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<h1>''Introduction''</h1>
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<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1AAc1JSJydsn-UWvsW-JR8T7Q5N9lQR6Q" style="width:960px; height:540px" alt="Image could not be displayed"/>
<figcaption>Shawlin Tucker at Fat Kid Skatepark in Brooklyn</figcaption>
</figure>The following essays compile a string of thoughts I’ve had over the past 6 months or so. Since moving to New York and starting college, skating has taken an ever more present role in my life, as it became the core way I met new people. Back home in Portland, I skated basically every day, but I barely knew anyone else who skated and certainly no one as committed as me. When I moved out to New York though, on my first day out of quarantine I went skating with a group of people and have gone skating the majority of my days since. Skating went from just a personal means of pushing myself to my main social activity and the main way I stay healthy. As you might expect, I started thinking about skating a lot more as well. It became my fallback for school assignments when I didn’t know what to make or talk about. I would just talk about skating because I already had plenty of thoughts on it, so shitting out a quick project about skating was easy.
This collection compiles some of the ideas that have come up since then. The first essay takes a personal look at how skating has changed the way I can look at myself, the second and third come from an essay I wrote for class in October, and the final one is an idea I came up with while reading a book, and acts as something of a follow-up to the third essay. Common ideas go through the essays, but I didn’t make any particular effort to combine or connect the essays in a special way. I didn’t want this to be one long essay, or the beginnings of some strange book, but rather just an anthology of ideas, representing the little ways that skating bleeds into my thinking about other things.
I made this collection using Twine, a software for making interactive stories, because it has a lot of useful built-in tools and features that saves me a lot of trouble, and it lets me upload to itch.io, which is free. A very useful thing for me nowadays. Additionally, I uploaded a short skating game I made for a final last semester to my itch page as well, so feel free to check that out if you want a few minutes of light, skateboard-themed fun. It has nothing really to do with this collection beyond the fact that they both feature skating, but, you know, I don’t really need much more than that, I suppose.
Lastly, I just want to thank my friends for helping with this. I basically only made this collection because they’ve let me skate way more than I ever have and feel way more comfortable while doing it. Before, going to skateparks used to terrify me, because I had to go alone and I never felt confident enough to do anything, but with my friends going to any park or spot feels great and I can skate for way longer than normal. I don’t really know how to wrap this up, I just wanted to highlight that. Thanks homies.
Anyways, thanks for reading, you can read in whatever order you want, but going from first to last probably makes the most sense. Also, again, don’t forget to check out the other game on my itch page.
James Martini
<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1a2YmqAgJC0-WHsuAmWbZbqezVm65_b3B" style="width:267px; height:100px" alt="Image could not be displayed"/>[[Introduction]]
[[Gender and Skating]]
[[Art and Skating]]
[[On Destruction]]
[[Keeping Wabi-Sabi Alive]]
[[Contributors]]<h1>''An Account of Gender and Skating''</h1>
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<figcaption>Me at Sgt. William Dougherty Playground, shot by Randy Spiegel</figcaption>
</figure>When I skate outside the realm of skateparks, I often get people taking pictures or videos of me. At first it seemed strange, but eventually I realized that they thought I embodied some kind of vibe that excited them. Like they came to the park to see skaters. They wanted to take a video of me as proof they hung out in New York and saw New York things. Obviously skating is not exclusive to New York and I most certainly do not qualify as a “New Yorker”, but regardless, the identity I get from people perceiving me like that feels nice. I like that people see me as one of the intimidating skaters that hangs out at the park. Regardless of how it seems to other people, when I skate, it feels like people get too busy looking at my movement and board and friends to really register me as a person. They don’t see me as a “man”, or any gender really, but rather as a skater. I intimidate them, not because of my gender’s reputation (well, okay, maybe a little), but because of skaters’ reputation as grimy and angry and scary. Sure, I don’t necessarily want people to fear me, but skating at least gives me control over the way that people see me, which makes being feared worth it in a way. I can escape my gender and choose how people perceive me.
