SYNONYMOUS FORMS, by Augustine Romero
Skateboard culture is synonymous with many aspects of street and youth culture and how it inhabits and transforms the public space into an arena of spectacle. The sidewalk becomes a ramp or a corridor of performance. The public space takes on a new form when skate culture enters and brings forth the question of the meaning of public space.
Who does the public space belong to? Is it my space or your space? When skate culture enters the public space, it transcends into something new like the public arena. The idea of a public arena might be the town square it might also be the neighborhood park, basketball court and something new like the skateboard park becomes the public arena. The public arena is an idea about where a performance, gathering or exhibition takes place. Who inhabits the public space is also a challenge to whose space it belongs to? Inhabiting a public space also establishes a sense of ownership and policing.
My experience as a youth was when kids of color gathered at a public location we were profiled as a gang but when white kids gathered it wasn’t a gang. This observation is important because It creates a profile on how positions of authority categorize anything and everything. Street art and skateboarding transform spaces from a static space into an arena that becomes an issue to create laws about loitering. The arena is basically defined as a space where events take place. This is important because many of the skateboard parks resemble spaces that are like the architecture of the public spaces that skateboarders once frequented.
Art making, creating, and exhibiting sometimes evolve out a variety of merging forces such as Hip Hop, Punk, Rock Music, surfing, skate boarding, and all of the many elements of street art. All these ideas are in a process of transition. In other words, they are still present in the conversation of youth culture. In the true sense of postmodern ideals, the cooptation of someone’s else’s history, art, or culture is open game for new forms of art; sometimes it resembles cultural goulash. How could the #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and other abolitionist movements serve as templates for the establishment on cultural appropriation and cooptation of state sanctioned public art as the new face of the art police. the arts board decides on what and whose arts invades your hood. This is important to address because when public art in its many forms of oversight acks as the gate keeper.
The public space where street art and skateboarding become the new arena--that’s when the politicians take notice and implement policies to prohibit such acts. The public skate park becomes a celebration of current political agendas by endorsing certain aspects of graffiti or murals supported by the public art establishment. This is the gentrification of the space when public art becomes a part of the experience. This needs to be pointed out because skateboarding has always had a sense of rebellion because of its many associations to rebellious images on the decks of skateboards.
The new canvas like the old canvas at times depicts many images. Sometimes they are images that question mainstream ideals. The new canvas, in this case the skateboard deck, resembles the shape of a popsicle stick with bends at the top and bottom. It is a big departure from stretch canvas. The skateboard deck distances itself from stretched canvas because it is greatly associated to a subgroup of artists who don’t participate in the other art arenas that typically show art in galleries. In the true sense of contemporary artists, who are working with a freshness, these artists frequent spaces that have their own atmosphere of challenge. Graffiti and other forms of street art have their own elements of rebellion that makes them more edgy.
Art on skateboard decks by nature makes it fresh, even if the processes are the same as those on canvas. There is also a parallel element to car culture. The deck itself calls out for its own composition. The shape alone makes it more 3-D, with this said the skateboard decks still holds the element of freshness.
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