Aerosol Maestro: Futura.

AN EXCLUSIVE, EXTENSIVE INTERVIEW WITH LEGENDARY GRAFFITI ARTIST FUTURA 2000.

I’m standing on a Singapore high-rise rooftop with Lenny McGurr, nom-de-plume Futura, the artist formerly known as Futura 2000, a moniker he assumed as a teen in 1970 and altered when the new millennium finally arrived, rendering it outdated, defunct.

Lenny’s tag was inspired by Kubrick’s sci-fi space odyssey, but the vibe tonight is more William Gibson — McGurr surrounded by young acolytes, black-clad kids sitting at his feet, me buzzed on Monkey Glands (a gin-based cocktail, no simians were harmed). It’s dark, smoggy, the skyline of the city Gibson called ‘Disneyland with the death penalty’ glowing in the background.

Futura asks where I’m from and I tell him Sydney. “Australia, yeah,” he says. “I’d been to Perth when I was in the Navy, back in the seventies, but it was in 2002 I think I went to Aussie modern-day-ism. When I got to Sydney, I was like, wow. Bondi beach. Beautiful. The whole temperature… I get it, man. It’s amazing. But I thought, this is San Diego: San Diego with a British accent. It was a little bit like, damn, I went that far when I could have just jumped to the west coast? But then you know what? I met some really cool people.”

Some of the very coolest people on the planet have entered McGurr’s orbit over the past five decades. From fellow graff godfathers Dondi White, Lee Quiñones and Rammellzee, to smashingly successful art-world crossovers Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat; from seminal punk iconoclasts The Clash (for whom Futura live-painted stage backdrops as the band performed on its 1981 European tour), to contemporary design zeitgeist shapers such as James Jebbia, Nigo and Virgil Abloh. The man has moved in some seriously influential circles.

Maybe the most important relationship of Futura’s creative career has been his longterm association with Mo’Wax record label founder, James Lavelle.

I ask him how the friendship came about. “I met James in ’92, in Berlin, that’s the first connection. Him saying to me, ‘Futura — yeah! I loved your stuff in the ’80s.’ But he was kind of a young kid. And I was like, wow, how’d you even know about that?”

Futura recalls, “I was in Berlin as part of the messenger championship event — a gathering of the global bicycle messenger community, the first one. This is 1992, as I said. I was four years removed from active duty, if you will, as a New York City fixie messenger. So when this gathering was happening, I got wind of it. Gerb, Stash and myself, we were doing a company called GFS. And we made some cycling kits, like a top, a jersey. It was perfect, this messenger race in Berlin, an opportunity to maybe sell some of the cycling jerseys to the cycling community.”

Lenny McGurr (fourth from left) at the Eric Firestone Gallery stand at ART SG Singapore, 2023

McGurr worked as a Manhattan bike messenger for a good while in the ’80s. He’d become a father and, disillusioned with the art scene and in need of regular income, decided to swap aerosols for pedals, earning a living ferrying urgent documents across the metropolis. It was a job that would soon be made redundant by the advent of faxes and subsequently, the internet and digital communication. 

Luckily, Futura had supporters in the art world. Talking him back into painting, French fashion designer and patron of the avant arts Agnès B set Lenny up with a studio space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, only asking a couple of artworks per year in recompense. Eternally grateful for her generosity, he credits Agnès with easing his return to the art world.

But let’s get back to this cycle courier thing in Allemagne, man…

“So that’s my intro to Berlin,” Lenny recounts.

An untitled Futura Pointman piece created at James Lavelle’s home in 2000, sold in the recent Sotheby’s auction.

“And here’s this young kid James, knowledgeable about my work with Jean-Michel, who had passed; Keith Haring, who had passed; the ’80s, which had passed. And I was just like, wow. He said, ‘I’m gonna be in New York, I’d love to come to your studio, and let’s see what you’re doing. Maybe we could use some of your artwork for a record thing.’”

As it turned out, a work Lavelle spotted and acquired at Futura’s studio, depicting the HR Giger-inspired ‘Pointman’ characters that are one of the artist’s recurring motifs, would come to serve as Lavelle’s avatar as a musician. “That painting became a kind of an identity” for Lavelle and his various creative and business partnerships, Futura reckons.

Lenny expresses enormous respect for Lavelle, for the ‘world’ he created around Mo’Wax, its visual and aural identity: an eclectic roster of recording artists — DJ Krush, Rob Dougan, Money Mark, DJ Shadow, Dr Octagon, Andrea Parker, Tommy Guerrero, et cetera, not to mention Lavelle’s own UNKLE — coupled with distinctive visuals created by Futura, Req1, Phil Frost, Haze and Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, among others.

“To me, James, throughout this whole arc, was a visionary. What he wanted to do with his brand, label, music, sound,” Futura says.

Lavelle, Shadow and Futura.

“He turned me on ultimately to the whole thing of what we would then call for lack of a better title call trip hop, and I loved it, because I was already learning about electronic music — Future Sound of London, the Dust Brothers / Chemical Brothers, like all these kind of things, and I was digging it. I was digging the higher BPMs.