When I started skating as a kid, this element didn’t mean anything to me. I liked skating because I found it fun. And I thought I looked cool. Or at least I wanted to look cool. When I picked it back up in high school, I liked the grind and the challenge, but also I did also enjoy having a reputation as a skater. In hindsight, I enjoyed how it took precedence over other aspects of my personality, like the fact that I was robotics captain, or in a post-AP math class. Or the fact that I was a man. And yeah, I still thought I looked cool. When I started skating in college though, the escapism started to appeal to me more and more, I think. I started to feel more and more connected to my identity as a skater, as I grew less and less connected to my identity as a man. The community I felt with my friends as skaters felt more powerful than any community I’d experienced before. Skating connected us all, regardless of gender, and pretty quickly we started spending more and more time together even when not skating. We had late nights in the park, thrifting trips, and jam sessions in the studio. It wasn’t that we didn’t see gender or anything like that, but rather connecting through skating allowed us to connect beyond gender, a feeling that I, along with many other people I think, never quite felt in high school.
When I came out as non-binary, I came out first to the friends I had from skating in college. I had only known them for a few months, and sure, I had friends from back home I had known my entire life, but skating with my friends in New York had allowed me to express myself in a way that I had never done before. I knew that they knew me more for my style, both while skating and not. They knew me more for my interests and studies and drive than for my gender. They saw me how I saw myself, so coming out made as much sense to them as it did to me. I don’t really know what to say beyond that it felt right to come out to them first. For the first time I had a sense of community that formed for reasons aside from gender. Things started to make sense and I started to appreciate the freedom I experienced when I didn’t feel like I had to match other people’s gender expression.
Now, as someone openly non-binary, I both understand the escapism of skating more, but also how I can use it my advantage. I understand how skating gives me the ability to eschew my gender, if only for a few hours, and I can lean into my identity as a skater, pushing harder and harder, forcing people to see my movement and tricks, and not my height and beard. When I skate, I—intentionally or not—do so in part because it allows me to spend time around people without having to think about my gender at all. I get all the other benefits of exercise and challenge and the Ilinx of it all (to use game studies terms), but I also get control over how people perceive me in a way that I normally don’t.
Unfortunately though, men dominate the skating world, and as a masculine person I don’t know how to separate myself from that. Yes, people see me more as a skater when I skate, but they still see me as a “skater boy”. Close, but no cigar. How do I take “boy” out of that label? Do I change the way I dress? I like my style. Do I shave my beard? I look weird without it. Can I take the “boy” out? I don’t know. I don’t like the idea that I can’t, but not all problems have solutions, I suppose.
More importantly (and less selfishly), I know that as a masculine person I benefit from the male dominance in skating. I look like a man, so when I skate I don’t have to deal with any of the sexism, homophobia, and transphobia I know exists in skating. I can skate without people registering any particular facts about my physical existence. Yes, so many of the skaters I’ve met are the most understanding, welcoming, incredible people I know, but I know that there are still the assholes out there. I’ve met them, and I know that they make it hard for both me to fully express myself but also hard for women and more feminine people to even exist in the same space. Skating is, pretty famously, not a very welcoming place to women, and skater men are not known to be particularly kind or friendly to women in skating. For so many reasons, the exploration of women and feminine people in skating falls beyond the scope of this essay—I am not a woman, it would require a whole separate essay, etc.—but I wanted to at least mention it because I don’t feel that I can appreciate how skating allows me to express my gender without also recognizing how many people it doesn’t allow. (I linked to a few articles about women/non-binary people in skating below in case you want to read a little more)
Skating has its problems, I won’t argue there and I don’t think many people would, but it is still one of the most formative things in my life and so many of the most important moments in my life involved skating. Skating raised me, it made me tough, and it allowed me to grow into whoever I wanted. Skating has given me far more than it has taken, and genuinely the least happy years of my life were the years when I didn’t skate. Not to say there’s a causation there, but at least something to think about. Admittedly I don’t really know how to end this, but I can at least say that skating has a complicated relationship with gender, but it helped me realize a pretty important aspect of myself, and I’ll forever be grateful to it and the people who made it happen.
