Homemade Culture: Growth of Gallery Art From the Skateboard Subculture Into the Mainstream Art World
California, USA
By George O'Dell

The skateboard subculture has created a growing niche in the art world. This niche finds its support base in urban culture and is becoming established in the gallery and commercially while remaining close to its founding community.  With this growing success, galleries and businesses have formed to meet the growth of this community. These artists and galleries have found a way to mix retail commercial success with fine art production. It is made up of artists influenced by urban and skateboard cultures; they have developed a movement that may have otherwise been overlooked by the established art community. Artists who started in the street are now working on canvas, in fashion, marketing, and music. Equally, fashion companies are opening white wall galleries and producing quarterly publications tailored to a younger demographic whose interests match those of the artists.  This growing niche of artists and art promoters is highlighting the role of the artist as entrepreneur in society. This growth is often linked to the “street art” movement and although there are many crossovers and connections this work is not determined to stay pure to graffiti roots and instead, on some levels, embraces commercial success and the doors this can open.  The ability to move between the street scene, the graphic or commercial art world, and the fine arts shows how this group of artists, working in an often-overlooked forum, has developed its own art world. This movement has produced its own culture and is now beginning to infiltrate other circles of the arts.  Artists who started by making stickers and t-shirts are now selling in group and solo gallery shows. While finding gallery success these artists still produce the ephemera; the t-shirts, posters, and stickers that got them started.  This is a complete reversal of the museum art system where work becomes famous and then becomes mass marketed on various types of saleable ephemera.

The birth of this movement can be linked back to the skateboard and punk culture of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The artwork adopts a graphic style that is found on skateboards and concert flyers. The art produced today is a refined look at these and other childhood influences. Artist, Jeremy Fish, got his start working in the print shop for skateboard companies; Shepard Fairey’s, now world famous, Obey the Giant artwork, started as a small sticker project. These two names represent a larger group of formally trained artists who got their start producing art on their own and commercially in an industry they grew up with. From small beginnings, these two artists have launched clothing companies, magazines, and skateboard companies, all while showing original work in galleries on both coasts of the United States and worldwide.

Shepard Fairey has become well known in the skateboard culture, the commercial design world, and more recently amongst the fine art gallery world. His work started in the late 1980’s with an independent sticker campaign that pronounced, “Andre the Giant has a Posse” a reference to the wrestler, Andre the Giant, this was accompanied by the word obey. From this first set of stickers, the image and the name, Obey, spread. The Andre the Giant has a Posse sticker campaign grew from a local east coast phenomenon to allover the country. This rise was accomplished by putting the stickers in punk rock albums, taking out ads in the back of magazines, and distribution among friends.

Fairey describes the growth in his manifesto as an “experiment in Phenomenology” . Fairey goes on to describe his notion of Phenomenology in reference to Martin Heidegger, quoting that Phenomenology “is the process of letting things manifest themselves.” “Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation.” The observer is asked to obey, but what or who are they to obey? The message is ambiguous and the viewer is left to question what it is they obey and why. Questioning what we obey has moved Fairey’s work, in recent years, to take on a much more subversive political quality. Appropriating political images and representing them in a Street Art format, asks the viewer to understand the power of political messages. The image or propaganda once controlled by a body of power has been taken by a new grassroots driven power.

Fairey has a solo show open currently in Los Angeles at Mary Karnowsky Gallery entitled, Rise Above. This show comes on the heels of the [recently closed], 130 piece, solo show at the Street Art and Graffiti dedicated space, Stolen Space Gallery in East London. This mix of galleries shows that Fairey’s work fits both within the Street Art scene at places like Stolen Space, and also works in galleries exhibiting Neo Surrealism and other emerging genres. Along with his gallery shows comes his connection to the street art culture. When a new show opens new designs are also produced for the street in which the show is occuring. In keeping the street side of his work current, the ethos of working within the public domain and for the masses is sustained. Fairey has also set up Swindle Magazine, and Studio Number One a commercial graphic design company. Fairey has established an art media empire that offers something for everyone whether or not they are interested. For those that are uninterested they may be confronted with one of his large posters while walking down the street or subtly in an ad campaign for a company like Honda. Admirers who are priced out of buying an original or print, can still afford a piece of clothing from the Obey clothing line or download free poster and sticker templates from the Obey website. Fairey has managed to use capitalism and the urban domain to create an organization that is involved in art on many different levels. In a recent interview he defends working for corporations that, if he didn’t someone else would and he can use the money to fund new art spaces and projects.

