Surf/Skate

Jacket

“ From realist painter to installation artist, to ‘genetic portraitist,’ to abstract painter, Miller’s impulse has through visual media.”

—Artspace Steve Miller is a multimedia artist who investigates the ways in which art, design, and scientific technology intersect in contemporary culture. Educated at Middlebury College and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Miller’s work, which spans the played a critical role in pioneering the Sci-Art movement.

With over 50 solo exhibitions at major institutions across the globe—including the National Academy of Sciences, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Hong Kong Arts Center—his work has been reviewed in Le Monde, ARTnews, The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. In addition to serving as an editorial advisor and contributor to the photography journal, Musée, Miller is the author of Radiographic (Glitterati). A native of Buffalo, NY, he divides his time between homes in New York City and the Hamptons.

Considered one of America’s greatest living novelists, Michael Tolkin is an award-winning writer, director, and producer based in Los Angeles, CA. His novels include The Player, The Return of the Player, Among the Dead, and Under Radar. For the film adaptation of The Player, Tolkin won the Writers Guild Award, the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the PEN Center USA West Literary Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award

An alligator glides through the brisk waters of California

Amazon is called the ‘lungs’ of our planet, I could

amidst the idling beachgoers basking on the sandy

x-ray the flora and fauna of the rainforests to give the

coast. A pack of piranhas ferociously rip through the

world a metaphorical checkup. It seemed obvious to want to know what lies beneath our global ribs.”

— Steve Miller from Radiographic: X-Ray Photo Inventions

roaring tides of Hawaii, breaking the waves among surfers. And a massive python slithers through the streets of Brazilian favelas, snaking its way through the busy crowds of people.

Making and breaking waves on artist Steve

These aren’t cases of wild predators on the loose, but

Miller’s surf- and skateboards, Amazonian

rather artist Steve Miller’s surf- and skateboard designs

creatures from iguanas to piranhas make their way back into their lost habitats in style. Always at the vanguard of scientific and artistic innovation, Miller has integrated biomedical imaging technology—from MRIs to CT scans—to capture the natural and material world as extraordinary photographic images.

As global environmental degradation continues to threaten the rainforests, Miller metaphorically restores the dwindling flora and fauna of the Amazon through dynamic surfaces and vehicles.

of x-rayed Amazonian creatures in motion. Propelled by

SURF/SKATE

disciplines of painting, photography, and sculpture,

“ The strange jaca tree made me think that if the

Steve Miller

been the same: to wrestle with the fundamentals of life

“ As an alternative to killing for sport, Miller offers such ‘eco-trophies’ as a white surfboard (exemplifying Brazilian beach culture) embellished with a black X-ray image of a caiman.”

—Washington Post

the dual forces of intellectual and aesthetic inquiry, Miller has collaborated with leading scientists at institutions like New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Rockefeller University for his prolific series, Health of the Planet. Employing imaging technologies often associated with the biomedical industry as his artistic tools—MRI, CT scan, electron microscope, and sonogram, among others—his monumental photographic imagery mediates the often dichotomized domains of art and technology to not merely represent but reimagine new modes of seeing.

Surf/Skate, a companion piece to Miller’s publishing debut Radiographic, documents this

As mass deforestation and environmental exploitation

expansion of his original concept, taking readers

continue to devastate the Amazon with catastrophic

on a ride to the intersection of fine art and material culture.

For Miller, activating his x-ray imagery on dynamic surfaces and vehicles is an act of restoration, metaphorically returning the dwindling flora and fauna of the Amazon to the world at large.

SURF/SKATE Art and Board Life Steve Miller

for Best Crime Screenplay. His most recent novel, NK3, was published in 2017 (Atlantic Monthly Press).

Published by Glitterati Editions www.glitteratieditions.com Printed and Bound in China

Foreword by Michael Tolkin

ramifications to its biodiversity, Miller’s work is now all the more critical. For Miller, the skate deck and surfboard are metaphoric connections to the land and water, vehicles to restore and reintroduce the dwindling flora and fauna back to the world. A companion piece to his extraordinary publication exploring this subject, Radiographic, Surf/Skate takes the reader to the intersection of popular material culture and nature itself, exploring the various ways in which Miller’s images are infiltrating the world, setting life in dynamic motion.

In a rare moment, a bright light can enter your life.

Mine is Jeanine Pepler. This book is dedicated to her.

First published in 2019 by

Glitterati Editions 311 West 43 Street 12th Floor New York, NY 10036 www.glitteratieditions.com media@glitteratieditions.com Copyright Š 2019 by Steve Miller All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

First edition, 2019 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the publisher.

