At a speaking appearance at Columbia University in spring of 2001, the legendary graffiti artist LEE was asked by a member of the audience what he thought about European graffiti. After a thoughtful pause, LEE said, "I have always found European painting to be inherently lacking in soul."

There is a six hour time difference between New York City and Stockholm, Sweden, which means that as LEE was speaking to a gathering of eager college students and a few genuine aerosol artists in Manhattan's late evening, the artist who calls himself Akay was most likely just getting ready to go to work. Perhaps he was putting on his uniform—that of a professional bill-poster, a loose jumpsuit and a vest with reflective strips—or looking for his keys to the billboard frames in the Stockholm subway system. If anyone was the European heir to LEE it was Akay, who in 1990 was responsible, along with his crew at the time, VIM, for the first whole train painting in Sweden. In 2001, however, this sort of piece probably would not have been on Akay's pre-dawn itinerary. Instead, he would have been carrying a pot of wheat paste and a roll of posters, posters featuring absurd images like a factory sitting on the palm of a human hand, and phrases with obscure meanings, if any at all—your only protection, or perhaps a reason for living. Somewhere on the posters, there would be the cryptic name of what could very well have been a corporation, a social movement, or a religion: akayism.

Graffiti has always been plagued by philosophers and prophets, self-styled and otherwise. Sometimes they are the writers themselves; either those like LEE, who simply has a knack for fascinating explanations of why he does what he does, or those like DOZE, whose penchant for mysticism—from the Yoruba tradition to the Kabbalah—translates well onto paper. More often they are the professional and amateur anthropologists who have attached themselves like lampreys to the New York graffiti scene for the past two decades in the interest of translating the art for the general public. For a long time, the rampant speculation primarily focused on graffiti as a form of personal expression, as the outpouring of some kind of subaltern subconscious. The anthropologists, hungry for overt links to the past, strained their eyes to see in the subway artists the echoes of everyone from Santer’a priests to the Kimbanguist prophets of the central African BaKongo people.

By the early 90s, however, a new current had emerged; a handful of artists began to think less about why they painted and more about the effect their work had on the people who saw it.

The concept of graffiti as a tool to alter the public conception of urban space had, of course, always been part of the art form. From the earliest attempts, the writers who worked in the train yards of New York's outer boroughs aimed not only at self expression but also at bringing about in their captive audiences an elusive sensation of wonder, at maximizing the effect the paintings would have on rush hour crowds waiting on the platform when a piece rolled by for the first time. Some artists had played around with the possibilities inherent in the trains' sliding doors, taking advantage of the element of surprise they offered by painting gigantic eyes and other gimmicks on them.

No one, however, reconceived of illegal art's place in the city more radically than COST and REVS. Both artists began, independently of each other, as conventional writers in the 80s, but as partners in the early 90s began interspersing work in aerosol with a pair of innovations: the roller letter—enormous, simple letters in white paint applied with paint rollers in subway tunnels and on rooftops, some of which can still be seen in SoHo—and the cryptic poster—simple statements, sometimes ambiguous (who's o.c.?) and sometimes resembling miniature manifestoes (real artists don't know they're artists), printed on posters and applied with wheat paste throughout New York City. The use of wheat-pasted posters wasn't new—members of the XMEN crew had toyed with the medium in the early 80s—but COST and REVS' all-out campaign of confusion was.

In 1995, COST and REVS' posters found their way to Stockholm, and into the hands of Akay. Akay had been a household name in the Stockholm graffiti scene for ten years, and had been working with other mediums for some time as well. "In '88, me and my friend NEWS from VIM were making big stickers," he says, "because we understood that that was an easier way to get up on the outside of the subways without pissing people off. At the same time, I remember trying to cut stencils."

"Years later, when I was pretty fed up with the Stockholm graffiti scene and wanted to find ways to get up in the very center of town, at places where I could not use spray paint, I was looking back on those sticker missions and how easy that had been, working in front of people. At the same time, I had seen the COST and REVS posters for the first time, and heard stories of how they were everywhere [in New York]. So I started to play with posters combined with stencils. Two years later [in 1997], I did my first Akayism poster."

