This is the second half of my essay about Amir Zaki’s photographs of Californian skateparks. If you missed it, Part 1 was posted on Monday, February 22, 2021.
THE SKATEBOARDER AS ARTIST
Amir Zaki’s photographs of California skateparks sit smartly at the nexus of two events, now historical—the emergence and evolution of the modern skatepark and the reinvention of American landscape photography. Published collectively for the first time, Zaki’s remarkable images depict the skateparks emptied of their users and made strangely supernatural by way of digital tooling and adept use of light.
2019: Hypersynthetic Topographics
Zaki’s work inherits and builds on two inevitably American traditions: rebellion and commodification. Zaki’s photographs, it should be noted, extend both from his personal history as a skateboarder who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in the outer edges of Southern California suburbia, and from his academic training and teaching as an artist who came of age at the time of the transition from traditional analog to digital photography. His series of images attempts to honor and document skateboarding’s rebellious outsider status and the skateboarder’s alienation from the field of all-American-jock sports play. Simultaneously, Zaki finds beauty and indeed a sort of ultra-natural sublimity in an otherwise denatured and utterly commercialized suburban American field made up of endless tract homes, shopping malls, parking lots, and freeways. Therefore, in all these images there are latent dualities: artist/skateboarder, man-made/ natural, reverence/rebellion, subject/object, pre-digital/post-digital, and, most importantly, body/no-body.
As Zaki guides us across a reimagined suburban skateboarding landscape, he presents these spaces, again and again, as sensuous carvings and cavities, complex and sculptural empty vessels, pipes, ramps, and rounded pyramids that are vacant of obvious purpose and therefore primed for the indulgences of the skating class, and simultaneously redolent of an alternative sublime. Like the best of Walker Evans’s work, Zaki’s photographs are symbolic of an emerging social body and also document one of the last forms of cultural resistance still available to suburban and urban youth. Even more specifically, the images are redolent of the artist’s youth growing up as a skater, most probably bored and listening to punk and American hardcore music in Beaumont, part of Southern California’s sprawling Inland Empire. Inevitably, they also bring to mind his graduate-school tutelage under the post-conceptual photographer James Welling at the University of California, Los Angeles. Zaki is currently a professor at the University of California, Riverside, where he has ongoing conversations with his colleague John Divola. Divola happened to be Zaki’s first photography teacher and has now been a close friend for several decades.
EYES THAT DO NOT SEE (AFTER LE CORBUSIER)
There is ultimately something more shocking in these photographs: recognition of and insistent resistance to the utter negation of the subject rendered by the algorithms and robot-eyes that see us without seeing and view us without understanding, in a sphere that is increasingly remotely surveilled and not experienced directly.1 In this sense, Zaki’s photographs break from the contemporary notions that art is now primarily a cultural commodity in a technologized arena owned and controlled by the Amazons and Facebooks of the world, with any work of art being simply the interchangeable “filler” in hyper capitalist commodity production; and that, worse, the new automated ways of seeing and re-coding the world are necessary evils. Indeed, he may understand new technologies of vision as being catalysts for new experiences and perceptions. Zaki suggests a means by which to recapture an actual, truly social experience in the age of virtual experience and via social media.
Zaki’s most potent insight into these unoccupied social spaces (as empty as their West LA and San Fernando Valley swimming-pool predecessors) is that they are not devoid of meaning, not symbols of a deadening suburban hell. They are quite the opposite; they are full of meaning and potential and are waiting to be occupied, corporeally and intellectually. The photographs are intentionally left absent of human activity and punctuated only by the occasional seagull or crow (the banalest of birds), marking the poetic presence of absence and the elusive absence of presence.