Hardcover edition ISBN: 978-1-943876-60-0 Printed and bound in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

4

5

In a rare moment, a bright light can enter your life.

Mine is Jeanine Pepler. This book is dedicated to her.

First published in 2019 by

Glitterati Editions 311 West 43 Street 12th Floor New York, NY 10036 www.glitteratieditions.com media@glitteratieditions.com Copyright Š 2019 by Steve Miller All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

First edition, 2019 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the publisher.

Hardcover edition ISBN: 978-1-943876-60-0 Printed and bound in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

4

5

FOREWORD Inspiration.

spent a few days in Orange County, driving around

It was the seventh grade.

the Vietnamese neighborhoods. The idea that began

1962.

to form was to make an Orange County Vietnamese

I don’t know who made my first skateboard or how

Rebel Without a Cause about the pressures driving

much I paid for it. I bought it from someone at school.

families apart, with a sensitive Vietnamese war

It was made of a solid piece of something like maple,

orphan bounced around the community as a foster

stained in light and dark stripes, to look like four

child and getting into trouble because he was a bad

pieces of wood. The wheels came from roller skates,

model to the kids he grew up with.

two steel plates, toe and heel screwed into the wood.

It was noisy. It vibrated. It was unforgiving. I wasn’t

people and didn’t have the patience to learn it, and

very good at it, but it made my dog happy. He pulled

at the same time, I started to form a story about

me around the block like an Evinrude speed boat,

the change in tone from my old skate wheels to the

and I waterskied behind him.

sound of the modern board.

I don’t know when I threw it out. The wheels

I ditched the Vietnamese family and made the

might have come off. There were no skateboard

rebel an orphan adopted by a white American

shops then. It was an artisanal project.

family with a three-year-old. The orphan becomes

I didn’t think much about skateboards until

their golden child, and the first born becomes the

one day in the mid 1980s, when I saw a kid on a

rebel, a bitter disappointment to his parents, a fuck

skateboard coming down the street carving a few

up in every way. The story accelerates when the

wide S turns, like a surfer. He passed me, and the

Vietnamese brother is murdered in a way that looks

sound of his wheels was deeper than the metallic

like suicide. The American brother skates around

screech of the past.

Orange County following clues, and in the end,

Not long after, I read an article in the LA Times

brings down the villains. That part came together

about the Vietnamese children who had arrived in

quickly, and to write it, I told myself that I needed to

the States as refugees at the end of the war and

buy a skateboard and learn how to use it.

were now teenagers, rebelling in their way—the boys

8

I didn’t know enough about the world of the boat

I went to a skate shop in Santa Monica, a fetish

wearing leather motorcycle jackets, the girls in poodle

store for teenagers who knew what they wanted

skirts. I wanted to write a film about that world and

and needed no help in asking for it. I needed 9

FOREWORD Inspiration.

spent a few days in Orange County, driving around

It was the seventh grade.

the Vietnamese neighborhoods. The idea that began

1962.

to form was to make an Orange County Vietnamese

I don’t know who made my first skateboard or how

Rebel Without a Cause about the pressures driving

much I paid for it. I bought it from someone at school.

families apart, with a sensitive Vietnamese war

It was made of a solid piece of something like maple,

orphan bounced around the community as a foster

stained in light and dark stripes, to look like four

child and getting into trouble because he was a bad

pieces of wood. The wheels came from roller skates,

model to the kids he grew up with.

two steel plates, toe and heel screwed into the wood.

It was noisy. It vibrated. It was unforgiving. I wasn’t

people and didn’t have the patience to learn it, and

very good at it, but it made my dog happy. He pulled

at the same time, I started to form a story about

me around the block like an Evinrude speed boat,

the change in tone from my old skate wheels to the

and I waterskied behind him.

sound of the modern board.

I don’t know when I threw it out. The wheels

I ditched the Vietnamese family and made the

might have come off. There were no skateboard

rebel an orphan adopted by a white American

shops then. It was an artisanal project.

family with a three-year-old. The orphan becomes

I didn’t think much about skateboards until

their golden child, and the first born becomes the

one day in the mid 1980s, when I saw a kid on a

rebel, a bitter disappointment to his parents, a fuck

skateboard coming down the street carving a few

up in every way. The story accelerates when the

wide S turns, like a surfer. He passed me, and the

Vietnamese brother is murdered in a way that looks

sound of his wheels was deeper than the metallic

like suicide. The American brother skates around

screech of the past.

