The post-provocation art crew may be ridiculous, but they aren't vulgar.

With the grace of a practiced gymnast, the lead sets up a tiny stepstool that has until now been strapped, unnoticed, to his back, messenger-bag style. (It’s actually a collapsible chair, the type carried by grandfathers to Sunday-afternoon softball games.) He swiftly removes the sign’s protective backing.

The wing gives the go-ahead. Thirty seconds later, a stop sign on the Upper East Side has been covered with an exact replica of itself. Unless they look very closely, no one will ever notice it.

That’s the whole idea.

A few feet away, Janine works on a used and battered black PowerBook, her eyes trained on an Adobe Illustrator outline of what appears to be a teepee. She turns her head sideways a bit, pulls the view back. The tent’s peak becomes the top of the letter "A" in a familiar type treatment of the words "ONE WAY."

She supplements James with supporting material, a reminder of targets he might otherwise forget: "Matthew Barney is a joke."

James nods, adds: "Barney’s horrible, and the Tate Modern [in London] this year was unbelievably bad."

From another corner of the room comes the voice of Chuck, who’s reading the latest Harry Potter book: "Last year’s Turner winner was ridiculous."

The two men, both Queens natives, have known each other since high school, while Janine is a college-age addition. I gather she’s an ex-girlfriend of James’, but I don’t ask.

They’re not your typical grown-up art-school kids, which can make for some jarring transitions—from Britain’s Turner prize to the decreasing quality of service on the Long Island Railroad, for example. Or the graffiti scenes in Berlin to the untimely death of Chuck’s hand-me-down Ford Aerostar (which relates directly to his observations concerning the LIRR). Maybe it’s the Queens home base, maybe it’s the lingering scent of hiphop and student loans, but their pompous statements about modern art aren’t as annoying as they would be, say, coming from a turtlenecker in a Bushwick loft. Their working-middle-class status isn’t a pose.

I met James at a barbecue in Bayside; he was talking to a mutual friend about stencil-artist Banksy, whose work I’d seen several months earlier in London. As a grown-up tagger, the 25-year-old James respects political bombers, especially clever ones like Banksy, but thinks their time has come and gone.

"Advertising has taken over snide," he said.

Back in Flushing, James is inspecting two dozen fake STOP "signs" that were delivered the night before. He checks them for scratches and crushed corners, then stuffs the packing slip and invoice into a weatherworn accordion folder on an unstained Ikea desk.

This batch is destined for Hell’s Kitchen, he tells me, one of very few Manhattan neighborhoods that hasn’t yet been hit during this…this…

"Culture jam?" I offer.

"No, no," he protests. "This isn’t an Adbusters-type project. We’re not scribbling on billboards and telling people to stop eating meat."

Janine either nods in agreement or enters into a sleep-deprivation seizure. Clear to anyone who’s spent time around graphic artists, she’s the type who stays up all night without regard for her day job, obsessed with the tiniest detail that no naked eye would ever notice. The peak of the teepee on Janine’s ONE WAY sign, for instance, is a perfect forgery at actual size. For her, though, it must be flawless at the maximum enlargement allowed by the software.

They’re an interesting bunch, these three. Janine, 25, works in advertising; Chuck, 26, works with James at the firm where they serve as "forensic accountants" investigating "semi-corporate improprieties." They share half a floor that, upon closer inspection, is less a loft than a deconstructed three-bedroom. The work and live spaces intermingle—the couch is covered by maps and magazines; the kitchen table serves as a work bench, an open toolkit spilling its guts and hiding the salt-and-pepper shakers. New York City street signs are scattered about.

What separates this from your average college dormitory are the six signs mounted on the wall alongside their plastic doppelgangers: STOP, YIELD, pedestrian images and three different 1 HOUR PARKING signs have been perfectly duplicated by a manufacturer in Hackensack, NJ. Janine provides the files; Chuck the materials know-how (and until recently, the car); James, it seems, the plans.

They can’t provide exact figures as to how many signs they’ve covered, and they aren’t inclined to dig into the accordion folder for a count. James reckons "somewhere around three or four hundred," but admits that it could be more.

