raphael zarka, "riding modern art. via DesignBoom

It comes as no surprise that skaters and others use public art in many different ways. Just as public art itself can be a more and less  genteel territorialization of space. The suite of photographs, “Riding Modern Art,” by Raphael Zarka at designboom based on an upcoming exhibition at the French Cultural Center in Milan, however, is particularly enjoyable for “decisive moment-ness,” which is at once frozen and viscerally vertiginous.

Zarka writes about his subjects –

“What strikes me, is that skaters prioritize a relationship with the work rather than a mechanical relationship aesthetic. for them, all the interest of a sculpture is the variety of movements that it recommends.”

Camille Utterback, "Abundance," 2007, San Jose City Hall Rotunda. Commissioned by ZER01.

When the skaters and bikers showed up in the San Jose City Hall Plaza, as they often do in the early morning hours when some of the “Do Not” signage is hard to read, perhaps, it was precisely an example of the kind of relationship that artist Camille Utterback had envisioned with her interactive projection, Abundance –

“By providing a way for participants to temporarily inscribe their movements on the facade of City Hall, Abundance personalizes the site, altering participants’ sense of ownership and belonging to a place that is already theirs as a public civic space.”

Shaun Gladwell Storm Sequence 2000 digital video edition of 4 Videoraphy: Techa Noble Original Soundtrack: Kazumuchi Grime Courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney. via Experimenta.

Australian artist Shaun Gladwell often features his own skateboarding, such as his 2000 video Storm Sequence, shot on Bondi Beach near Sydney, about which critic Penny Craswell suggests yet another level of interaction based on Gladwell’s personal philosophy of the “isolated figure moving and struggling through the panoramas of nature (urban and ‘real’) in a possible engagement with the sublime”