Zarka & Borden Q&A
An open discussion from the Tate Modern, London about skateboarding and the use of urban spaces.
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Sculptural artist Raphaël Zarka screened his film The Species Of Spaces In Skateboarding at the Tate Modern on February 28, a film that explored skateboarding and the use of space.
After the screening, he was joined on stage by Iain Borden, Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at UCL, to discuss skateboarding, architecture and the use of public space.
HUCK was there to take note…
How did you put the film all together?
Raphaël Zarka: I was trained at art school and I was a skater when I started but then I said, ‘that’s enough of my adolescent impatience’ and I started to focus on fine art. When I finished my studies, I started to take photographs of concrete objects and landscapes. I was at looking at them and, at some point, I started to realise that these were pictures of certain spots that you see in videos. I suddenly realised that skateboarding is framed by the way you see the world and appreciate and assess it. I was thinking about it all the time and wondered if I had wasted my time on a skateboard and I thought, ‘if I wasted so much time that it wasn’t important’. I investigated why it wasn’t so important and in that process [I made] a book on how a skateboarder sees the city
Iain Borden: I’ve probably read more skateboarding magazines than anyone on the face of the planet, from when they were first produced in the 1960s right through to the present day. I primarily learnt about skateboarding through skating in the 1970s and 1980s but mainly through magazines. You would see these amazing photographs of pipes, reservoirs, pools and objects that you find, and also the amazing skate parks. It’s only when you see them on videos do the amazing nature of the forms of them start to come alive. And that’s because what you’re seeing is not just the object itself but the skateboarder’s body bringing something out in that form. It’s not just an object to be looked at but to be moved in relation against. And for me that’s the real treat of watching the videos – it’s just brilliant those photographs formed in a line in a way that you don’t get static representation of them but they seem to say something about those shapes. They have an inherent sense of energy in them that is then brought forth by skateboarding. I guess that’s also what skateboarders do in cityscapes as well. But it’s the release of potential within – in some cases in modern art and the creation of these ‘found’ objects – which I find quite extraordinary.
How do you see the relationship of skateboarders using modern art and then putting it on show?
Zarka: What I was interested in was the fact that normally the kind of relationship you have with a piece of artwork is whether it’s aesthetical or intellectual. So if a sculpture is not beautiful then it’s interesting and visa versa – there are two options in the presentation of the work. But skateboarders, rock-climbers or other types of practices, they add a third type of relationship which is mechanical. I was fascinated by the fact that even if a sculpture is artistically a failure both aesthetically and intellectually, then it can still be interesting on a mechanical level. And so for skateboarders, what isn’t interesting in a sculpture could be interesting [on the two other levels].
Borden: That’s an interesting point because you can say that about architecture. You might think something is the most failed piece of architecture but it’s not a failure if it’s skateable. And what’s interesting for an architectural critique is that the skateboarders don’t give a damn who the architect is or what type of design it is, what matters is the degree to which it’s skateable. So there’s a kind of attack on the emotion of the architects and the design that they’re understanding. We tend to think of architecture as being projects of objects that are separate entities and skateboarders think of it as a set of ledges or a set of steps, and that relationship is interesting.
Zarka: The practice of skateboarding relates to seeing different architectural spaces in the way your body moves around those objects.
How do you think architects feel about skateboarders skating their creations and damaging them?
Zarka: I don’t think they really think about it. Because under the huge perplexities of designing, getting the commission, constructing and the rest of it, what the skateboarder does is fairly off the radar for most architects. So it’s not a primary consideration. Most of the anti-skateboarding measures that you see around the city aren’t put on by architects: they’re put on by the managers. But actually the architects I’ve spoken to like it because essentially architecture is a creative map and so is skateboarding. They tend to like the idea that someone will come along and use their building for ways that are different to the ways they’ve conditioned them, it extends the cultural richness of what they have created.
Borden: I don’t think skateboarders are indifferent to architecture at all: I think they’re indifferent to architects. Other than style and architectural magazines, I don’t know anyone more obsessed with architecture than skateboarders. It was absolutely predicated on modern architecture in particular landscape forms. I think skateboarders are huge fans of that. That’s one of the greatest things about skateboarding; it shows the creative possibilities of modern architecture.
Do you see these films at artwork yourself? What do you see as artwork and what do you see as documentary?
Zarka: For me this is art, because I chose work as an artist. The easiest way to understand that question is to go back to what Americans like Nelson Goodman were saying about art, which is not ‘what is art?’ but ‘when is art?’ – what is the context of art or what is your position as an artist? But it’s true that if you present this in a skateshop or at a skatepark, it would be just a documentary and I think this is not. I like producing these projects that [can be read differently]. I don’t do it for the ambiguity, but I like the ambiguity. But I think all of my practice, even when I’m making sculptures, it’s clearly in a documentary approach with existing materials. […] I believe that creation is not so much about invention but about editing and what you choose and what you pick up. And maybe that also has to do with what skateboarding is about – it’s not only about the tricks that you can do but also the type of spots you can discover.
Borden: Also about bringing those spots together. If a skater does a run through a city then they’re editing different parts and bring a special edit of the city together. That’s fascinating – moving from one spot to another quite quickly.
Tell us a bit about your love/hate relationship with skateboarding?
Zarka: what I was explaining earlier on was that I think skateboarding is a great thing because you have certain strategies. However unfortunately you have in mainstream magazines, they tend to be very shortsighted. They do something fantastic, they have different ways of approaching things but they are so self conscious that what they are doing is interesting that they cannot apply the strategy to other fields. And I’m very sad when I see that people want to organize skateboard exhibitions that the artist would have studied graphic design and all this art stuff – I think that’s okay but there are other ways to look at the world than this perspective. And that’s at I’m aiming for with this type of work.
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