In this piece, Mr Savethewall pays tribute to one of New York’s very first graffiti artists. Let’s discover his story together. In the early 1970s, a simple, seemingly anonymous tag began to appear repeatedly on the streets of New York’s Upper West Side: TAKI183. It was the name of a young man of Greek origin, Demetrios, who combined his nickname with the number of the street where he lived: 183rd. It was a sparse message, obsessively repeated on walls, bus stops and underground carriages. But it was precisely this obsessive repetition that transformed it into a familiar, almost mythological presence for those who travelled through the city every day.
TAKI183 has no artistic intent in the traditional sense: his gesture is direct, spontaneous and urban. Yet it is precisely this raw, sincere power that ushers in a new era of urban visual communication. His signature represents not just a name, but an affirmation of existence and identity. It is an ‘I am here’ shouted out to an indifferent metropolis.
In 1971, the New York Times dedicated an article to him entitled “TAKI 183 Spawns Pen Pals”, and his story inspired hundreds of young people to pick up a spray can and leave their mark everywhere: thus the ‘early writers’ emerged, the first protagonists of graffiti. The name became a logo, the signature transformed into a style, and the style into a challenge: who could sign the most, the highest, the most visibly.
TAKI183 does not consider himself an artist, nor does he belong to the gallery world. However, his actions are now seen as the original seed of a movement which, through evolution and cross-pollination, would lead to the birth of contemporary street art. Even Banksy, though so different in message and technique, owes something to these underground origins: the idea that urban space is a blank canvas, accessible to anyone who has something to say, to sign, or to assert.