Surfing, art and artefacts: asking coastal questions
Over the past few years, I have attended a lot of ‘surf art’ openings and exhibitions. A lot. Mostly they’re quite lovely and colourful and, well, surfy, but mostly I also walk away and don’t much think about them again. I don’t mean to say they’re not good, because they are and people are doing all sorts of awesome things using images of waves, boards, bodies, colours, clouds and the beach, but while they might make me smile or feel good,I suppose they never really teach me much, or make me ask questions. And that’s not a criticism so much as an observation, because making beautiful images, films and objects for their own sake is wonderful and I don’t necessarily want anyone to stop. But there are a growing number of surfy artists I have come to love, whose work is not ‘surf art’, but rather is ‘art about surfing’. The difference is that their work is more than textual, more than art for beauty’s sake, and engages in cultural questions and ugliness and critique. This ‘art about surf...
