Godzilla vs Skateboarders

Written in an elaborate blend of languages, the lavish Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (c. fifteenth century) is the first illustrated architectural book in western culture. Recently attributed to Leon Battista Alberti, this depository of architectural remembrances delineates a method for reusing memories creatively. It fuses not only building types, but architecture with traditionally autonomous art forms. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is an anomaly of the early Renaissance—Alberti's metaphor of the building as a body introduces eroticism into the architectural experience. In this hybrid of novel and architectural treatise, we find the pursuit of physical pleasure in designing, building, or experiencing a constructed space. We find a building in the form of a man that one enters through the mouth. The interior of the building replicates the interior of a human body. There is a chamber in the heart—where love is born.

I would like this essay to be read in the same vein.

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In skateboarding circles, there is a saying that has been quoted in different ways and often enough that it approaches myth: “Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of immense potential. But it was the minds of 11 year olds that could see the potential.”[i] Perhaps this is the skateboarding world’s equivalent to punk rock’s slogan, “here’s three chords, now go start a band.” Given the context of a massive playground, it is the role of play as a cultural practice that I want to consider here, in this interpretation of social spaces and visual culture. Skateboarding is a vehicle that follows this path. That all the concrete, steel, and detritus of the North American continent is a vast playground is the vision of this exhibition.

Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott stated that “cultural experience is located in the potential space between the individual and the environment (originally the object). The same can be said of playing. Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested in play.”[ii] These ideas are critical. Play—as a cultural activity—suggests a number of potential activities and artistic strategies. In this exhibition, play is the operative metaphor for exploring a potential space and its meaning. Play better approximates cultural experience than “experimentation” does. Experimentation is intrinsically based on science and rationality; it does not serve art, or what artists do, as well as play.

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Architecture—the “built” environment (in the most expansive sense)—is a space of creation and interpretation. The possibilities of how we may choose to build, move through, and interpret space are imagined by not only architects, but also by artists, philosophers, filmmakers, writers, and performers.

The exhibition title Godzilla vs Skateboarders implies a site—like those depicted in the Godzilla films—where forces collide, usually in a specific location that carries meaning (i.e. an identifiable landmark). However, in this exhibition, the “vs” is intended to connote a comparison rather than opposing forces. Godzilla is generally perceived as a figure that does little more than stomp around, roar, and smash things. It (he?) is then dispatched at or near some famous urban landmark. So too are skateboarders perceived to be doing little more than hanging around, “disturbing the peace,” and damaging things—until dispatched at or near some famous urban landmark. Such statuary, architecture, or plazas are notorious skater hangouts.

If we imagine that there is more going on than the above commonplace narratives imply—not only in Godzilla movies but in skateboarding and other performative acts in visual culture—the visual language of these acts reveal otherwise quiescent narratives that can bring new connotations to our social spaces.

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A group of mostly French intellectuals in the 1950s propagated their belief that a world of permanent creativity could exist; against the backdrop of “the society of the spectacle” they were developing means to pursue that world. The Situationist International (as they would become known in 1957) conceived of contemporary consumer culture as a spectacle—a one-way spectacle in which the consumer is reduced to an isolated, passive receiver. The SI applied Marxist critiques of capital not only to political economic organization but to everyday experience in consumer culture—an experience of alienation generated by the commodity. The name Situationism derives from the “constructed situations” through which the group attempted to experience life. For the SI, the city would no longer be experienced as a backdrop of received (and orthodox) information; of power relationships, consumer culture, and products; of boredom. Rather, it would be an epistemology of everyday life where each “situation” would be a setting for a play of events. Through this play, one could live life as if writing a book or making a drawing—as events happened—allowing one to transform society, to call forth new places, new buildings, new meanings.

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In reaction to the society of the spectacle, the SI introduced two acts: détournement and dérive. Détournement is the displacement of visual artifacts from their usual context and diverting them into a context of one’s own design or choosing, thus changing the way they might be interpreted. To dérive is to wander or drift down city streets in search of signs of attraction and repulsion. Détournement and dérive were theorized as acts that would cull a revolutionary disordering of the senses in an attempt to disrupt one’s worldview. Through these means, the SI was a wandering, anti-capitalist experiment. 

