Glory Days – EXHIBITION ESSAY FOR SCULPTURAL ARTIST JOSHUA VAN DYKE
Repped in Paris, New York and Vancouver, Joshua Van Dyke repurposes old skateboard decks into archetypal modernist sculptures. BCreative worked with Van Dyke to provide a range of biographical and support material, including this piece which provides context for his sublime work.
There were no animal trophies in the great noble houses of Britain or Europe in the 18th century – the Enlightenment would have turned a cold eye to such a brutal display of a primitive aesthetic. Trophies were an invention of the 19th century Romantic imagination, a glowering presence that served as status symbol, decorative prop and direct connection to an ancient ideal about glory. As a by-product of the hunt, they were a nobleman’s souvenir of an ancient rite-of-passage: the means by which he tested his mettle, the mystical core of his being. To the Victorian upper class – unsettled by the technological, industrial and popular remaking of the socio-political landscape – the hunt remained their last redoubt to prove the privilege of their worth. Fortified by ritual and impressed with pageantry, the hunt represented all that was good and Christian, medieval and mystical in an established order that linked nobility to the chivalry of the Middle Ages and all the way back to the myth and golden promise of the Holy Grail.
Where would we all be in our own lives without the long romance about that search for sacred purity and the transformative power of the sublime?
For his series of large-scale formalist sculptures in The Hunt, the Canadian artist Joshua Van Dyke is cunning in his appropriation of these mythic symbols which he welds to the need for freedom and glory in our own much troubled time. Using the simple technology of the skateboard, Van Dyke has fashioned a contemporary vehicle for metaphysical inquiry, a trick that contains the promise of a truth. Who knew a skateboard –the tarted-up toy of slacker youths everywhere – could carry the weight of history and the cultural expectations of myth. But Van Dyke’s found material is fashioned with a faith that deserves its full measure. The skateboarder may just be heir to the honour of those much-hallowed knights of yore.
After bursting out in the 60s as a fad for clean-cut kids looking for some easy fun, skateboarding went out of fashion and then came roaring back in the freewheeling 70s with a fresh voice. The 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z Boys – narrated by Sean Penn and now the ur-text for a generation of kids stoked by the exploits of the Zephyr crew – tells this story like a romantic epic.
The faith in the skateboarding creed is something to consider. The “cultural path” – as one its gurus dubbed it – that skateboarding took in the 70s forward can be sourced to a low-end southern California “slum”, the new Camelot, where a mostly male crew of kids founded a pastime that is non-authoritarian and non-hostile, and favours self-expression, co-operation and personal freedom. And the central tenet of skateboarding, its commanding impulse, is love: “We we’re doing it because we loved doing it”.
Of course, the truth is never so pure of trouble. Darkness always looms at the edges. Like the Victorians with their taste for the gothic and grotesque, Van Dyke’s sculptures in The Hunt are also touched by the macabre. Particularly at night, they have a looming, sensuous presence. You feel their descending force as much as their uplifting sweep. As the e.e.cummings poem goes – rendering death and forever with each breathing. They might be considered as a ‘memento mori’, a means of remembering that death exists in life and we would all be wiser to know that.
But symbols, including Van Dyke’s noble skateboard stags, offer a locus for inspiration, an opportunity to experience an awareness of purity that can transform us and make our flawed and mortal lives seem greater than perhaps they are.