Orange County following clues, and in the end,

Not long after, I read an article in the LA Times

brings down the villains. That part came together

about the Vietnamese children who had arrived in

quickly, and to write it, I told myself that I needed to

the States as refugees at the end of the war and

buy a skateboard and learn how to use it.

were now teenagers, rebelling in their way—the boys

8

I didn’t know enough about the world of the boat

I went to a skate shop in Santa Monica, a fetish

wearing leather motorcycle jackets, the girls in poodle

store for teenagers who knew what they wanted

skirts. I wanted to write a film about that world and

and needed no help in asking for it. I needed 9

nothing but help. I had three choices to make: deck,

wings. It combined the left facing skull and wings of

the part you stand on; trucks, made of the base

the Hells Angels symbol and the Grateful Dead’s top

plate; the pivot and axle; and then the polyurethane

view of a skull with hair of roses framed as though

wheels. I was told I would be safest on something

inside a porthole.

wide and stiff. The selection of equivalent boards

Hawk’s symbol was a hawk skull set on an Iron

was set in front of me, and I was stuck with a

Cross. The bird skull was friendly, the beak dominant

dilemma that was aesthetic rather than practical.

like a parrot’s, like Disney’s José Carioca. McGill’s

Any of ten boards would work equally well, and

symbol took the Bones Brigade skull and a Grateful

I was too much of a beginner to feel the subtle

Dead lightning bolt and removed the frame. The

differences. There was no one board that was

skull was large and serious, fully human, no hint of

clearly the only choice for me, so I bought logo

glee. A thick green rattlesnake, tail above the skull,

stickers from my dozen or so contenders and took

wraps around the back of the skull beneath a halo of

them home.

lightning. The snake has wedged itself between the

It came down to two boards, the Tony Hawk

skull’s teeth and then reached forward, fangs ready

and the Mike McGill. They were both skating with

to sink into the viewer’s face. Below the snake’s

the Bones Brigade, the team sponsored by Powell

head is McGill’s signature.

Peralta Skateboards, and at the time Hawk was not

The snake ennobles the skull by making it a

yet the dominant skater of his generation. McGill

home, as though the skull logo was finished before

had perfected the McTwist, which was an impossible

the snake crawled into the frame. Where did that

skate ramp trick, the skater version of the four

snake come from? Who knows? I just know that

minute mile, a front flip, and a 540-degree rotation.

one day it wrapped itself around Steve Miller’s

The basic Bones Brigade logo was a grinning skull clawing his way into a halo between two yellow

skateboard (snakeboard!) and stopped to have the artist take a picture of its bones.

Michael Tolkin

10

11

nothing but help. I had three choices to make: deck,

wings. It combined the left facing skull and wings of

the part you stand on; trucks, made of the base

the Hells Angels symbol and the Grateful Dead’s top

plate; the pivot and axle; and then the polyurethane

view of a skull with hair of roses framed as though

wheels. I was told I would be safest on something

inside a porthole.

wide and stiff. The selection of equivalent boards

Hawk’s symbol was a hawk skull set on an Iron

was set in front of me, and I was stuck with a

Cross. The bird skull was friendly, the beak dominant

dilemma that was aesthetic rather than practical.

like a parrot’s, like Disney’s José Carioca. McGill’s

Any of ten boards would work equally well, and

symbol took the Bones Brigade skull and a Grateful

I was too much of a beginner to feel the subtle

Dead lightning bolt and removed the frame. The

differences. There was no one board that was

skull was large and serious, fully human, no hint of

clearly the only choice for me, so I bought logo

glee. A thick green rattlesnake, tail above the skull,

stickers from my dozen or so contenders and took

wraps around the back of the skull beneath a halo of

them home.

lightning. The snake has wedged itself between the

It came down to two boards, the Tony Hawk

skull’s teeth and then reached forward, fangs ready

and the Mike McGill. They were both skating with

to sink into the viewer’s face. Below the snake’s

the Bones Brigade, the team sponsored by Powell

head is McGill’s signature.

Peralta Skateboards, and at the time Hawk was not

The snake ennobles the skull by making it a

yet the dominant skater of his generation. McGill

home, as though the skull logo was finished before

had perfected the McTwist, which was an impossible

the snake crawled into the frame. Where did that

skate ramp trick, the skater version of the four

snake come from? Who knows? I just know that

minute mile, a front flip, and a 540-degree rotation.

one day it wrapped itself around Steve Miller’s

The basic Bones Brigade logo was a grinning skull clawing his way into a halo between two yellow

skateboard (snakeboard!) and stopped to have the artist take a picture of its bones.