Theirs was a reconstructive, playful behaviour. That extension of the critique of boredom, conformity, and consumer culture courses within the performance of skateboarding; Iain Borden suggests it is a direct link to skateboarding’s own critique. Skateboarding—as a way of life, a culture with its own dress, language, music, and beliefs—is largely a middle-class preoccupation that originated in the suburbs within a culture of conformity and boredom. This context resonates with the SI’s development out of such a culture in Paris, during the years known as Les trentes glorieuses—the post-war period of economic development.

“The Situationist project, as originally outlined, was the liberation of desire in the building of a new world—a world with which we will be permanently in love. This put them in much the same position as the first Surrealists­­—and beyond Surrealism in the same position as a liberated psychoanalysis, or, more simply, in exactly the same position as children. For their underlying philosophy was one of experiment and play—but play equipped with the whole of twentieth century technology.”[iii] Like a bunch of 11 year olds, the SI conceived of the society of the spectacle as a massive cement playground of immense potential.

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Around the same time as the SI, French filmmaker Jacques Tati was playfully reflecting on Paris and the interpretation of architecture. Filmed in exquisitely detailed 70mm, Tati made Playtime (1967) during Paris’s years of prosperity and hygiene, Les trentes glorieuses. Playtime features a quintessential modern city of glass and steel high rises; the historical streetscape of Paris recedes to a reflection in its hyper-modern surfaces. Travel posters advertising various cities around the world all feature the same monolithic cube edifice. To consider Tati’s take on modern Paris as mere parody, or anti-modern prejudice, is to miss all of its complexity.

A satellite town was constructed for the set of Playtime. It was later torn down, the land eventually absorbed by Paris. That some of the “skyscrapers” were actually built on wheels is apropos here. Where the SI were drifting through the city in order to re-interpret existence, Tati set the urban landscape itself on wheels. Both interpretations of Paris imply a desire that is visually concomitant with contemporary skateboarding. In Tati’s film, the architecture is as much a narrative element as the actors and their performances. Furthermore, the foregrounding of “background” sounds in the film—footsteps and mechanical noises—shares an awareness of the urban soundscape that is analogous to skateboarding’s amplification of street sounds.

The film’s narrative is a playful succession of minute events that together form a tapestry of high modernity. Towards the end of the film, modernity’s ideals of easy, functional living and simplicity, made possible by technology (that tends to backfire for the befuddled protagonist M. Hulot), are ideologically imploded in a restaurant’s spectacular physical collapse through a symphony of comic accidents.

Tati explains:

For the entire beginning of the film Playtime I direct people so that they are following the guidelines of the architects. Everyone operates at right angles to the décor, people feel trapped by it. If  M. Hulot comes into a small shop, a haberdasher’s say, and drops his umbrella the haberdasher will say to him: ‘Sorry, sir. You’ve dropped your umbrella. – Ah, sorry.’  It’s a matter of no importance. But because of the size of the set, if you drop your umbrella in the hall of Orly, straight away it’s a different story. Because everything had been planned and decided on by developers and the architects of the complex so that the umbrella should not be dropped in Orly…and precisely because of the clatter which a falling umbrella makes in Orly you are guilty of acting in a dangerous manner. You have become a focus of attention. The architect might be there, saying his piece, ‘Sir, when we designed this place we didn’t envisage you dropping the umbrella.’”[iv]