"We started strong, doing 20 a night a couple times a week," he says, until "we got tired of being tired," according to Janine.

An hour after sundown, Chuck and I head over to Main St. to pick up pizza for dinner. Away from James, he’s not very talkative about their "project," so we make small talk about the neighborhood instead. He points in the direction of the Wendy’s where five people were murdered three years ago, and tells me that Louis Armstrong is buried in the Flushing Cemetery.

One relevant fact does come out: The apartment belongs to James’ brother. The whole building does, in fact. They pay rent, but it’s reasonable, which goes a long way toward explaining how they can afford what they’re doing—a quick peek at just one invoice revealed a number north of $400.

Several hours later, eight signs on the Upper East Side have been covered with replicas that are indistinguishable from the originals. (Actually, that’s not true: They’re cleaner, and the letters aren’t as reflective.) In two hours, cruising in a minivan borrowed from Chuck’s brother, we’ve hit four intersections. A couple cars honked at us—especially when Janine took over the lead role midway during the third batch—but we were otherwise unmolested. With all the talk of increased security, I wonder how two clearly unauthorized individuals can so brazenly mess with street signs in Manhattan.

We save one for a side street near the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel and another for Long Island City; then we take the slow road back to Flushing—beneath the 7 train along Roosevelt Ave. (Chuck, ever the ghoul, points to a Spanish restaurant that burned down not 30 minutes after he’d eaten there.)

There’s no giddiness in the car, no sense of accomplishment, no high. For bombing runs, this is strange. As Janine rolls a joint, I finally ask the question that’s been on my mind all day: Why are they doing this?

"We don’t have a manifesto," James replies, as if on cue, almost rehearsed. "We’re not Stuckists or Dogme ’03. We didn’t come up with the acronym and design the website and elect a president and a treasurer."

He takes a couple pulls off the joint, and somewhere along the way, his tone changes from eager, if haughtily charismatic, to arrogant prick: "And we don’t really care if you write about this, you know."

When Chuck drops me off at the corner of Main St., I realize that I should’ve parted company with them back in Manhattan. At this hour, it could be a long time before the next 7 train leaves the station.

James blindsides me with this statement the next evening (again, pizza for dinner). Chuck is spending time with his girlfriend, so it’s Janine and James and me. Once again, the male half of this symbiote has just finished a rant against Damien Hirst, and passes the mic to Janine for a tirade against performance artists.

"Annie Sprinkle is the worst thing to happen to both feminism and art," she mutters around a slice of pizza. "Stick a carrot into your vagina, and you’re not shocking. You’re demeaning the vagina."

I correct Janine, noting that it was a yam. And it was Karen Finley. And it was her ass. And she didn’t stick it in.

"Same thing. Sprinkle desensitizes people to sexuality, and Karen Finley has nothing interesting to say with her mouth, so she speaks through her other lips."

She crosses the room and turns her attention to a full-size proof of a ONE WAY sign. Yesterday, I learned that they’re ordering 50 laminates, with plans to bomb 10th Ave.

I ask, then, what of shocking people out of their conventions? What of crossing lines of taboo and skirting around the realm of the impolite?

Chuck: "Ever see Gilbert and George? They’re the only people who can get away with the feces and urine thing. They’re brilliant. But only because they’re not trying to—"

"Be vulgar," offers Janine, with the ears of a rabbit, 20 feet away. "‘We want to spill our blood, brains and seed in our life-search for new meaning and purpose to give to life.’ They wrote that in the 80s after working as artists for 20 years or something. They’re gentlemen."

Then James again calls this newspaper too obscene. "The more you curse, the less effective it becomes."

Janine returns to the patch of floor where the near-empty pizza box serves as a centerpiece.

"The whole city, the whole county, is too vulgar," she expands.

James: "‘Vulgar’ in the classic sense, from vulgaris, ‘of the common people.’ I’m not saying—we’re not saying—that the average person is unsophisticated or anything. The opposite."

Janine: "The everyday person has been made vulgar and coarse and obtuse by desperate artists."