[[My Experiences in Skateboarding - Linnea Bullion - Jenkem|http://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2018/08/21/my-experiences-in-skateboarding/]]
[[What Does the Rise of Women in Skateboarding Mean for Female-Focused Brands - Andrew Murrell - Vice|https://www.vice.com/en/article/evqmme/what-does-the-rise-of-women-in-skateboarding-mean-for-female-focused-brands]]
[[New York's radical female and non-binary skateboarders -- in photos - Jacqui Palumbo - CNN|https://www.cnn.com/style/article/girls-cant-skate-jordana-bermudez-photography/index.html]]
<h1>''Finding the Art in Skateboarding''</h1>
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<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1AUhThuoEuCpHkB0-kbZqKFP-TidmzN3h" style="width:640px; height:480px" alt="Image could not be displayed"/>
<figcaption>Gou Miyagi from ThrasherMagazine</figcaption> </figure>''An Interesting Skater''
A quick search on YouTube for “Gou Miyagi” yields a small handful of videos, most of them quite old and reasonably short, but all of them reveal a fascinating man. The first result, a video on Thrasher’s channel from 2013 simply titled “Gou Miyagi” lasts less than four minutes, but clicking on it begins a wild journey. How do most skate parts start? Generally, they start with some kind of strong opening trick. Or maybe they start by demonstrating the community of a particular skate team, usually to the opening beat of a powerful song, but Gou Miyagi’s part starts differently. It opens on a calm, serene shot of the Pacific Ocean, on the Japanese shoreline. Slowly a man comes into frame from the left end, walking through the water, his head barely bobbing above the surface. It seems strange enough, but the man also has a skateboard strapped to his head. After this, the camera zooms in, and then fades out to the man carving on his skateboard, weaving back and forth on flat ground, and he appears to surf on nothing but pavement. Then, suddenly, his back foot comes off, his body rotates, and his front foot pops the board into his hand, as he spins the board, throws it back down, and pops it back up, in this wild, pop-spin cycle unlike anything that happens in surfing or skating (Thrasher).
Gou Miyagi demonstrates some of the strangest, most creative skating out there; and he does it all out of passion. If you try to find an interview with Miyagi, you’ll find yourself disappointed because he has none out there. The closest you’ll get is a brief video on Red Bull’s YouTube channel featuring interviews with his filmer, other pro skaters, and even his parents, but none with the man himself. Nobuo Iseki, a photographer interviewed for the video, informs us that Miyagi refuses interviews because “his video parts speak for themselves” (Red Bull). While initially disappointing, one can’t really argue with the logic. To describe Gou Miyagi’s skate parts as anything but “expressive” would utterly misrepresent his skating. Miyagi doesn’t fit into any “genre” of skating. He doesn’t compete, he doesn’t put out regular skate parts, and he doesn’t really skate freestyle or street, but rather this weird middle ground no one else really did before him. Despite his relative notoriety in the skating world, you can’t really describe him as a celebrity. He has about 100,000 followers on Instagram as of writing this, but he’s known to delete all his posts and even his entire page if he feels like it. I mean, the man doesn't even have a goddamn Wikipedia page. Gou Miyagi’s refusal to skate within the bounds of his form begs the question of what skating really is, because he simply defies any potential categorization, suggesting a similar abstraction for skating in general.
''Examining “art”''
In her essay, “Art Objects”, Jeanette Winterson writes a lot about the form of art and how we interact with it. She writes about the “[i]ncreasing distractions” we face when we try to look at art; things like money, status, media coverage, and a litany of other factors can obfuscate art and turn pieces of direct expression into sensational events, more important for their perceived monetary value than for the actual experience an audience has towards the given work. What we feel when we truly engage with a work grows harder to identify under the pressure of these ideas. She wraps up her essay by arguing that art has no monetary value but only value in how its audience interacts with it, writing, “The cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling…are part of the art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that it is pointless and mean” (Winterson). Comparing primitive cave paintings to the grandiose Sistine Chapel establishes that, even though our modern eyes would generally identify the Sistine Chapel as a greater work of art, they both played deeply important roles to the culture that created them, so making such a distinction ignores the value each work has provided people.
Art often tempts us to find hard meanings, to drill down to the artist’s true intentions behind the work, but as Winterson points out beautifully in her essay, we can never find such conclusive answers: “If we sharpened our sensibilities, it is not that we would all agree on everything, or that we would suddenly feel the same things in front of the same pictures…but rather that our debates and deliberations would come out of genuine aesthetic considerations and not politics, prejudice and fashion” (Winterson). Instead, while discussing art museums, she advocates that we “ignore everything about them, except for the one or two pieces with whom I have come to spend the afternoon” (Winterson). To me, taking this time enables us to engage with art objects not as any specific form, craft, or media, but with each as its own unique piece. Artists create art to capture a specific feeling, and comparing works based on medium ignores that in favor of simply debating the quality of the technique used, something that only exists to support the experience.
