The Skateboarding Art

By Tait Colberg

More than a celebration of skateboard graphics or photography and videos, more than a personal memoir of one life on four wheels, this book argues that riding a skateboard is an art form of the same kind and stature as the traditional visual and performance arts. Like a paintbrush or a musical instrument, the skateboard has become a tool of limitless creative possibilities. Not a sport, often a crime, and for many a broader lifestyle, skateboarding transforms mundane travel and neglected spaces into extraordinary experiences and spectacles. Mullen, Gonzales, Hawk, and others count among its Masters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781300097099

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The Skateboarding Art

The Skateboarding Art

Tait Colberg

Copyright

Copyright 2012 Tait Colberg

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-300-09709-9

Acknowledgments

Thanks, first and foremost, to my mother and father. Mom has been a ceaseless advocate of the arts throughout my and my siblings’ lives, driving us hours away to city museums when we were children, and always finding the resources for whatever supplies we needed. Although she never entirely understood or approved of her sons' skateboard madness, she allowed us to ride as enthusiastically as we liked. She also welcomed our loud, sweaty friends into her house, onto her furniture, and through the refrigerator, as we sat down to watch again and again the latest and greatest skate videos. To many of our friends, she became more than just a host; she mothered them too with some encouraging words, a place to stay, and a little gentle nagging. She continues to keep a watchful eye over their small children when they visit the pediatric clinic where she has worked longer than she would care for me to print.

Dad regularly shuttled my brother and me to a skate shop nearly an hour's drive away before we and our friends could sit behind the wheel of a car ourselves. He built our first ramps and gave us a life-long appreciation for tools and craftsmanship. He also operated the Super-8 camera that recorded our first skate video, and he let us become the filmmakers a few years later with the gift of a VHS camcorder.

Second, I owe thanks to my big brother, who has been my leading role model since childhood, including the day that he brought home our first skateboard. My little sister deserves my gratitude too for always managing to entertain herself wherever I dragged her, so that I could still skate while babysitting. Both my brother’s and sister’s art school educations and professional lives in painting, music, and theater have inspired my own amateur efforts as well.

Third, I thank all of the skaters with whom I have ever shared a session. The skaters of my hometown are the truest friends that I have ever had and ever expect to have. Even riders I did not know well, beyond a shared experience at a local hotspot, contest, or demo one day, helped form a supportive community around me. So too the pro skaters I have admired, most of whom I have never met personally nor even laid eyes upon outside of a magazine photo or video image.

Finally, credit is due to all of my teachers and professors, who taught me how to think, write, and draw. Any good ideas and successful writing in this book belong largely to them; I take the blame for all of the blunders. Though few of my academic instructors knew about my skateboarding life (and I am not certain that they would consider this book the best use of the skills they worked so hard to inculcate in me), they took a deep, personal interest in the development of my mind that has shaped my every endeavor since. I include among my teachers many older people with little formal education who have made an effort to guide me through the wider world outside of the classroom. I also count my students and colleagues at the school gracious enough to employ me for so long. My students especially have prevented me from growing too old despite the passing years.

T.C.

Dedication

For Robin and Maxi

Introduction

This is not the first book written in celebration of skateboarding. Today countless articles, magazines, websites, and books are readily available, thanks to skateboarding's global popularity and the speed of electronic communication. Often these publications invoke the term art.

Many of these media sources, however, applaud skateboarding mostly as a means to larger ends, whether artistic, didactic, or even spiritual. Despite good intentions, these sorts of indirect praise may become distractions from a deep appreciation of the riding itself. Setting them aside is the first step in establishing the mission of this book.

