Performance art and skateboarding
Performance, art and skateboarding are old bedfellows! In its very nature skating is inherently all three. One of the most notable examples of this is Mark Gonzales skating at the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg in Germany in 1998, dressed up in an all-white suit, with ‘Aloha’ painted on the back. In collaboration with artist Johannes Wohnseifer, who came up with the idea of having a skateboarder skate between his artwork as it was exhibited in the museum to incorporate street culture directly into artistic context; Mark Gonzales’s performance was also used in a music video for Jason Schwartzman’s band. Film maker Cheryl Dunn (who shot this performance) went on to make a short art film entitled ‘Back Worlds for Words’ again in collaboration with Gonzales. This film combines poetry, visuals and a multi layered sound track combined with footage from the Abteiberg Museum, street footage and archive material. Mark Gonzales himself is a prolific artist, poet and filmmaker and could be called a performance artist as well.
https://vimeo.com/57637159
D*Face Ridiculous Pool (2009) is a piece of more contemporary performance art: skateboarders used remote controlled spray paint cans mounted to the base of their decks to create an enormous Spirograph in an empty swimming pool. The video and outcome for this is a visualization of the maneuvers a skateboarder undertakes when skating a ‘Concrete Wave’ or ‘Bowl’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScW5kWzSaSI
More recently Brooklyn-based artist Matt Reiley combined performance, art and skateboarding within the Mana Contemporary Art Gallery in Jersey in 2014. Reiley attached paint soaked sponges to the trucks of his skateboard and on a half-pipe covered in a canvas within the museum he skated back and forth creating a track of his movements in an array of different colours. Reliey performed this number of times on different canvases, rendering each finished work unique from each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBZKK6MaUx4
Dillon Buss is an up and coming American Skater/artist. His work is notably dramatic and the combination of cloaks and bright colour has become a signature of his work. In 2014 Buss, in collaboration with The Institute of Contemporary Arts created “The Art of Skateboarding Demo”. A street performance combining the skills of skateboarders with Buss’s style of film making.
https://vimeo.com/103400007
Killan Martin: A Spanish Skateboarder expressed in a 2014 interview with CNN that “To me skateboarding is an art form…I’m able to put my thoughts into it, picture stuff and then draw it … using the world as my canvas and the skateboard as a brush.” Martin has skated all over the world and his videos are unlike any others in that his skating is performative, almost dance like and the landscapes that he skates on are more exotic and less Urban than in traditional skate video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHkEYu_PccM
Other Sources: [all accessed 6th Nov 2015]
CNN’s Human to Hero series.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/29/sport/kilian-martin-freestyle-street-skateboarder/
http://www.dillonbuss.com/
http://www.thehatchreport.com/video/skateboarding-museum-music-jason-schwartzman.html
http://www.designboom.com/art/matt-reilly-skateboard-painting-mana-contemporary-08-03-2014/