In Search of Authenticity

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw skate videos develop a distinct “street” aesthetic, made possible by Sony’s VX1000, enhanced with a fisheye lens. Paying homage to this era, skater-filmmaker Colin Read grabbed the same camcorder in the 2010s to make a series of videos. In Tengu: God of Mischief (2013), Read stitches together a stream of sequences filmed over two and a half years by envisioning skaters as tengu—untamed Japanese creatures that fly high and dive deep—and follows them on rooftops, through subways, across platforms. Though composed of hundreds of individual shots, Tengu embodies a single, “authentic” skater profile: daring, rebellious, and worshipped in the collective imagination. “It’s our human duty to enjoy life” and “we’ve got to be greedy about living”: quotes from Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) play over the crisp sound of boards hitting the pavement. The mythic figure of the urban skater emerges from the gritty nightscape. He audaciously indulges in the freedom and self-gratification that come with surfing on the city’s edges.

Becky Beal and Lisa Weidman, pioneers of skateboarding research, suggest that visual representations of skating at the turn of the 21st century overwhelmingly catered to a masculine ideal centred on toughness and risk-taking.2 Tengu uses this imagery, looping us into his subcultural spectacle of trick execution. Read’s deliberate retro aesthetic and the editing choices of the satisfying, smooth landings, feed into the nostalgic reproduction of an idealised—and perhaps, mythologised—’90s skate scene. In his animated short Together (2024), Leon Washere brings a soft touch to the legacy of insider skate videos. The cityscape of concrete and steel melts into vibrant colour blocks, while the camera choreography follows the VX1000 template, zooming in on skaters’ trick achievements in their boyish, oversized silhouettes. In an interview, the artist explains that his creative process starts with a specific trick or skater in mind and then moves on to illustration and colouring.3 Though working in different visual mediums, Tengu and Together both belong to a contemporary continuation of the early-2000s insider DIY skate-video movement, aspiring to recreate the brisk “flow” chased by a generation of skaters who grew up in the analogue era.

Millennial artists’ nostalgia has contributed to the canonisation of the ’90s skate video aesthetic, and Brown Bag (2020) is an extraordinarily authentic example, based on a Super 8 film artist Ari Marcopoulos uncovered in a long-forgotten brown bag in his studio. Teen groups in baggy clothes roam the streets and corners of mid-90s New York. Skaters’ seconds of suspension in the air stretch into two decades of dust and sediment. Miles Davis’s electric, jazzy track “Tatu (Part 1)” jams alongside the drifting figures, improvising around the thick, steady beats, a sonic reminder that every skate trick returns to the ground. Marcopoulos’s discovery archives a time when the noise and frenzy of the new century’s neoliberal market economy had not yet entirely inundated the city.

Despite its celebration of individual progression, skateboarding culture remains deeply communal and convivial. Its emphasis on a non-competitive ethos means that one skates with, but not against, each other. Jonah Hill’s fiction feature Mid90s (2018) and Bing Liu’s documentary Minding the Gap (2018) are among the many titles in which skateboarding mediates stories of friendship and belonging. In All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (2014), Enzo Smits takes us to the periphery of the skate scene, introducing us to the “outsiders.” Signature adrenaline-fueled shots defining skate video production dissolve into the ambient natural soundscape and a coming-of-age melancholy. We are caught in the hypnotic in-between of becoming, where skateboarding is both a gateway to an identity yet-to-be and a reminder of the boredom here-and-now. Static frames of teen boys gazing out in a black Thrasher sweatshirt, browsing the in-game merch shop, trying on sneakers in real life, and walking together with their boards in hand all point to the B-side of skater authenticity: the desire to belong and to be seen.

The archetype of the alienated, subcultural youth in skateboarding representations, however, fractures when we look at some of the activity’s early footage. Canadian director Claude Jutra’s The Devil’s Toy (1969) is among the very first films about skateboarding. The narrator sarcastically calls the new craze in Montreal “an epidemic from which no one was secure.” Dedicated to “all victims of intolerance,” The Devil’s Toy cuts into the board’s material anatomy and kinetic principles, concluding that its variations of maneuvering are infinite. Boys and girls on boards—the “pilots of the missile”—are exhilarated by the free-wheeling downhill glide. Eventually, the public authorities take alarm at the kids’ “mindless” takeover of the roadways and direct them to enclosed ice-rinks—a measure that aspires to prevent youth on wheels from sabotaging the coveted orderliness and serenity of middle-class urban neighbourhoods but does not prevent the skaters from having fun.

Skateboarders’ unease with a predetermined and regulated lifestyle extends to a deliberate disregard for protective measures. In the late 1970s, skateboarding turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry. At the same time, in the US, media reports of a growing number of skate-related accidents and injuries, along with liability concerns from the mostly privately funded skateparks, created a market demand for protective gear. Sid Davis’s Skateboard Sense (1979) offers a glimpse of the effort at the time to raise safety awareness among skater youth. Presenter Tom Padaca, a known professional surfer and skateboarder, recommends wearing complete safety gear and skating in designated, confined areas, rendering an activity driven by unruliness and spontaneity into an institutionalised sport, a development that steered rebellious helmetless youngsters in the direction of counterculture companions. The irony of Skateboard Sense peaks, in hindsight, when Padaca lectures, “you can’t have any fun skateboarding across the streets, there’s just too much on the way.”

Because “too much on the way” is often precisely what helps skaters gain their momentum. Rotterdam-based designer and researcher Pedro Gil Farias’s machinima In Search of Productive Friction (2025) reimagines this entanglement between the rowdy urban environment and the skater’s body, using a modded Pyramid Ledges map in Skater XL. Speaking from the perspective of the personified architectural complex, Farias defends the intrusive skater, who disrupts mundane routines and sparks new spaces and new actions. Instead of maintaining what critic René Boer calls the “smooth city”, skateboarding’s playful intervention momentarily disrupts the space’s absorption into the gentrified urban grid.

To be locked in, to make sense of surroundings, to see the surface anew and to make it skatable: this embodied attentiveness to space seems to be an intrinsic quality skaters pursue. In its minimal production, Belgian designer Abel Kleinblatt’s Sidewalks (2022) is a footnote to that alternative spatial thinking, which pushes the boundaries of skateboarding culture. Sidewalks gives credit to skaters’ reinterpretation of public spaces, referencing Mark Gonzales’s performance “skate ballet” (1988) in Germany and pairing it with Kleinblatt’s own attempt to ride a board inside Antwerp’s contemporary art museum. Interestingly, Gonzales himself has reflected on how the search for something new can lead you back to familiar habits. This raises a question that Sidewalks leaves largely unexplored: if skateboarding is about breaking conventions, how should we address the comfort zone within skate culture itself?