Some admire the skateboard as an artwork, contemplating the whole as a piece of sculpture, or extolling the graphics on the deck's underside. To a certain extent, this activity is innocent and pleasant enough. Collecting boards solely for this purpose, though, may do a disservice to skateboarding, since preservation prohibits riding them. Collectors whose advancing years and disposal incomes allow them to buy up and hang mint condition decks on their walls may have fallen out of love with riding and taken their own visual tastes and nostalgia as mistresses. After all, every board that an ol' timer removes from the marketplace for mounting in his home might have found its way into the streets or local skatepark beneath the feet of a youngster. Displaying decks worn past their prime by actual use may show a finer appreciation of skateboarding itself. This book is not a consideration of the skateboard, new or used, as a three dimensional artwork nor of the two dimensional graphics printed on its bottom.

Others commend skateboarding as fine subject matter for the visual arts, especially photography and filmmaking. They do so correctly. Again, though, these compliments may easily become backhanded. Photographers and filmmakers without much experience rolling on four urethane wheels may subordinate skateboarding to their own aesthetic goals. In the worst cases, they may reduce the board to a crass, accidental vehicle for setting in motion the noble human form. Or, they may treat the riding merely as an opportunity to show off neat shooting, processing, and editing techniques. For skaters, the most valuable images are likely the plainest; no other visual agenda clutters the appearance of the riding. This book often draws upon skate photos, videos, and films as evidence to support its arguments, but it does not aim to judge them as artworks in their own right.

Some personal memoirs present skateboarding as a teacher of larger life lessons. Certainly, it has played this role for many people. Still, some dangers may lie in such accounts. First, the immediate pleasures of skating are rewarding enough; no greater conclusions about the nature of human experience are necessary to recommend it. Second, the memoir as a literary form may be problematic for celebrating skateboarding. A memoir encourages readers to draw parallels between the author's experience and their own. It may even suggest that the author's experience is somehow definitive. Yet skateboarding is a highly individual affair, as this book argues. The value of personal expression is perhaps skateboarding's chief life lesson. For both of these reasons, this book is not simply a chronicle of my personal skateboarding history. I have tried to limit my memories and anecdotes to places where they help advance or illustrate my arguments about the nature of riding alone.

Finally, some have described skateboarding as a path to some kind of mystical experience or spiritual awareness. I confess that I have little patience for this point of view. Transcendence of this world on a skateboard is superfluous, at least; riding the pavement of the here-and-now is sufficiently meaningful and joyful by itself. More likely, as this book argues, skateboarding is deeply concerned with interactions between the durable materials of this physical existence. Busted and bailed tricks constantly remind riders of the reality of paved surfaces and their own bodies. Skateboarding is properly an antidote, not a stimulant to delusions of disembodied spiritual soaring. There will be no cosmic unfolding in this book, as in so many surf testaments and exotic travelogues.

This book aims to describe what skateboarding is. Skateboarding is art. There is no figure of speech here; it is not merely artistic or like the arts. Skateboarding is art, coequal with drawing and painting, sculpture, music, dance, theater, and filmmaking. Like all art, its value arises simply and directly from being what it is; nothing more, nothing less.

This is a laughable claim to non-skaters, especially when they draw comparisons like Tony Hawk is no Michelangelo. Even veteran skaters customarily crumple beneath such blows from the public.

This book argues that Tony Hawk and Michelangelo are peers. They share the same domain, differing only in medium. There are arguments for parity in quality, even grounds for declaring Hawk superior.1 Tony Hawk is no Michelangelo may summarize prevailing attitudes about art, but the herd’s preferences are often baseless aesthetically, consisting instead of hopes for socioeconomic advancement by adopting the arbitrary prejudices of the aristocracy. I imagine that if a time machine were to transport Michelangelo to the present, he would agree that Tony Hawk rips in as awesome a fashion as any figure on the ceiling of his Sistine Chapel.

In a similar fashion, I present an apology for skateboarding throughout this book. I do not use the word apology, in the modern sense of I am sorry; please, forgive me, however. Instead, I intend the original meaning of the ancient Greek term: a vigorous defense, as Socrates mounted at his infamous trial.

Some skaters may object to a rational analysis, Skating is an intense physical and emotional experience, not an intellectual exercise, and no verbal description can fully capture the feeling.

They are correct, but this does not prevent us from examining our riding in hindsight and trying to discover why we found the experience so compelling. Understanding skateboarding with greater precision is likely to deepen and prolong the thrill. Well reasoned reflection is also helpful for communicating our love of skateboarding to the curious and for defending ourselves against condemnation. I certainly cannot see anything to lose by thinking as carefully as possible.

Skaters themselves are the primary audience for this book. I do not expect, however, to reveal for them any new insights into skateboarding (except maybe some historical information for the youngest). Skaters experience the value of their art directly and grasp its principles and virtues intuitively.

Often, though, skaters are too young and too raw intellectually to articulate their thoughts and feelings, leaving them vulnerable to ignorant and unreasonable criticism. When the adult filmmakers of Powell Peralta's Future Primitive (1985), for example, asked young riders at a park demo, What's skateboarding all about? few could formulate more than Having fun! as a response. This is a perfectly legitimate answer, of course, but perhaps not complete. What makes skateboarding fun? What makes it more fun than conventional sports and other leisure activities? Does it provide rewards in addition to fun? What kind, and how so? Why doesn’t everyone skate? Why are some hostile to it?

In my youth, I also struggled to explain my fascination with skateboarding to my adolescent peers, adult family members, and schoolteachers. Natural processes of neurological development and the formal training of my university education have made me more verbally sophisticated since. Although injuries and the drudgeries of adult life have reduced my skating to a trickle, my appreciation for it has swelled. I now feel equipped and even duty-bound to spell out for young skaters what I see as the miraculous heart of skateboarding. I expect that I will fail to capture some thought or feeling completely, and I may overlook some issues entirely, so I ask in advance for my fellow skaters' forgiveness and invite them to write their own accounts to correct or supplement mine.

Although skaters are my chief audience, I hope to include non-skaters, or civilians, in the discussion as well.2 I owe some gratitude and encouragement to those readers. If you have become curious about skateboarding, maybe after seeing skaters in action on television or in your neighborhood, or perhaps as a member of another overlapping subculture, and you have picked up this book to investigate the subject more deeply, thank you for your interest and your effort to learn something new. I hope that I can begin to satisfy your curiosity, and if you are able, I urge you to give skateboarding a try yourself for a full understanding. If you are an adult, especially a parent, who has opened this book in hopes of comprehending a young person's passion for skateboarding and strengthening your personal relationship, thank you for your sincere commitment to supporting his or her life.

To the same readers (and maybe to some skaters too), I must issue some warnings regarding my diction and style. The meaning of the word skateboard may seem plain enough: a plank of some kind attached to four wheels. Skateboarding, then, must refer to any sort of riding one does upon such a vehicle. I am afraid, though, that the situation is more complicated than this. Throughout their history, skateboards have come in a dizzying array of sizes, shapes, and materials suited to a broad range of riding styles and terrain. The board that I aim to discuss throughout this book is the narrow popsicle shape with low trucks and hard wheels used primarily to pull tricks in the streets. This is the stick and the landscape that I know best. In places, I will expand my discussion to include the immediate ancestors of modern street boards and riding the transitions of pools, parks, and ramps. I do not address shortboard slalom, longboard downhill and freeriding, or other sorts of cruising. Surely, these are legitimate sectors of the total skateboarding world, and lately they have enjoyed explosive growth and development, but they lie outside of my experience and the needs of my argument. If riders of other rigs want re-title this book The Shortboarding Art, or The Streetboarding Art, or One of the Skateboarding Arts, they may do so. I assure them that I do celebrate within these pages the fundamental motion that all sorts of skateboards share, and I look forward to reading any book on the other shapes and styles that have descended from it by someone more informed than I.

Hereafter, then, skateboarding and skateboard refer to riding the streets or vert on short sticks. One more clarification regarding these broad terms remains. I use skateboarding to indicate the total universe that has developed around the popsicle board; all of its principles, practices, members, and artifacts. Skating has the narrower sense of the riding alone, which reduces further to street skating or vert skating as well as the personal habits and preferences of any individual rider. The distinction between skateboarding and skating is hardly scientific, though; sometimes I may blur the line where useful. Skater obviously refers to a person who rides a skateboard, but may or may not participate in other aspects of the wider skateboarding world, such as reading magazines, watching videos, or wearing so-called skate clothing.

When I discuss people who ride inline skates, traditional roller skates, or ice skates, I distinguish them with the appropriate adjectives. Ice skates and roller skates may have appeared first historically, and inline skates not long after, but the number of people riding skateboards today, I believe, is greater. I also argue later that riders of skateboards have earned the right to claim the plain skater for themselves on aesthetic grounds. I revert to skateboarder for additional clarity only when comparisons to the other vehicles run long.

Throughout this book I take for granted some more specific knowledge of skateboarding. I assume familiarity with the parts of the skateboard, from obvious components like wheels, to more specialized terms like the hangers, baseplates, and kingpins of trucks. I place the names of some tricks within quotation marks at their first appearance to establish them as technical terms and to prevent readers from interpreting them according to ordinary English usage. Eggplant, for example, refers to the popular vert handstand from the 1980s, not the garden vegetable. The second and subsequent mentions of the same trick usually abandon the quotation marks. If a word or phrase clearly represents the name of a trick from the start, like nollie, I give it no special punctuation or typeface. Likewise, the terms frontside and backside, fakie, and switchstance receive no quotation marks, since they describe directions of motion rather than distinct tricks, and since they stand out clearly from the surrounding English context. Throughout the text I also omit the word degree when describing rotating tricks, like 360 (degree) backside ollie. Occasionally I slip into skaters' slang for praise or blame, the slang of my era, at least. Already I have said above, for instance, that Tony Hawk rips.

I want to reassure civilians that I am not trying to create confusion with these writing and printing practices, so that skateboarding remains an exclusive club; everyone is invited to the party. Instead, I leave some aspects of the discussion in skaters' original language to encourage non-skaters to speak with them directly for clarification and enrichment. If, say, the ollie is a mystery to you, ask any skater, especially your own child, to explain and demonstrate this essential skill. Those conversations will be more edifying and rewarding than the one-way transaction of reading this book.

I do not recommend that a non-skater, particularly a parent, read this book in secret, then spring a skateboarding conversation on a young person: So, pull any ‘method airs’ today, Son? How about that Bob Burnquist--pretty rad, eh? Suspicion and resentment are the likely results of well intentioned, but poorly delivered overtures like this. Be honest about your interest or puzzlement, and be careful not to intrude too deeply without invitation.

Occasionally, though, adult readers will have the upper hand. I do not limit myself to a child's vocabulary, and I leave unexplained larger cultural references, especially where they provide fruitful analogies with skateboarding. These are your opportunities, Mom, Dad, and Teacher, to assist the intellectual growth of the young skater in your life.

One final editorial decision demands special explanation. Throughout this book I refer to the hypothetical skater as he solely for grammatical convenience. Boys have dominated skateboarding historically, thanks to gender biases within the broader culture rather than any intrinsically male character of rolling on four wheels. Here I want to acknowledge the contributions of female skaters and applaud their efforts to continue riding in the face of the prejudice that they regularly confront, both within and outside of the skateboarding community. The growing numbers of female skaters, in fact, strikes me as the healthiest trend in skateboarding today, not simply for their numerical addition to the population, but for the fresh perspective young women bring to the skateboarding art. Women see the world and move their bodies differently than men, and both women's psychological and physiological dispositions may serve as stimulants and counterpoints when the male herd's creativity is stagnating. Female skaters may develop a skateboarding of their own that sometimes parallels, and on other occasions intersects with males' riding. Skater girls need not limit themselves to slavishly imitating the boys.3 Boys, likewise, must not judge girls' riding simply by the degree to which it matches or fails to match their own. Shame on boys who trap a girl between She sucks! if she skates differently, and She’s a man! when she skates in a similar way (especially if she rips harder). Differences between male and female riding are healthy and beneficial to skateboarding as a whole.

Thus, with an apologetic mission, and with these compositional conventions in place, this book presents the case for skateboarding as an art. First comes dismissal of the label sport, embrace of crime, and a careful consideration of lifestyle. A brief history of the skateboard follows, stressing the trend toward simplification. Next we see how refinements of the skateboard have provided riders with infinite expressive opportunities and allowed them, like all artists, to transform the mundane into the extraordinary. The skateboard's limitless creative potential also separates skateboarding from the extreme sports. The final chapter assembles some of the immortals of the skateboarding art.

Chapter 1: Not Sport

The first step toward establishing skateboarding as an art is dispensing with the label sport. Skateboarding is not a sport. Any resemblance to baseball, basketball, football, or any other athletic competition is accidental and superficial.

Skateboarding centers around moving the body, of course, but this property alone is not sufficient to classify it as sport. Ballet, for example, is an obsession with movement of the body, but not a sport. Sports regulate bodily movement in quantifiable ways, so that one body's can be compared to another's as precisely as possible, and the superior movement identified and celebrated. These regulations include all of the rules of a particular game, the referees who monitor play, some means of keeping score, and grouping bodies into teams under the guidance of trainers and coaches. Sports that become popular organize themselves into leagues and establish tournaments under the watchful eyes of governing bodies. The prevailing ethos of sports is competition, the singular goal victory. At the end of play, a clear winner, whether an individual or a team, stands above the loser. Sports with professional ranks and international reach legitimately crown their champions the greatest players in the world, until the next cycle of contests replaces him, her, or them. Compare gymnastics to ballet. Gymnastics has all of the regulatory apparatus necessary for identifying national, international, and Olympic champions and earns the classification sport. Gymnasts proudly describe themselves as athletes.

Skateboarding rejects the regulations of sports. Skateboarding has no rules, no referees, no trainers or coaches, and no proper teams.4 A skater sets and breaks his own rules, if any, and serves as his own trainer and coach. This personal freedom is skateboarding’s principal attraction for many young people, who otherwise suffer under adults' rules in every other aspect of their lives. Numerous professional skaters have identified this individual liberty when asked what first drew them to skateboarding, or what drew them away from sports to skateboarding instead.

Practitioners of the traditional arts enjoy the same freedom. Skaters' interest in drawing and painting, music, dance, acting, or filmmaking, therefore, is no coincidence. Likewise, traditional artists are often fond of skateboarding, incorporating it wholesale, or borrowing bits and pieces for use in their own work. Over its history, skateboarding intertwined first with rock’n’roll and later hip hop music, for example. Graffiti art and other graphic design, as well as photography and videography, have also enjoyed long and fruitful collaborations with skateboarding. As a result, skaters routinely have led the mainstream youth culture as tastemakers.

The larger society, however, often fears those who indulge in too much freedom and feel little regard for rules and authority, especially when such people group together. For this reason, skaters have justifiably earned reputations as rebels.

Additional stereotypes have also accumulated in the popular media. A skateboard, usually a laughably outdated or cheap poser model, is a frequent prop to identify troubled or troublemaker youth in television programs, ranging from teen soap operas to crime shows for adults. Drug addict or dealer, thief, gang member? Give the actor a skateboard, says the show's Director. The next chapter examines the criminality of skateboarding itself. Rejecting the suggestion that skateboarding is a reliable indicator of all sorts of other delinquent behaviors is sufficient here.

Unfortunately, young athletes often adopt the prejudices of popular media, parents, teachers, and coaches. Sometimes they absorb these misguided impressions passively. On other occasions, adults explicitly implant them. Whatever the source, athletes often attack skaters without provocation. Sooner or later every skater confronts the verbal and physical abuse of jocks who derive their identity from their victories on the playing field. An independent act as simple as rolling down the street, minding one's business is too threatening to be ignored by people who lack the bravery to regulate themselves and depend instead on structures and accolades provided by others. Such people are even incapable of harassing their peers individually; gangs of older athletes hassle a younger, solitary skater.

Many young people have also come to skateboarding for relief from the zero-sum competition of sports.5 Those who have failed to meet the athletic expectations of adults or peers find solace in the supportive network of skateboarding. Poor athletes, once free of the constraints and pressure of sports, have often become extraordinary skaters.

Skating alone, whether leisurely cruising or the intense concentration required to develop and master new tricks, is enormously pleasurable and rewarding. More often skaters rove in packs, and they certainly compete among themselves to pull the gnarliest tricks. Even under these circumstances, though, a collaborative effort to improve, to protect one another from danger, and above all to have fun dominates the activity. For this reason, skaters who are otherwise complete strangers easily mix with one another and form friendships; everyone wants to have a killer session. The suspicious glares, puffed-up chests, even violent confrontations between members of opposing sports teams and their fans, from street games, to high school contests, to professional play, are largely unknown in skateboarding. Skaters want to meet riders from other parts of the country and from abroad; they want to skate with, not against unfamiliar peers who may have new tricks and fresh spots to show them. Skateboarding has even shed the locals only exclusivity that sometimes hampers surfing. There is simply more pavement to go around for longer stretches of the year than coastline ideal for wave-riding during a few short months. Skaters are generally happy to share prime spots too, as evidenced by the reappearance of the same terrain in different companies' videos year after year. Often one team’s video is generous enough to include shots of friends who ride for other sponsors when they pull some sick trick at the spot that occupies the day’s filming. No sports team shows moves by players from opposing teams in its season highlights.

Pro Contests

Before skateboarding can shrug off classification as sport, however, someone may protest, What about contests? Certainly their regulations, judges, and winners make a sport out of skateboarding?

They do not. Unlike proper sports, contests represent a small, uncharacteristic sector of skateboarding. The skateboarding universe does not revolve around contests, whether professional or amateur. Nor would the disappearance of contests be the death of skateboarding. In fact, skateboarding has weathered periods of unpopularity in which contests did vanish almost entirely, and these droughts of public competition eventually proved salutary for skateboarding as a whole.

Consider the nature of professional contests. On the surface, they have eligibility requirements for participants, clearly defined formats, dedicated spaces, judges, spectators, and sponsors, like any sporting event. Profound philosophical differences between skateboarding contests and other sporting events emerge, though, when we scrutinize the level of esteem granted to the winners.

Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NFL legitimately crown the Yankees, the Lakers, or the Cowboys the year's undisputed champions, and fans of every team within the league, however grudgingly, must agree that their players have proven themselves the finest in the world by emerging victorious from the end-of-season tournament.

Although skaters may recognize Andy MacDonald as the winner of this year's Dew Action Sports Tour, for example, they do not conclude from his contest victories that he is the Greatest Vert Skater in the World for the year or even that very day. In the back of every skater's mind, when the judges declare the winner of a professional contest, is the afterthought, Big deal; other skaters rip just as hard or harder. This feeling crystallizes further when typical skaters answer the question, Will skateboarding ever become an Olympic sport? They reply, No, at the very least and often add, I sure hope not. Skaters recognize that apparently elevating skateboarding to the peak of international athletic competition actually would cheapen it by suggesting that contests, however prestigious, measure skill accurately and definitively.

So strong is this conviction regarding the contingency and triviality of contest wins that many professional skaters have used their runs to mock the contest structure, including the sponsors that have compelled their participation. At the high point of skateboarding's popularity in the 1980s, for example, Mark Gonzales wore his sponsors' stickers on his body to declare his status as a mere commodity.6 Likewise, Neil Blender pulled only a few mock tricks at the street contest in Tempe, Arizona in '86, instead spending most of his run spray-painting a grimacing face on the wall of the course.7 At Del Mar during the same year, he filled his run with nearly identical inverts and axle stalls on the coping in deliberate contrast to the spectacular airs demanded by spectators and judges for victory. More recently