The dedication to form can lead us to classify certain things as “art” and other things as “not art”, but in reality art comes from the moments and objects that we connect ourselves to. Forms of expression, even cosmic expression like nature, can classify as “art” if someone finds meaning behind it. When Winterson writes that “the language of art…is not our mother- tongue,” (Winterson) she encourages us to spend time to engage with art on its level, an attempt to escape the distractions that can prevent us from properly engaging with art. She posits that dedicating real time to individual works of art forces us to think beyond the surface-level reactions we have because of factors like technique, status, and value, but the sentiment can also imply that art might exist beyond the places we generally feel comfortable looking for it in. Or maybe even places we feel too comfortable with; places where we relax and stop thinking, because these places might have the most meaning to us.
''What is Skating?''
Because many people have classified skateboarding as a “sport”, people have grown comfortable discussing it as such, but skating exists as so much more than that. “Sport” implies that some kind of competition must take place, and while people do hold skating competitions, other motivations drove the creation of skating and it exists beyond contests alone. Contests only make up a small part of the culture, but as mentioned, many people skate more for the sense of expression, culture, and community that comes from it than for the chance at winning some arbitrary contest. After all, most skating events have no objective points system like football or baseball and rely on the subjective opinions of judges to determine winners, much like art exhibitions and contests.
Because of this, skating bears many more similarities to performance arts like dance and acting. In the same way that dancers learn, rehearse, and memorize routines with specific moves, skating requires memorization and mastery of specific movements that skaters will pair together in lines or in film to create long performances. Even though people may not often think about skating in these terms, to skaters this expression motivates them to keep practicing and growing. Learning new tricks goes beyond just learning the hardest tricks possible, but learning a wide range of tricks so that skaters can apply different tricks at different spots to best express their own style, again, similar to how, for example, figure skaters will learn common moves that get used across routines, but they piece them together differently depending upon what they want to express.
Returning to Gou Miyagi, “art” certainly seems to describe him the best, because he certainly doesn’t compete in any kind of athletic endeavor and the challenge of form he forces onto himself resembles that of performance artists. Gou Miyagi is known to spend weeks on a single trick. One of the filmmakers interviewed in the Red Bull video said that Miyagi landing a trick is “like winning the lottery”. The tenacity Miyagi puts into each individual trick suggests a very artistic purpose. The borderline avant-garde style of his tricks points to a dedication to a style of physical movement, something some scholars call “significant form”.
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<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=13uB9wwj43f1ncMRPCEH8FJI902HlZUFl" style="width:960px; height:540px" alt="Image could not be displayed"/>
<figcaption>Shawlin Tucker at Fat Kid Skatepark in Brooklyn</figcaption>
</figure>''Expression''
C.L.R. James, a trinidadian historian and journalist spent most of his career fascinated, arguably obsessed with the sport of cricket, and wrote about significant form in cricket in his book Beyond a Boundary. Beyond a Boundary, while something of a memoir and autobiography of James’ life, explores cricket with such depth and complexity that it is often considered as one of the most important books written about both cricket and sports in general. James introduces the idea of significant form in the book by writing about the critic Bernhard Berenson, who wrote about significant form in painting. Berenson argued that the true art in painting came not from the objects represented, but rather the lines themselves. In describing Berenson's perspective, James writes that the art “was the line, the curve, its movement, the drama it embodied as painting” (James 200). James goes on to tie significant form into cricket, arguing that the motion depicted by cricket players contains as much drama and expression as any work of art.
James’ argument here, I would say, applies even more to skating than it does to cricket. In fact, I don’t know that skating has a more core purpose than expression through motion. Nearly all the skaters interviewed in the Red Bull video about Gou Miyagi made sure to place a special emphasis on the filming of Miyagi’s tricks as well. One cannot separate skating culture from photography and videography, because at its core, skating is about capturing expression in motion. Miyagi’s filmers capture the motion of his tricks in the exact same way Berenson describes in painting. Additionally, Miyagi’s filmmakers often employ complex movements themself, layering the significant form in the work. We can so easily find the significant form in Miyagi’s videos because it comes from both himself and his filmers, creating an almost disorienting level of motion-based expression. Miyagi’s style and presentation parallel the idea of significant form so closely that I can hardly see how anyone could claim that it’s not art.
''So, it’s art?''