“And when I heard Krush, I was like, What the fuck?! You know? And Shadow! So my intro to his world was awesome.”

While painting the incredible sleeve visuals for many of the Mo’Wax artists, Futura wasn’t simply an element in the design process — he played an essential, integral role in making those records fully-formed cultural artefacts. Lenny salutes the artistic sensitivity displayed by Lavelle and Mo’Wax’s house designer Ben Drury, who always kept his imagery to the fore.

An untitled collage, produced by Futura during cover art sessions for UNKLE’s 1998 album ‘Psyence Fiction’ .

“What I loved was that James said to me, ‘Look, this is not going to be backgrounded with graphics.’ It was done very tastefully. And I think it was kind of costly to do that, maybe from his point of view, or the label’s, right? The parent company going, ‘James, what are you doing, spending all the money on this (art and packaging)? Why do you really care about that?’ But the fact was, he did care about that.”

Lavelle invested serious time and funds into the way Mo’Wax’s releases were presented to the world. He would fly Futura into London, give him some creative guidance, paints, canvases, and a space at the label’s W1 premises, and let him do his thing. Several pieces from this period were recently sold by Sotheby’s in New York, including Futura’s 1995 painting ‘Anatomy of a Murder’.

In the auction catalogue, Lavelle recalled: “This work was used on the cover of Rob Dougan’s hugely successful and influential release ‘Clubbed to Death’... Lenny again painted this one in the Mo’Wax office on Mortimer Street in Fitzrovia. We had this small room which we set him up in, and he’d lock himself in there and get to work. It was pretty intense what was going on in that room, with the smell of the paint.”

The artwork for Rob Dougan’s “Clubbed to Death” — a detail from Futura’s artwork “Anatomy of a Murder” (1995).

This historic (and utterly fucking fantastic) canvas sold for US$53,000 in the auction, while another large Futura, an untitled Pointman piece from 2000, achieved a price of US$38,000. The artist’s most recent large-scale works tend to sell for similar sums, perhaps a little more. These are not figures to be scoffed at, by any means, but they do seem modest when compared to the US$110.5 million that was paid for the most expensive Basquiat ever to go under the hammer, or the US$6.5 million record for a Haring.

I tell Lenny, you look at his early work, and it was just lightyears ahead of what anyone else was doing at the time. I say, no disrespect to any of his contemporaries from the early 1980s — some of whom are now multimillion-dollar industries, albeit posthumously — but his style, the technique: it’s next level. Just the… virtuosity.

“I wouldn’t say that about myself, but I’m not angry with that word. I like that, thank you,” he replies, with the utmost humility.

“I kind of get the vibe that you think I’m a bit undervalued, in where I might, should, could be?” Well, yes, that’s kind of what I think. “I’ve always been a humble guy. And I’m not… you know, the money, the pursuit of something that people equate to success? Which is usually material objects and some sort of a monetary status? It’s not my thing.”

McGurr at ART SG Singapore, 2023.

Lenny says he let his artistic career take a back seat at certain points over the years, but that allowed him to focus on raising his two kids. (Who’ve turned out great, as it happens. His son Timothy is a prominent photographer and daughter Tabatha a successful broker of chic commercial real estate.)

“A lot of that time that I ‘lost’, I was spending being a parent,” Lenny says.

And being a parent means guaranteeing you can provide for your family — you can’t simply hope that your art sells.  

“Jean-Michel didn’t have any kids. Keith didn’t have any kids. A lot of emerging artists, they don’t have kids, or they only have kids after they did their thing and got to where they wanted to be in terms feeling secure in their career. And then, it’s like, okay, let’s do this,” Lenny says.

“I had zero when Timothy hit the planet, you know what I mean? Like, that little dude put me in debt — you know what a birth costs, not having insurance? Oh, what, an epidural? In 1984, that was five thousand dollars! You know, shit like that, the reality of it all, I wasn’t prepared for that.” So McGurr stepped away from the art world and got a ‘proper’ job. “With Tabatha coming a couple of years later,” he says, “I had mouths to feed, I had a little bit of responsibility.”

He always returned to art, though. “There were moments I was like, ‘Well, fuck all this. I don’t need this shit to be a success in my life. I’ll find some other career, and I’ll just be good at it.’ But every time I tried to wander off, I kept finding my way back. And at this point, today, I’m like, this is inevitable, you know, I can’t really escape.”

At an exhibition of Lenny’s work, you’ll encounter the familiar motifs that have become his trademarks: atomic globes, cranes, saw blades and alien Pointman characters. But he continues to push his practice and technique forward. Lenny draws parallels with the way a band like the Stones approach a concert. “I’ll sing your hits for you, yeah, but let me try a couple of new numbers that you don’t know the words to yet,” he says. “I need to express myself even after I’ve given you the classics, you know?”

Futura rewinds our conversation. “You said I was ahead of my time. I kind of feel like I have been. So if I was ahead of my time, then what’s really changed? I’m still forward thinking.”

The message he’s sending with his freshest work: “It’s like Joe Pesci says, in Casino — ‘Yeah, I’m over here now.’”