I ask how many "average people" know about Karen Finley or Annie Sprinkle. How many would see Gilbert and George as anything more than two aging queens who take dirty pictures of themselves?

"Art trickles down to culture, intentionally or not," James says. "From Chris Burden to Johnny Knoxville, it’s a clear progression."

Janine: "After [Chris Burden] shot himself and nailed himself to the [Volkswagen], what else could he do? He’s an architect now. He designs bridges."

Which isn’t entirely true, I note. He designs bridges mostly as art projects. Janine (typically, I’m discovering) doesn’t really pay much heed.

"Art ‘actions’ and ‘happenings’ were fine," she continues, "for the 60s, DuChamp’s urinal was good for the 20s—"

Fountain was earlier than 1920—

"These things are no longer interesting. There’s nothing shocking about defecating on a dinner plate or saying bad words on tv or showing a woman’s breasts during prime time. My six-year-old cousin already knows more cusses than my grandmother knows now."

She sets the ONE WAY proof down where the pizza box was. James leans in, nods his head, then leans over and kisses her on the cheek.

"We don’t want to be mistaken for restorationists," he says, "so we’re going to scrape these and dirty them a little."

Seven years ago, I suggest, James and Janine would be taking swing dance lessons and affecting Rat Pack lingo. They’d be watching Nick at Nite reruns of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and mourning the loss of courtship between man and woman. Their return to politeness and attention to civility is just the latest incarnation of youthful nostalgia.

"Wrong," James says. "America in the 1940s and 50s wasn’t paradise. We don’t advocate returning to anything. We want women back in the kitchen? Separate entrances for African-Americans? We’re not advocating a return to anything. We simply think the world has become too obscene, and this is our way of addressing it."

Janine starts rolling a joint, and I know it’s time for me to hit the road—before her partner gets stoned and nasty.

Two weeks later, Janine calls. Chuck’s ride is finally repaired, and the ONE WAY signs are ready for mounting. They pick me up at Union Square.

For whatever reason, James has changed the target to a stretch of 9th Ave. in the 30s. This time, though, Janine has other obligations, so I’m left alone with the boys. Insisting that he remain with the car, Chuck assigns me to be the lookout. He parks on 35th between 9th and 10th, perhaps not realizing that Midtown South police station is down the next block. As we finish up the northeast side, a patrol car turns the corner and pauses, but doesn’t stop. Not fazed, James heads north, intent on finishing this part of the run.

"Happens all the time," he tells me. "We probably look suspicious, but there’s nothing wrong. What’s the worst we can be doing? Taping fliers to the pole? That’s part of the beauty. There’s nothing inherently wrong with what we’re doing, but technically we’re still breaking the same laws as vandals."

It strikes me for the first time that, unlike other environmental artists and groups—from spraypainters to the Earth Liberation Front—these three aren’t documenting their work. James doesn’t whip out the digital camera after each installation; Chuck isn’t videotaping from the driver’s seat.

Even granting that the average person doesn’t benefit from provocation, don’t they want someone to know about the effort that’s gone into this?

"The three of us, we’re in our 20s and we don’t have families and we don’t have careers, our jobs suck and no one taught us to save up for a rainy day."

He sets down the stool while I check for police.

"It is the rainy day," he continues. "What else is there to do? Design websites? Paint sunsets? We’ve moved beyond provocation, but we still need to do something with ourselves. So why not manipulate the environment in such a subtle way that no one will ever notice?"

He finishes up and replaces the chair on his back.

"The next time you see a ONE WAY sign, imagine that we were there the night before, that someone’s time and energy and money is concentrated on that same stupid sign you’ve seen every day your whole life."

We’ve got one more sign to hit, but two cops are walking our way. He lights a cigarette while we wait them out.

"We’re fucking with things, yes, but we don’t need to be rude or destructive or hurtful in the process. Do I care if anyone notices? No. The whole point is that they don’t."

After that Thursday-night run, Chuck dropped me back off at Union Square. I haven’t heard from them since, and I haven’t tried to call.