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| Billboard by ESPO/Steve Powers in conjunction with Wallpower/Indelible Market exhibits at ICA |
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Alex: The show I most recently did was these three graffiti artists, Barry McGee ("Twist"), this guy Steve Powers ("ESPO"), and this guy Todd James ("REAS") and that was really great. There's a crossover a bit with youth culture, graffiti, and skateboarding. The first time I really read about Barry McGee was in skateboard magazines so there is sort of a crossover element. Although none of them really skate, they have an appeal with um, like the skateboard culture which is sort of interesting and good. It's fun to work in a museum setting because contemporary art is open enough to all types of things. The skateboard element entering in to that sort of museum setting, it's not that out of the loop. It makes sense. It's nice that I can work at a job that has (an average person would never consider) a wider appeal, using the skateboard scene, and indeed it winds up that you can make it that way. I know for instance, just recently there was an exhibition in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center called symparch and some guys built a skateboard bowl in the gallery. So yeah that's pretty good.
SK8TC: Bowls can be considered sculptures in a certain sense. Alex: Oh definitely. There's this conceptual artist, this public art guy, called Dan Graham, who designed a skateboard bowl for public art in Germany. That unfortunately, was never finally produced, he just had the maquette, the little model for the skateboard bowl. I saw a photograph of it in an art magazine, it seemed really interesting. I actually, at one point at FDR skatepark in Philly, a local Philadelphia public art organization approached us to submit an application for a public art project at the skatepark and we did that. Unfortunately nothing ever happened with that either. Our proposal was that we would be the quote un-quote artists, the skaters, and we would create some sort of skate art. It was essentially a way to get money to build the skatepark but that never happened, unfortunately. I recently just resigned from this job at the museum because I need to finish this PhD I started to work on a couple years ago at Temple, in this visual anthropology program. I don't really need a PhD for my field of work. It's nice to have one, I have a Master's already in Anthropology at Temple, but I went back to school in the early 90s a little bit unsure of what I wanted to do. I don't regret it or anything like that but there really is no reason for me to finish my PhD aside from the fact that I started, and I really have to finish what I started just so I can feel good about having completed it. I don't want to be an academic, it's not really a good time to get a university job because there's so many cutbacks going on at the university level where it's really hard to get a full tenure track position. They're hiring adjunct faculty more and more that don't have any benefits; they're essentially part-time jobs that are not very well paid either. So it's actually probably better for a career choice to sort of stick in museums and I really enjoy that more. I think you have a wider audience, the academic audience is really small. Aside from teaching undergraduates, which I think would be really gratifying, still your ultimate audience is your academic peers, and I think that's a very narrow audience. The museum field is bigger, so you have the potential to attract all kinds of people who are literally coming in off the streets, I hope, to see a particluar exhibition. You're not writing or creating text for some very small group of people the way you are as an academic. So that's what I really want to do, but I'm gonna take this short hiatus to finish this dissertation that I started; I have some part time museum gigs lined up anyway. Resigning from my current job is really a good thing, it's ultimately me calling the shots which is kind of nice. |