The Akayism posters were cheerful, ominous, meaningful, meaningless, ironic, sincere, deceptively clear and maddeningly opaque to various degrees. The design was trendy—comic book flourishes, echoes of punk xerox art, ironic retro images of smiling nuclear families, World War II aircraft and the elderly—and Akay's texts played hide-and-go-seek with meaning, elaborating on the pioneering work of COST and REVS. Some were fragments of idealism—there is no light at the end of the tunnel, but i see the light (it's growing underground). Some were mock testaments to the powers of the self-declared movement—akayism changed my life. Others played rock star-like games with the fear of graffiti—a virus from outer space, or mothers watch in horror, children stand amazed.

"I think playing around with an 'ism' was a good choice for posters," says Akay. "It makes it easy for people to speculate and apply strange ideas to the project."

"It was strange," he muses. "The day I decided to start working with posters labeled with akayism, people all of a sudden showed great interest in my work. People I had known for years all of a sudden commented on my work." Soon the posters had thoroughly blanketed Stockholm, and in time made appearances in Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Oslo, New York, Seattle, Tokyo, and Reykjavik. akayism international became more than just the text on Akay's rapidly proliferating mock-Orwellian sticker—it became the truth.

Akay was certainly not the only one engaged in this sort of project. Whether it was the example of COST and REVS, the latent spirit of Dada that had been lurking on the periphery of urban Europe for seventy-five years, or some combination thereof, a Pandora's box of absurdity opened in European graffiti in the late 90s. Now in addition to Akay there is Space Invader, for example, who has attempted to make the icons of the antiquated computer game of the same name a ubiquitous presence on an international level, the crude pixels recreated in ceramic tile. Bacteria (who also goes by Adams) has deployed countless replicas of a preposterously simple black and white shape—his "bacteria," a sort of circle with a tail that defies explanation—on walls throughout Stockholm and other cities.

REVS, Piece in New York.

If Akay stands out among these and other peers, it is because he has found something beyond a single clever novelty to work with. Akay's work, which yo-yos between the organic fluidity of aerosol art and the deliberately icy tone of advertisement, often lacks the stylistic coherence of more restrained absurdists like Bacteria. In this respect, however, his work is a greater step beyond the idea of the tag, the doctrine of ruthlessly uniform self-promotion, and into a more anarchic approach to guerrilla art.

Although Akay has worked extensively with a readily identifiable logo—the earth, no less, with akayism wrapping around it in block letters—in posters, stencils, and stickers, he has just as often done the opposite, developing Akayism into a sort of protean anti-tag that takes on the shape of its surroundings. On a crosswalk, akayism appears in a simple, black paint stencil. In the Stockholm subway, akay appears, one neatly printed lowercase letter at a time, in four consecutive billboard frames. On a wall already cluttered with tags and posters, Akayism meets the other artists on their own terms with varying combinations of wheat paste, markers and spray paint.

In the aesthetic of the posters that dominated Akay's work for a number of years, Akayism seems to have a certain kinship with Obey Giant, Shepard Fairey's now-ubiquitous campaign that in the late 90s came to define the burgeoning field of "culture jamming," COST and REVS' somewhat more academic cousin in the pitched battle for urban space. Obey Giant began with a spirit of absurdity similar to Akay's; Fairey had the brilliant idea of promoting an utterly meaningless image—the late professional wrestler Andre the Giant, rendered in mock-Soviet propaganda style with the cryptic text obey—in what he called in his highbrow 1990 manifesto "an experiment in Phenomenology" a la Heidegger. The Obey Giant campaign, according to Fairey, sought to "reawaken a sense of wonder about one's environment," "to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings."

However, Fairey ultimately betrayed his absurdist roots in two different directions, at once caving to both his left wing political inclinations and the temptation to make money off of Obey Giant. Fairey had chosen Andre the Giant because his image had no political connotations, but soon the artist was making similar posters of politicized musicians like the Clash's Joe Strummer and Public Enemy's Chuck D and Flava Flav, as well as the Mexican guerrilla leader Subcomandante Marcos. Meanwhile, the Giant logo began appearing on a wide range of merchandise, and quickly became a lucrative franchise. What Fairey had once declared to be "advertisements [and] propaganda for which the product is not obvious" was now the exact opposite on both counts. On the eve of George W. Bush's attack on Iraq, the Obey Giant website simultaneously debuted a Fairey-designed action figure selling for three figures and a heartbreakingly obvious poster bearing the image of Bush wearing a cap with the Nazi SS logo and a Hitler mustache, above the text, "war: everyone wants it! except smart people and the u.n.!"

