‘Riding Modern Art’: How Skateboarding Can Transform City Sculpture
Some skateboard spots look like modern art and some truly are modern art. Raphael Zarka made a very nice looking book that documents the times that skateboarding and modern art, willingly or not, collaborated.
As The Hundreds found out in their interview with Raphael, “Seeing a tiny skater on top of a sculpture on a Thrasher cover got me thinking that if the skater had been a performing artist addressing this art piece, it probably would have landed him on the Art Forum one,” he explains. Because to him, this is truly what skaters do: “Unlike the art critic, the skater isn’t looking for the ‘unsaid’ in an art piece, its hidden meaning. A skater doesn’t exactly ‘translate’ an art piece either, even though what he/she does is similar to a certain degree only. No—as an actor, or musician, the skater plays the piece. It’s a full-on performance.”
Kinda like Dave Carnie becoming a “skateboard” all in the name of modern art!
Sample:
“At art school, I was making money on weekends giving these tours of the Maison Carrée, a Nîmes monument that was also our skate spot. I’d skate at night, and I was terrified that anyone from the monument would see me skate,” he confesses sarcastically. “I went through some sort of identity crisis: for my art to exist, I first needed to push my skateboard aside, so the object that defined me as a teenager and a person wouldn’t define me as an artist.” (Usually things happen the other way around, right? “Skateboard artists” claiming stripes they never earned to push some semblance of street cred.)
All jokes aside: Thankfully though, some bright day in 2003, Raphaël decided to reconcile with his skateboarding past and present. The long journey has led him to put out what I think is one of the best books about art and skateboarding: Riding Modern Art, a 152-page black-and-white compilation of 74 photographs of skaters skating public art pieces, all over the world, that took him roughly ten years to source in magazines or on the web—all meticulously captioned: name of skater (and trick of course), but also name, year, the installation skated, and of its artist.
Click to THE HUNDREDS for more on Raphael Zarka’s book “Riding Modern Art”
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