To many people, including many skaters, directly calling all skateboarding “art” may not seem appropriate, though. Even though a skateboard itself can appear simple, skate culture is far more comprehensive than other art forms, with ancillary aspects like fashion and music playing just as important of a role as skateboarding itself. The emphasis on skating’s cultural impact can lead people to want to call it something else, making it difficult to assign a single label to the entirety of the craft. One article from the skateboarding outlet Jenkem even explores the idea of whether or not skating could fall under the category of a religion (Jenkem), so perhaps taking Winterson’s ideas one step further can help solve this taxonomical issue. Winterson’s essay challenged us to expand our artistic literacy by spending more time with individual works, but what if we forwent the label of “art” entirely? As mentioned before, art ultimately exists to create some kind of emotional experience, but anything can create such a feeling. Attempting to categorize certain things as “art” and other things as “not art” ignores the very real impressions the latter category leaves on people. Choosing to leave the idea of “art” behind and instead look more directly at the experience, removed from any labels we might apply, can help us better appreciate the significance in the world around us, including in skating.
Works Cited
[[Can skateboarding be a religion? A sociological perspective - Paul O'Connor - Jenkem|https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2019/12/18/can-skateboarding-religion-sociological-perspective/]]
[[Gou Miyagi - ThrasherMagazine|https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk8dy4NIzBU&t=152s]]
[[The Man, the Myth, the Legendary Skateboarder Gou Miyagi - Red Bull Skateboarding|https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsY3xJSOEVE]]
James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. Hutchinson, 1963.
Winterson, Jeanette. "Art Objects." Essays on ecstasy and effrontery, 1995, pp. 3-21. www.olinda.com/Art/artobjects.htm.<h1>''On Destruction''</h1>
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<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1CkctRfXAyRe4Y8mPIdxEhqKCUNQ7aKcn" style="width:540px; height:960px" alt="Image could not be displayed"/>
<figcaption>Cameron Livesey at LES Coleman Skatepark in Manhattan</figcaption>
</figure>A skateboard can appear so simple. At its core, it needs nothing beyond a plank of wood, two axles, and four wheels. Anything else simply adds on. Unlike other wheeled objects, a skateboard has nearly no prerequisites. A bike needs two wheels and generally some kind of chain and gear mechanism, a car needs a motorized engine, but one can fashion a skateboard out of junkyard scraps and trash. In fact, skateboards started out this way. When surfers sought an affordable way to pass time between tides, they did just that: they took planks of wood and put wheels on them. Often metal wheels or wheels from roller skates, they rarely made for effective or comfortable ways of replicating the waves, but surfers persisted still.
Of course, most modern skateboards have more complicated construction than this. Modern companies have special presses to put multiple plys of wood together to create stronger decks, and have turned to urethane wheels for a softer and more versatile ride. Skateboards have also added more complicated axles, the trucks, which twist inwards and outwards when skaters apply pressure.
Even though skate technology has increased with time, skateboarders still hold onto the scraps they came from. No one can skateboard without accepting that their gear will not last forever. Often, even the most durable shoes or decks may only last a few months, even weeks for hardcore skaters. More robust parts like trucks and wheels will also still break, forcing skaters to accept that they can never use perfect, fresh gear. It will always break with time.
Many enthusiasts buy things intending to keep them clean and pure. Sneaker heads try to keep their shoes in mint condition, tech people like to keep their setups as clean as possible, and comic collectors keep their issues tucked away in individual plastic bags, in boxes, but skaters do not have the luxury of such an attachment. Skating forces people to accept that nothing lasts forever, and that they can’t prevent decay. While initially this gives the impression that in skating people never have a reason to get attached to their gear, skaters know better than this. Skaters revere their equipment more than anyone else, noticing even the most infinitesimal differences. Switching from an 8.25” deck to an 8.375” deck can completely throw off a skater’s rhythm. New shoes, or harder wheels can completely change how a skater skates, so why do skaters accept that their gear will eventually break if they depend so desperately on the specifics of it?
Well, skaters have to learn to let go. When a deck breaks, or shoes give out, they know that they have to get new gear and regard that as part of the process. They get rid of their gear respectfully, knowing that it served them well, and move on to new things. They adjust and adapt to the next setup they buy. It’s not that skaters don’t respect the things they own, they simply acknowledge its destruction as a natural part of the craft, a concept that applies well beyond skating specifically.
