Earth Moving, and Vice Versa

I barely remember my life without my skateboard. All things environmental and architectural are thrown through the lens of the concave and convex meeting of plys of Canadian maple on a polyurethane conglomerate wheel, suspended in a polyurethane tension above a street and space most likely not contoured for use by said vehicle. I couldn’t help but consider all of Cache’s writing through that same lens — there are a devastating amount of points of intersection between the ideas he posits and the seemingly simplistic manners in which the skateboarder exists with the urban, or even suburban, architectural schema.

Cache states that “fuctionalism in architecture means that the form serves the function […] there is an essential difference between the frame of probability and the effect that is produced within it” (29). Consider also, for example, the idea of inflection, in his drawings of inflection (40), are the basic foot movements employed by skateboarders in order to propel the board into the air. A roll of the foot, a sweep of the ankle and a series of frictions are an individualized interface in a primary space defined through topography and material construction. The resulting action is an art of the here and now — not separate from the “artist,” as the artist is the actor, but a conglomeration of time, space, talent, skill, geography and topography.

These ideas can also be seen in some of the more advanced artwork growing from skateboard culture. Using the detritus of broken boards, artists like Brandon Shigeta’s sculptures as not only as representations of the architectural, curvaceous, interaction of skateboarding, but also with the media themselves — the wood and the color of pressed hard rock maple.



to be cont...

--Mike v.W.