“If I take the money [from corporate jobs] I can fund all these other projects that I want to do like: the street art campaign that costs money, the gallery that I have out here in LA that loses money, Swindle that loses money but is definitely dealing with art and politics, and other aspects of culture that I want to put the spot light on. So for me, even though I would like to get people to consume with discretion and heighten their awareness of all the manipulations of capitalism, I am not anti- capitalist, there is a big distinction there." (Shepard Fairey)

San Francisco based artist Jeremy Fish is another art-entrepreneur to rise out of the skateboard subculture. Designing graphics for skateboards was the launch pad Fish used to move his work into the gallery. Recently his artwork has been shown in galleries throughout the United States and Europe. The focus of his work includes, childhood memory, the uncanny, and mixing the approachable with the scary. His work has appeared in, gallery shows, on clothing, and more recently in the CD packaging and a music video for the musician Aesop Rock. His collaborative efforts show how his work encompasses the greater world of a younger urban culture that is concerned with contemporary non-mainstream music and fashion. In 2005 Nike launched an artist series of skateboard shoes with Fish’s work on them and supported a European promotional tour, to support both the artist and the product. This collaboration is an example of how artists are using corporations for self-promotion.

Like Fairey, Fish’s work has also taken the form of a clothing line and skateboard company, Superfishal. Produced through the art space Gallery Fifty 24SF and the clothing boutique Upper Playground. Superfishal focuses on original designs and limited collaborative efforts with other artists in an Urban and Street Art genre. In working with Gallery Fifty24SF, Fish has moved into the world of contemporary design. He has created a line of limited furniture for Upper Playground and their gallery efforts. His “fine art” work still manages to show the skateboard influence beyond their graphic quality, creating pieces that are carved out actual skateboards. Through this work one can see directly how the world of skateboarding influenced the way in which, Fish approaches art.

Upper Playground is another San Francisco based entity that connects art and fashion immediately. Started in 1998 as a clothing company, the store has grown with two galleries (one fine art and one design), clothing stores, and other media outlets. The creation of Upper Playground is not limited to the Bay Area, but includes artists and designers from all over the world. Working with their gallery, Gallery Fifty24SF, the company produces t-shirts to coincide with artists that the gallery shows. This combination immediately links art and fashion together and creates a tangible connection between the art and the culture that supports it. The ability to market art on this level also attracts more potential buyers who might otherwise see an art show and leave with nothing more than a flyer. A plausible argument is that this is over marketing and thus devaluing the art on the wall. On the other hand it offers the fan base a previously unavailable opportunity to support the artist. Creating t-shirts, stickers, posters, and other ephermera is also how many of the artists at Upper Playground got their start. A departure then, from this production, would in fact be to reject the roots of what got the artist to the gallery level. Art on a t-shirt or merchandise also means that the work being done by the artist has reached another level of dissemination.

Another company to reach out to the artist to meet their fashion needs and foster a stronger community is RVCA. RVCA is a clothing company that uses artists in the skateboard and surf community to design their graphics. In return for designing RVCAs’ merchandise, artists in connection with the companys’ non-profit, ANP (The Artists Network Program), produce gallery shows. A portion of the profits from each show and merchandise goes to the artist’s charity of choice. RVCA tries to develop its commercial side along with its community side in hopes of sustaining a harmonious co-existence, between the fine arts and the commercial arts. Promotion of the fine arts for RVCA is done through their free magazine titled ANP Quarterly, whose mission is stated as “this endeavor is to make a magazine that will educate and inform openly and without the social or financial restrictions that plague many publications today” . ANP Quarterly is free and devoid of advertising. The idea is to write about what is appealing in the arts to them and not necessarily what the biggest buzz in the art world is.

Detractors or those who question the legitimacy or purity in the nature of this movement could argue that, the art being produced is not pure, due to its connection with mass commercial production and advertising. In actuality this movement has stayed pure to its cultural roots. It is a culture built around skateboarding, surfing, graffiti, music, fashion, and art; a culture that built itself, because nothing like it had existed before. It is possible to sell without selling out, if the desire to do something creative and productive to society, is present. Jeremy Fish describes this idea of mass production as “maybe you are cheapening it [art] ok, or maybe you’re making it cheaper, and I think there is a difference between the two” . In this statement Fish is arguing that the commoditization of his artwork keeps it accessible to the members of the community that he is trying to stay in touch with, who don’t have the means to buy artwork.

The crowd that initially supports the movement may not be able to afford the same support down the road. The commitment to keeping art accessible at many levels shows a commitment to the community that helped them succeed. Of course this is a commitment that allows commercial success for the artist and gallery. This success however allows access for other artists working in the same vein, as interest from outside the obvious community grows. The success of these artists, companies, and organizations shows that it is possible in the art world to create something within the existing structure that rejects the traditional way of success in the arts.

George O'Dell

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