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Tati’s playful circuitous narrative carries with it the ghosts of a carnival. Tati has M. Hulot performing a kind of dérive—coasting through the city. At the end of Playtime, the movement of the modern city is transformed into a carnival. Traffic negotiating a roundabout implies the movement of a carousel, comically triggered when a pedestrian inserts a coin into a parking meter. For Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival—the pre-Renaissance celebrations and spectacle of laughter and irreverence—signified the symbolic destruction of authority and the assertion of popular renewal. These ghosts haunt us, from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to the Situationist International and Tati’s Playtime to Godzilla and skateboarders. In a specific sense, Bakhtin’s interpretation of the symbolic destruction of official culture (in this case high modernity) is a lens through which to interpret Playtime's ‘climax.’ In a broader sense, Bakhtin’s ideas of meaning outside the domain of art, or the organization of life itself, deny the view of life as inert ‘chaos’ that is transformed into organized ‘form’ by art. “Bakhtin claims that life itself (traditionally considered ‘content’) is organized by human acts of behaviour and cognition…and is therefore already charged with a system of values at the moment it enters into an artistic structure. Art only transforms this organized ‘material’ into a new system whose distinction is to mark new values.”[v] Bakhtin delineates that art and everyday life are neither autonomous nor independent of each other.

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In contemporary terms, Iain Borden describes how the physicality of skateboarding is at the centre of its representational meaning: “[Skateboarding’s] representational mode is not that of writing, drawing, or theorizing, but of performing—of speaking their meanings and critiques of the city through their urban actions. Here in the movement of the body across urban space, and in its direct interaction with the modern architecture of the city, lies the central critique of skateboarding—a rejection of both the values and of the spatio-temporal modes of living in the contemporary capitalist city.”[vi]

The gliding of skateboarders, the passion of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the physical comedy of Tati, the bacchanalia of carnival—these performances all foreground the body and play as means of interpreting social space. If anything, the Situationists were the least physical: “What was basically wrong with the SI was that it focused exclusively on an intellectual critique of society. There was no concern whatsoever with either emotions or the body. The SI thought that you just had to show how the nightmare worked and everyone would wake up. Their quest was for the perfect formula, the magic charm that would disperse the evil spell. The pursuit of the perfect intellectual formula meant inevitably that Situationist groups were based on a hierarchy of intellectual ability—and thus on disciples and followers, on fears and exhibitionism, the whole political horror trip. After the initial period, creativity, apart from its intellectual forms, was denied expression—and in this lies the basic instability and sterility of their own organizations.”[vii]

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Skateboarding may be artistic, but it is not art. By operating outside the paradigms of organization and, consequently, control, it is largely non-programmatic. Certainly—as Bakhtin would insist—even though skateboarding takes place as life, outside the organized form of art, it still has a system of values. Yet it is de-centralized, random, and largely ignored. It is relatively free. Operating outside structure, it is unencumbered by the great vulnerability of political, artistic, or theoretical movements (the horror trip). Outside of art, it remains free of an additional—“new” or imposed—system of values. Skateboarding’s critique of the built environment is one that occurs liminally, as another way of knowing. Like play, this takes place in a potential space, in crevices, gaps, and potholes. It is the potential space spoken of by Winnicott—the space of cultural experience. And while I do not argue that skateboarding is art, I am interested in what it tells us about art.

This text was originally published in 2003, in the exhibition catalogue Godzilla vs. Skateboarders; Skateboarding as a Critique of Social Spaces. Organized by Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, and toured nationally. © the author, and artist, all rights reserved.

[i] Hunn, David. Skateboarding. London: Duckworth, 1977, 6.

[ii] Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1971, 100.

[iii] Gray, Christopher. “’Everyone will live in his own cathedral’: The Situationists 1958—1964.” In What is Situationism? A Reader. Stewart Home, ed. Edinburgh: AK Press, n.d., 6. Originally published in Leaving the 20th Century, edited by Christopher Gray. London: Free Fall, 1974.

[iv] www.tativille.com

[v] Pomorska, Krystyna, “Foreword,” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helen Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984 (originally published in 1965), viii.

[vi] Borden, Iain. “Another Pavement, Another Beach: Skateboarding and the Performative critique of Architecture,” in The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space: A Strangely Familiar Project. Edited by Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, and Jane Rendell, with Alicia Pivaro. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001, 195.

[vii] Gray, Christopher. “’Those who make only half a revolution only dig their own graves’: The Situationists since 1969” in What is Situationism? A Reader. Stewart Home, ed. Edinburgh: AK Press, n.d., 23 Originally published in Leaving the 20th Century, edited by Christopher Gray. London: Free Fall, 1974.