Michael Tolkin

10

11

44

45

44

45

46

47

46

47

62

63

62

63

64

65

64

65

132

133

132

133

134

135

134

135

136

137

136

137

184

185

184

185

Jacket

“ From realist painter to installation artist, to ‘genetic portraitist,’ to abstract painter, Miller’s impulse has through visual media.”

—Artspace Steve Miller is a multimedia artist who investigates the ways in which art, design, and scientific technology intersect in contemporary culture. Educated at Middlebury College and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Miller’s work, which spans the played a critical role in pioneering the Sci-Art movement.

With over 50 solo exhibitions at major institutions across the globe—including the National Academy of Sciences, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Hong Kong Arts Center—his work has been reviewed in Le Monde, ARTnews, The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. In addition to serving as an editorial advisor and contributor to the photography journal, Musée, Miller is the author of Radiographic (Glitterati). A native of Buffalo, NY, he divides his time between homes in New York City and the Hamptons.

Considered one of America’s greatest living novelists, Michael Tolkin is an award-winning writer, director, and producer based in Los Angeles, CA. His novels include The Player, The Return of the Player, Among the Dead, and Under Radar. For the film adaptation of The Player, Tolkin won the Writers Guild Award, the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the PEN Center USA West Literary Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award

An alligator glides through the brisk waters of California

Amazon is called the ‘lungs’ of our planet, I could

amidst the idling beachgoers basking on the sandy

x-ray the flora and fauna of the rainforests to give the

coast. A pack of piranhas ferociously rip through the

world a metaphorical checkup. It seemed obvious to want to know what lies beneath our global ribs.”

— Steve Miller from Radiographic: X-Ray Photo Inventions

roaring tides of Hawaii, breaking the waves among surfers. And a massive python slithers through the streets of Brazilian favelas, snaking its way through the busy crowds of people.

Making and breaking waves on artist Steve

These aren’t cases of wild predators on the loose, but

Miller’s surf- and skateboards, Amazonian

rather artist Steve Miller’s surf- and skateboard designs

creatures from iguanas to piranhas make their way back into their lost habitats in style. Always at the vanguard of scientific and artistic innovation, Miller has integrated biomedical imaging technology—from MRIs to CT scans—to capture the natural and material world as extraordinary photographic images.

As global environmental degradation continues to threaten the rainforests, Miller metaphorically restores the dwindling flora and fauna of the Amazon through dynamic surfaces and vehicles.

of x-rayed Amazonian creatures in motion. Propelled by

SURF/SKATE

disciplines of painting, photography, and sculpture,

“ The strange jaca tree made me think that if the

Steve Miller

been the same: to wrestle with the fundamentals of life

“ As an alternative to killing for sport, Miller offers such ‘eco-trophies’ as a white surfboard (exemplifying Brazilian beach culture) embellished with a black X-ray image of a caiman.”

—Washington Post

the dual forces of intellectual and aesthetic inquiry, Miller has collaborated with leading scientists at institutions like New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Rockefeller University for his prolific series, Health of the Planet. Employing imaging technologies often associated with the biomedical industry as his artistic tools—MRI, CT scan, electron microscope, and sonogram, among others—his monumental photographic imagery mediates the often dichotomized domains of art and technology to not merely represent but reimagine new modes of seeing.

Surf/Skate, a companion piece to Miller’s publishing debut Radiographic, documents this

As mass deforestation and environmental exploitation

expansion of his original concept, taking readers

continue to devastate the Amazon with catastrophic

on a ride to the intersection of fine art and material culture.

For Miller, activating his x-ray imagery on dynamic surfaces and vehicles is an act of restoration, metaphorically returning the dwindling flora and fauna of the Amazon to the world at large.

SURF/SKATE Art and Board Life Steve Miller

for Best Crime Screenplay. His most recent novel, NK3, was published in 2017 (Atlantic Monthly Press).

Published by Glitterati Editions www.glitteratieditions.com Printed and Bound in China

Foreword by Michael Tolkin

ramifications to its biodiversity, Miller’s work is now all the more critical. For Miller, the skate deck and surfboard are metaphoric connections to the land and water, vehicles to restore and reintroduce the dwindling flora and fauna back to the world. A companion piece to his extraordinary publication exploring this subject, Radiographic, Surf/Skate takes the reader to the intersection of popular material culture and nature itself, exploring the various ways in which Miller’s images are infiltrating the world, setting life in dynamic motion.