"I think that in the beginning Shepard used to have pretty much the same approach to his work, to the media, to the 'commercial world' as I try to have right now," says Akay. "And I think that he still would if his project hadn't been such a huge success that he could make a massive amount of money off of it. Obey Giant tried to be the brand that wasn't selling anything; that was the spirit of the campaign when it was a pure street thing. But now it is about products, a brand like Levi's."

There is deliberate hypocrisy in that statement. Akay, who did an ad campaign for Levi Strauss & Company four years ago, is no saint himself. He writes off his flirtation with the commercial world as a valuable experience, albeit one not to be repeated. "It felt very strange and very wrong, and at the same time it was a thrill that something that big wanted me that was so small, so after a few weeks I decided to go along with it and see what [Levi's] would have to offer."

"And it was pure horror," he says. "All of it. Realizing what they were willing to do to sell more jeans. I don't regret that I did it, because it taught me a valuable lesson: never to be a part of anything like that again."

If the heady days of anti-advertising like Fairey's and Akay's in the late 90s proved anything, it was that the line between the commercial world and its self-declared nemesis was far blurrier than anyone in the latter camp was comfortable admitting. Since then, Akay has moved away from posters in that style, with iconic black and white line drawings and vaguely ironic text—we are the happy family; in your head, your remedy—punctuated by the occasional bout of earnestness—i want my planet back—into less openly fashionable, more intriguing territory. Akay and Bacteria covered Stockholm with posters of Akay and Bacteria covering Stockholm with posters, making the act of getting up itself into a bizarre sort of multiple-mirror reflection and reflecting one of Akayism's more memorable aphorisms: the beauty is in the act.

"I go back and forth still [between posters and spray paint]," Akay says. "Right now, I have only used black spray paint for the last three months, writing site-specific sentences about Stockholm tearing down all the old industrial districts, because they want to build malls in the boring U.S. style."

"If Akayism had to be read as advertisements," he says, "I would hope it would promote a kind of self-driven action. A possibility of what could be done. It's nothing that's printed on the poster that's going to necessarily advertise this—it would be the poster itself existing where it does, [the fact] that someone had actually made this and went out and put it up."

"Maybe [Akayism] shows an actual experience instead of the false promise of one, "Akay continues. "I mean, commercial advertisements aren't really selling a product, they're selling a promise of something that you can attain by purchasing the product. That's old news, and I can't understand how even the basic knowledge that there's a man behind the curtain doesn't detract from the power and awe of the image of Oz. I don't understand it."

Maybe—but Akay is a man behind a curtain, too. It's worth noting that L. Frank Baum, who wrote the original novel The Wizard of Oz in 1900, was an ad man—he founded the first magazine devoted to product display in 1897. Baum was probably the least cynical advertising mogul the twentieth century ever saw, and he truly believed, as much as Akay does, that he was selling the world a utopia, even as he knew that it was made out of colored glass, not emeralds.

As the historian William Leach has written, "Baum's stories reflect the polymorphous nature of the market and of the new urban world in which the market took its grandest expression. His stories are the literary apotheosis of commodity flow." For Baum—and for many people since—the processes of commodification weren't something that had to be hidden behind a curtain; they themselves were full of power and awe.

But if the alchemy of commodity holds a certain mystical appeal for much of the population, it seems inevitable that the opposite—processes of decommodification, of reclaiming urban space—would have access to the same kind of daemonic energy, channeled through similar means; Akayism is the reflecting pool of Oz, and it works on principles not unlike Baum's.

Much of Akayism's impact comes from the simplicity of its underlying principle: freedom is so close at hand that activating it requires little more than a subtle gesture—an incongruous image, a nonsensical statement that amounts to you are free—one that, once conceived, is easily replicated by virtually anyone. Akayism could be the work of one person or of a thousand, a near-infinite series of concentric ripples through the urban fabric. There may very well be a trace of truth in Akay's statement—he may truly be your remedy.