NOT TOPO-POP
These hyper synthetic photographs inherit and deny several West Coast art tropes. In his hyperdetailed and sumptuous photographs, I see a continuation of the avant-garde tradition of negating and reifying the past. The images are not single-shot, well-composed visual artifacts in the tradition of Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, or Ed Ruscha (even as they wryly recall Ruscha’s series of pool photographs, Nine Swimming Pools); they are, in fact, a more subjective and personal illusion, or a simulation, even a restaging, of the practices of those artists. Painstakingly assembled and constructed from multiple images of surface details and hosting a very curated and imported aviary, they have been obsessively worked over pixel by pixel, stitch by stitch, layer by layer. Importantly, they are also not located in the traditions of surrealist montage, cut-and-paste DIY punk image-making, or Hollywood-slick matte painting. Zaki repudiates the photo - collagist’s tradition (I am thinking here of David Hockney’s slightly maudlin desert landscapes, assembled from hundreds of individual snapshots) by erasing overlaps, blending seams, denying stitches, and reverently removing unwanted distractions.
In other words, Zaki obliterates the obvious hand of the artist while canceling out the Pop California-lite sometimes apolitical work of a figure like Ruscha and aims instead toward a new hypersocial realism. Zaki’s art serves as a critique of both the image in an age that has forsaken the body's presence and the now-absent classical subject. It is built craftily on top of the idea of a now-irrelevant, outmoded distinction between the organic, the built, and the simulated.
This quality in the work—the overabundance of a subjective absence and the superpresence of a denatured and simulated socio-natural landscape (a topic that I thought was possibly exhausted by Baltz)—makes Zaki’s serialized photographs consummately masterful. They are works of great technical skill and yet, playfully, also the product of some seriously gnarly subjective projection. As the legendary Tony Hawk points out in his essay, Zaki’s camera is often placed inside the concrete structures (not at a safe distance from the pool, à la Ruscha) and thus figures the absent presence of the skater himself, who in this case is the photographer, a lifelong skater. And so—ta-da!—these photographs are selfies with no self. In an era defined by the ever-present roving eyes of automated surveillance systems, drone photography, and the ubiquitous/obnoxious robotic Google Street View, Zaki’s photographs are, in a way, like a skater’s middle finger held up to a world that insists on flattening the subject back into an anonymous landscape.2
So, it can be argued here that the photographs are not, in fact, cold or documentarian emblems of a purely conceptual practice that happened upon several skateparks. As Zaki wields/welds and seams together the traditions of modernist American landscape photography in the West (he has a deep admiration for Edward Weston, for instance), as well as those of the social documentarian work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, absent the body, he effectively and remarkably performs a sort of magic trick: he pulls the rabbit of a long tradition of Romantic and subjective landscape art (such as that of Hudson River and Rocky Mountain school painters Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and other nineteenth-century painters of the American West, and also that of the photographers Carleton Watkins and George Fiske) out of the New Topographics hat. It is quite a feat and worth paying close attention to because Zaki is not without a slight sense of the theatrical and the absurd.
Amir Zaki insistently points us toward the body's erasure as a subject in photography while presaging the possibility of a hyper-present personal lens witness to but defiant of the billions of images, real or synthetic, that now circulate the globe under the auspices of an automated social-media machine. His is an art that, as Rosalind Krauss imagined, “presupposes the acceptance of definitive ruptures and the possibility of looking at historical process[es] from the point of view of logical structure[s],” and his digital facsimiles of facsimiles (bowls that are like pools; ramps and pipes that are like berms and culverts; spines, kidneys, and hips that are like spines, kidneys, and hips in form) recognize and honor the powerful naturalization and socialization of these spaces while revealing a hybrid artistic practice that is both documentarian and personal, familiar and exotic, of place and no place; it is an art that borrows from the center of the culture to feed the edge of the city.
The “styles” — for one must do something. […]
Our era fixes its style every day.
It is right before our eyes.
Eyes that do not see.
Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture. Trans. 1927, p. 156
Google’s Street View technology employs cameras that “contain no mechanical parts, including the shutter; instead, it uses CMOS sensors and an electronic rolling shutter. Google Street View photographs are accurately positioned via a Global Positioning System, wheel speed sensor, and inertial navigation sensor data. Laser range scanners record the actual dimensions of the space being photographed, measuring up to 165 feet and 180° in the front of the vehicle. LIDAR scanners are mounted at 45° to capture 3D depth information and are used for additional positional information.