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<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1Gj0kwpLp23YHV8uXSKWy42a12Dr2xtAx" style="width:960px; height:540px" alt="Image could not be displayed"/>
<figcaption>Shawlin Tucker at Fat Kid Skatepark in Brooklyn</figcaption>
</figure>Aside from a skater’s gear, they see their own body with the same reverence. Skaters consistently feel impact after impact, of all kinds. They jump, they fall, and even during tricks, if they bail their board can bang into their shins, or feet, or any other part of them. This doesn’t even account for the full-blown injuries skaters experience. Any skater out there will readily admit that bruises and sprains come with the craft, and some skaters might even enjoy the feeling more than they would like to admit. Skating also comes with heavy injuries too. I’ve seen skaters next to me break their wrist into a floppy appendage, or dislocate their shoulder to the point of it hanging down around their chest.
Skaters accept that injuries come with the hobby, but that doesn’t mean they want them. Skaters treat their body with respect, stretching before sessions, keeping braces on-hand, and keeping first aid equipment in their backpacks. Skaters understand their bodies and their injuries; they just don’t let injuries stop them. A light sprain will only stop a skater so long as they can’t walk. A broken wrist doesn’t mean they can’t skate, they just need to be careful. Skaters understand, much in the same vein as their equipment, that their bodies will break, age, and deteriorate, but they also understand the importance of not letting that stop them.
Skaters understand the beautiful nuances of their gear as well as their bodies. They have designed a craft around pushing the limits of themselves and the equipment they own, so they had better understand the intricacies pretty well. With this understanding also comes the understanding that nothing will last forever, an idea that applies to all facets of one’s life. The idea of eschewing material possessions, of accepting death, of accepting decay comes up everywhere, but it oftens comes in an extreme form. A form that encourages people to remove themselves from the world entirely to avoid the traps of material possessions. Very few people actually have the opportunities and abilities required to do this though, so the message can be hard to really grasp onto. Skating on the other hand hits a much more realistic, applicable balance. It understands that in the craft, as in the world, we need things. We need to rely on things. But we also need to be ready to let them go.<h1>''Keeping Wabi-Sabi alive through skateboarding''</h1>
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<figcaption>Shawlin Tucker at Substance Skatepark in Brooklyn</figcaption>
</figure>
In the introduction to his book Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Leonard Koren describes what he calls “The extinction of a beauty” (Koren 7), known as “wabi-sabi”, a Japanese aesthetic most famously used in Japanese tea ceremonies, though Koren fears that over time the art form has started to lose the true intent behind the aesthetic. He writes about how a modern tea ceremony he attended held by some of the most well regarded practitioners and designed by well known architects featured lavish architecture and extravagant creations, very against the concept of wabi-sabi that had driven Japanese tea ceremonies for so long.
To understand the real problem here, we should first understand wabi-sabi itself. While an aesthetic that drives design and architecture, Koren writes that over history wabi-sabi’s true meaning has remained intentionally abstract and hard to describe, and that “[a]lthough almost every Japanese will claim to understand the feeling of wabi-sabi….very few can articulate this feeling” (Koren 15). While one short essay could not truly convey the feeling of wabi-sabi, Koren connects wabi-sabi to Zen Buddhism, and this can provide a good frame of reference. It might even help to describe wabi-sabi as a kind of applied Zen Buddhism; an aesthetic style with a heavy focus on efficient, modest design, and a reverence for the natural world and natural decay. Wabi-sabi tea huts were designed to emulate a farmer’s hut, small, with natural colors and exposed wood and mud (Koren 33). Early on it used rough, neutral utensils in an attempt to contrast the extravagant Chinese tea ceremonies popular at the time.
Koren writes about how over time, tea ceremonies have moved away from pure wabi-sabi and more towards abstract ideals of “‘world peace’ and ‘deep communication between people’” (Koren 36), leading the way for extravagance to re-emerge in tea ceremonies, leaving him concerned about wabi-sabi’s future and the possibility that in time people will completely forget the feeling of wabi-sabi, one of the most grounded, humble aesthetics in design.
