Concrete Content
February 12, 2002
Mike O'Meally and Max Creasy: Concrete Content, Citylights, Centre Place-Hosier Lane, Melbourne, February 12th-April 4th, 2002.
A young man is airborne on a skateboard above the cement curl of a graffiti covered rink in Brooklyn, New York City. The man is Bobby Puleo (2001). The twin towers of The World Trade Centre form a backdrop to this scene. The evening sky and smog is fading over the city. There is a disturbing subtext to this image by Mike O’Meally: Ilkarus who in making wings for himself, flies too close to the sun, damaging his wings and falls to his death.
The lurid sky and backdrop is derealized like Richard Prince’s sunset images, selected and re-photographed from magazines and advertisements. This photograph is characterisitic of many of the images in Concrete Content. As subjects of photography, professional and amateur skateboarders express tbe possibilities of the picturesque. The lateral extensions of skateborders on concrete and plywood ramps reveal the capacities of sites and bodies in a kind of parallax which magnifies their variety and singularity.
The photographic images by Mike O’Meally and Max Creasy present skateboarding as a global cultural phenomenon of hegemony and difference with images from the United States of America, Sweden, Australia and Brazil. The photographers utilize conventions of fashion photography and documentary photography.
The culture of skateboarding has utilized photography, video and digital technologies (commercial and “do -it yourself” practices) to transform a marginal subcultural space into a mass market with special interest magazines, clothing, sneakers, boards and major events. Skateboarding has its own photographic conventions based upon fragmentation, repetition, action and performance. In the culture of skateboarding photographic practices become predatory whereby cultures and spaces are plundered for the mass market in a way related to tourism’s quest for the natural and authentic.
O’Meally is associate editor of Skateboarder magazine and Creasy is a visual artist practicing in Melbourne. Their photographic images appear in billboard style light-boxes of Citylights, a public art space which engages with advertising and fashion at two separate locations in Melbourne’s Flinders Lane Precinct.
O’Meally and Creasy document a masculine masquerade in which the skateboard becomes a fetishistic signifier of the metaphysics of youth. Creasy's image of Dion Kovacs bedroom, (Sydney, 2002) contains the anti-heroic privacy or suburban banality by photographing second-degree, image-fragments fixed to a domestic wall. The rituals of youth demmand a kind of outsiderness and lawlessness of performing toughness affected by the boundaries of gender, race and class. This is apparent in O’Meally’s black and white image of Keith Huffiagel negotiating the strees of New York with the aid of a car.
O’Meally's photograph of Jason Dill (New York, 2000) in a sleeveless camouflage T-shirt (by Japanese clothing label Bathing Ape) may be compared to Steven Klein' s images of masculinity in fashion magazines, Dutch and Arena. The close physicality and combative representation of masculinity is compromised by the anxiety of desubjectification. Dill’s T -shirt suggests the camouflage pattern has more of an affinity with concrete structure than foliage. The adoption of utility clothing creates a language of singularity from uniform, mass effects.
The skateboard has a particular relationship to the production of space. The culture is perceived to challenge authorized public space by altering it into a semi–private and clandestine state. The imigges of O’Meally and Creasy articulate the sculptural and architectural capacities of skateboarding in a travesty of minimalist aesthetics. This is apparent in Creasy's site–specific photograph of a group of dismantled, plywood ramps in a pine forest (Mammoth, California, 1999).
These objects retain a reserve of aesthetic and utility potential. O’Meally’s image of Reese Forbes on a ten meter high concrete public sculpture (Sao Plaulo, Brazil, 2001) articulates the subversive production of meaning, desire and use in everyday tactics. O’Meally uses lighting to photograph Hufnagel in a public car park (Los Angeles, 2001). The immaterial effect of lighting on the industrial interior resembles a white walled, gallery space in a kind of re-image of architectural space.
O’Meally and Creasy utilize second-degree re-imaging to indicate the skateboard is both a tool and toy of everyday practice and experience. The photographic image produces space and spectacle. They utilize the conventions of fashion and documentary photography to produce images which appear natural, authentic and even beautiful. In using the convention of documentary and fashion photography, they risk repeating a spectacle of heroic and romantic masculine mythologies to enable the
mass appeal of uniform products. The production of space in skateboarding is acutely affected by masculine self-presence and the commodity drive to indistinction.