. Each tag had a different look, ranging from simple monochromatic designs to elaborate, multicolored pieces with shadowed bubble letters and intricate shading.īloch, who is now an assistant professor of geography at the University of Arizona, said that in the early aughts graffiti writers began adopting deliberately outlandish names, like Neck Face, to distinguish their work from gang-related graffiti. Toeflops were even spotted as far afield as Memphis and New Orleans. Sometime around September, Toeflop landed in Austin, hitting an abandoned gas station, the shuttered restaurant Shady Grove, and an oft-tagged railroad bridge over Lady Bird Lake. As spring turned into summer and summer into fall, the artist or artists kept Toeflopping across Space City-and beyond. In the subculture of contemporary American graffiti writing, which emerged in Philadelphia in the late sixties before spreading around the world, achieving Toeflop-level ubiquity is known as going “all city.” The most recent Houston writer to achieve such distinction was Rowdy, an anonymous individual whose spray-painted tags were nigh inescapable in 2019. Others suggested their own acronyms: The Organization Exists for Loving on Potato Salad? Take On Every Freaking Louisianan on Penicillin? Observing the similarity of Toeflop to TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), another hypothesized that the graffiti writer had probably failed, or flopped, the exam. “It sounds like foot drop, which is a neurological condition requiring spinal surgery,” suggested one commenter. This most recent one is way at the top of a building… they’re multiplying so fast. Someone tell me what Toeflop is!? ITS ALL OVER HOUSTON.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |