8 minute read
Binocular Monovision 1
100% bone-free Nigel Cooke @the_chocolate_saiyan
PART ONE
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The overly-educated, ultra-conservative guy in the office came in one Monday so incredibly annoyed. His wife had bought him a painting at some charity thing they’d gone to over the weekend. He had made the mistake, he complained, of saying he liked one of the pieces. Unbeknownst to her, he had said this only to make conversation — the kind of thing you say when you don’t know what to do with your hands. His reaction to the office that morning was “What am I supposed to do with it now? Look at it?”
“Of course you do,” I thought, shrugging, if only in hopes of backing away from the conversation.
I mean, that is what art’s for, isn’t it? To be looked at? Art is possibly a hobby, but rarely a sport. It’s sometimes a lifestyle, but ephemeral — a captured moment in time, or at least a vehicle(1) for taking note of time’s fleeting emotions, ideas and movement. To quote your most-lifted roommate, “The true artist just, like, captures this all to purge the mind ’n’ shit. The eventuality of showing it later, even if just to themselves as a point of reflection is secondary, followed only then by some sort of financial- or attention-based profit economy, bro.”
We can debate how accurate that is, but the same question arises in relation to skateboarding — this 'What is it for?'. Skating is also not a sport, really, but an undeniably physical exertion if not expression. It’s sometimes called a lifestyle, and often considered an artform, but those are still metaphors, not statements of purpose. Similarly to everyone’s favorite F-word, part of the trouble is dissecting why skateboarding is both a noun and a verb, and which you more agree with.
Both art and movement collide during the act of skating. Much like dance and trees-falling-inforests: when we aren’t there to see it go down, did it ever exist at all? If a concept or feeling only becomes art once it’s made tangible, then it follows that observation/consumption of the act of skateboarding is what converts it from personal activity to the social good many conclude is Art. Because all skaters “just know it when they see it,“(2) this finds skating more tradition(3) than hobby through its cohesion to the way in which the visible objects of these actions are collected, seen, and evaluated. Still, the existence of a collected mass of communal values —the subculture — continues only to better define not the why, but the what.
— Dick Hebdidge
“Video, or it didn’t happen,” right? There’s this slack-jawed astonishment that strikes certain skate media types when confronted with the mere mention of how much groundbreaking skateboarding went down in the ’90s off-camera. Their reaction isn’t about the feats being realized at all, but that they were never captured. The ahistoric as insult — the audacity to jump the Gonz gap or yadda-yadda’ed JKwon without a filmer present?!? — as if the skater simply doing something rad for and by themselves is offensive and without value (except Gino’s push, evidently). We may have missed so much of Penny, Sanchez and Cardiel by merit of their priority having been on skating, not making a show of it.(4) When Iain Borden explains that, through their actions, “skateboarders use imagery less as pure image, and more as a … lived representation,”(5) he would seem to point to the existence of the act itself as art, uncaptured or otherwise. Does this further confirm the evidence-of-skateboarding as skateboarding-itself? Is the verb the noun? Are we really down to toss the entire thing down the wellworn path of Plato’s Cave, the simulation, red and blue pills, and … just: no. Let’s start over.
— Kevin Wilkins, Timbre #16
By most standards, the artist and the audience are rarely one in the same. Skateboarding is one of the only activities whose fanbase is also almost entirely made up of its participants. When it's not about pants, skateboarding is as often as much about the act of watching as it is about the act of doing. Though this may change with the Olympics, there just isn’t a codified, industrialized mindset in skateboarding like there is among the recreational football fan light years removed from an NFL field. Even when one may have played at the collegiate level, there is no analog to the inclusion of the spot in “organized” sports.
— Kyle Beachy, The Most Fun Thing
In the ’80s-90s, the obsessive ‘watching’ required to dissect still photography enough to even learn to ollie demanded psychotic dedication. It’s no accident that the dawn of progressive street skating and cheap camcorders nearly overlap. Watching Shackle Me Not or Video Days (and their very existence) was a game-changing experience for all. But for the garden-variety skateboarder (possibly even the hometown hero) to accept them as truth was to be perpetually positioned six months to a year behind where the pros were at.(6) Access to real-time progression was a privilege requiring a move to NYC, San Diego, or San Francisco. Except in rare exceptions, the quality of the observation drove the quantity and quality of "In those moments of grinding, no matter how many hundreds tricks being done. In that way, watching took on an even bigger role during the big-pants-small-wheels lull in popularity.
— Ted Barrow
This was merely normalized back into the mainstream as the internet took root. Ironically, the era(s)(7) of peak-Poser(8) coincided with when watching was such a functionally small part of the culture by volume. With such a finite well to peer into, the only option was to try.(9) To be watching and not participate circa(ish) ’87-94 was actually uncommon.(10) It showed far more dedication to and interest in the scene than its passive, modern equivalent. This type of intense watching / studying / decoding could almost be considered another discipline, like freestyle or slalom before it. You became your own answers.
At some point, watching skateboarding stops being about viewing and consuming and instead becomes an essential form of empowerment. The existence of two For?s — one, described by Bill Strobeck ‘filming skateboarders’ for non-skateboarding Supreme shoppers, and the other by Greg Hunt ‘filming spots’ for his fellow skaters.(11) The first creates a throughline of association-by-association, similar to Art Haüs patrons who appreciate and financially support the creators, who the latter is both Of and For. The reason why skateboarding has progressed so quickly over the past 15 years is entirely due to the amount of skateboarding that we see on behalf of both, regardless of what we choose to do with it. For the proactive doer, watching shows potential, possibilities, while the reactive watcher underwrites a feedback loop. It lets skaters ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’; the volume of input resulting in a greater multiplier of output.(12)
Part 2 Next Issue
Footnotes:
1. We value ‘style’ which, in effect, is what Walter Benjamin deemed The Aura: “the value created by the presence of an original (not) captured or transmitted.” There is a certain magic to Video Days’ simplicity (and The Gonz in general) that isn’t described by technical merit or achievement. It can’t be recreated verbatim, if it could, Mark (as the man in his mid-50s) could not carry the reverence he does.
2. Or, in other words: “if you don’t skate, you don’t relate.”
3. Cultural critic Neil Postman describes tradition as “the acknowledgement of the authority of symbols,” such as when skaters respect our peers more should their name be printed on a deck, with tiers of legitimacy assigned along a spectrum of wack to core, depending on the brand to issue it. Some traditions (like pro status) can (and maybe should) be revised over time. The “trivialization of the symbols that support the (cultural narrative)” — like calling yourself pro based on a monetized YouTube follower count — “will accompany (its) decline.”
4. Part of the legacy of these skaters are in the myths surrounding them. Had they been better-documented, would they hold the same gravity in the culture today?
5. Iain Borden, Skateboarding and the City, 120.
6. But where is no lag, we now see three and four-yearolds on Instagram performing feats that rockstar pros couldn’t accomplish 35 years ago.
7. Depending on your age, you may know is better as the “post-Back To the Future,” “Pop-Punk ’90s,“ or “Kylie Jenner x Thrasher hoodie ’10s.“
8. Posers haven’t ceased to exist outside those windows, it’s that skaters/artists are too busy making and doing to care, ignoring the Brailleskater rather than kooking on them. “Live and let live” is one of the major shifts today, as it sets the stage that it is far worse, socially, to be ignored than it is to be identified (even negatively). Through fashion and the social media gazpacho of subculture, there is no shame in fandom now even as it overtakes the ability (or desire) to participate.
9. Being outside the rainshadow has been responsible for significant advancement: the Boneless One in Ohio, a ton of vert tricks in Texas, Canadian Flyouts, etc.
10. Unless you were female, then it was enforced by toxic layers of bros at every turn.
11. To borrow Kyle Beachy’s comparison (TMFT, 130).
12. Boorstin tosses in something to chew on as you feed the feed: “One picture is worth a thousand words. But a thousand pictures, especially if they are of the same object, may not be worth anything at all.”