Luckily for Koren though, skateboarding exists. It may seem somewhat odd to connect skateboarding to a Japanese tea aesthetic, but as I read Koren’s book, I was struck by how similar the performance art of the tea ceremony really was to skateboarding. For starters, from a performance perspective, a tea ceremony requires a performer to memorize very specific movements and execute them in an evocative, engaging way, similar to how skaters learn and perform tricks. Additionally though, the space in which a tea ceremony takes place plays just as large of a role. The room, the utensils, the colors, and even the entryway all play a part in the experience of a tea ceremony. Wabi-sabi tea practitioners keep their tea rooms small and modest, with one of the early wabi-sabi practitioners reducing the size of the room down to thirty-nine square feet (Koren 33).
Skateboarding shares this emphasis on a distinct, yet simple, practical style. Beyond skating itself, style like fashion and music help to build the holistic experience people have with it. Looking at fashion specifically, skaters often wear clothing distinct to their own style while also serving a practical purpose. Dickies, suede skate shoes, thrifted clothes, and more all create a style very unique to skating while also serving practical, environmental, and cost-efficient purposes. Skaters also often use old cameras and film equipment when filming clips and parts, out of a reverence for the simple roots of skating, like a wabi-sabi tea ceremony’s use of a farmer’s hut to pay homage to a simple lifestyle.
Beyond the visual aesthetic, wabi-sabi’s view of the world also tends to align with skating as well. According to Koren, spiritually, wabi-sabi clings to the idea that all things eventually decay, and it reveres the process of natural decay. Because of this, wabi-sabi tea ceremonies often use wood and clay objects, because clay cracks as it hardens, and wood ages very clearly and quickly, so it represents decay in an obvious way. Skating holds to this idea as well. In skating, nearly everything will eventually break. Boards snap, shoes tear, and wheels flatspot. Skaters accept this destruction as something that must happen and rarely take measures to keep their equipment in mint condition.
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<figcaption>Cameron Livesey in Tribeca</figcaption>
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Even if we agree that skating embodies the idea of wabi-sabi, how will skating preserve the idea in a way that tea ceremonies won’t? Well, skating cannot escape the idea of wabi-sabi. Because the destruction of equipment happens rather quickly, and skaters rarely have extreme quantities of money to spend on gear, skating acts as a constant, overt reminder to skaters of the values of wabi-sabi. In tea ceremonies, practitioners can easily fall into the trap of putting more and more money into getting better utensils and spaces because those things, even the most rustic, earthy of them, will not decay all that quickly, and practitioners can justify larger investments, but in skating everything breaks and skaters cannot afford to get attached to having the best gear all the time.
Koren writes that “Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things” (Koren 59), and skateboarding toes this line perfectly. Even though skaters accept that nothing lasts forever, they still appreciate their gear and enjoy new things. When a skater gets a new pair of shoes, they relish in the quality of the shoes and appreciate having it, but they develop no illusions that they will have the shoes forever. They appreciate the shoe and also the process that will eventually destroy it.
Because skating cannot escape these simple truths, it exists in a place where wabi-sabi will always act as a driving force. It’s worth noting that this essay does not really speak to the idea of wabi-sabi. I haven’t studied the topic extensively and I won’t pretend to know everything about it. More specifically though, this essay does respond to Koren’s idea of wabi-sabi. Koren’s book presents its own idea and interpretation of wabi-sabi, and this essay responds to that idea. Koren describes his book as a “personal first step toward ‘saving’ what once constituted a comprehensive and clearly recognizable aesthetic universe” (Koren 11), and fortunately for Koren, the idea of wabi-sabi that he constructs is only a label applied to a broad and complex concept which can exist far beyond the 15th century Japanese tea ceremonies the label came up in, and practices like skateboarding will hopefully preserve these ideas in a modern world for as long as possible.
Works Cited
Koren, Leonard. Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. Imperfect Publishing, 1994.<h1>''Contributors''</h1>
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<figcaption>Shawlin Tucker at Fat Kid Skatepark in Brooklyn</figcaption>
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''Created by''
James Martini ([[@jamesmartinisb|https://www.instagram.com/jamesmartinisb/]])
''Additional Filmer''
Randy Spiegel ([[@randyspieg|https://www.instagram.com/randyspieg/]])
''Skaters Featured''
Shawlin Tucker ([[@shawls_land|https://www.instagram.com/shawls_land/]])
Cameron Livesey ([[@cameronfilms_|https://www.instagram.com/cameronfilms_/]])
''Special Thanks''
Alex Friedman ([[@alexandrafayefriedman|https://www.instagram.com/alexandrafayefriedman/]])