Hard Copy

Writing for hard copy journals can be taxing. Yesterday I completed a first draft of my review of the Audain Art Museum's Out of Control: the Concrete Art of Skateboarding exhibition and found it to be 100 words over. I took off the opening paragraph, and it fit. In fact, it was better without it. But what to do with that paragraph? I worked so hard to get it right!

Skateboarding, like surfing and alpine skiing, is both a recreational activity and a competitive sport. That it was invented by Californian and/or Hawaiian surfers in the 1950s, and de-wheeled three decades later (to become popularly known as snowboarding in the 1990s), places it in an evolutionary middle and invites comparison. All three spawned complex postwar subcultures, though skateboarding maintains a rockier relationship to its elements. Indeed, if surfing occurs smoothly over water, with the ocean’s force behind it, and alpine skiing/snowboarding gravitationally down water’s frozen form (snow), skateboarding is largely body-powered, its horizontal surfaces more often than not a mix of water, sand and cement (i.e. concrete).