Shaun Gladwell's Central

Here's about Shaun Gladwell's Central

The first things you notice when you enter Shaun Gladwell’s central Sydney studio are the dozens of brightly painted skateboards stacked against the wall and a tangle of mountain bikes—there were nine on the day he invited The Art Newspaper into his studio, shortly before his departure for Venice, where he will occupy the Australian Pavilion.

“Venice must be the worst place in the world for a skateboarder,” says Gladwell. “But I love it.”

He has no idea how many skateboards are in the stack—there must be more than 100 of them—although he quickly locates three particular boards kept in plastic to preserve their pristine condition, too precious ever to ride: one by Liam Gillick, who is set to occupy the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, and two by Jeff Koons. “I like having the collection near me,” he says. “I just look at them and they collect dust.”

And the mountain bikes? “Yeah, I have a bike fetish too, I love them. But they have to be black, to have dual suspension, and to be made by a firm called Specialized.”

Skateboarding is central to Gladwell’s idea of himself as well as to his practice as an artist. It links the 37-year-old artist—in early mid-career, as Doug Hall, commissioner of the Australian Pavilion put it—with his teenage years in a Sydney urban subculture, that links in turn with urban cultures from Tokyo to London, New York to Seoul. Skateboarding also provided him with the two defining video pieces he made in 2000, which still inform his work: Double Line Walk, in which he uses a handicam to video the tip of his board as he skates around Sydney—Gladwell’s take on Paul Klee’s dictum that drawing is “taking a line for a walk”—and Storm Sequence, in which he performs freestyle tricks on a board while a storm rolls in from the ocean behind him on Bondi Beach. Storm Sequence has become an important Australian work of art, and drew accolades at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Other performances chronicled by Gladwell have included a stunt cyclist riding on one wheel through a McDonald’s, unnoticed by the eaters; a breakdancer doing headspins, again with the image inverted; two breakdancers locked in a frozen position for as long as their bodies can manage at a Tokyo underground station; and a Capoeira dancer performing exercises in a deserted 24-hour petrol station. “I like to think of the spaces and dynamics before the work, almost as if the space inspires the work,” he says.

He also explores these formal ideas in the least formal of settings, deploying what he terms “post-pop logic” and offering multiple entry points into the work. “I try to use the debris of the collision between pop and high art,” he explains, citing the human skull, a graphic image in youth culture but also the memento mori of art history. He’s interested in how skateboarders, for instance, will get something very different from his work to art world insiders—“I like things to be open-ended, to allow multiple interpretations.” This openness extends to allowing chance to introduce elements of broad humour or absurdity, such as a pigeon that wanders through the shot in the McDonald’s sequence, and a bright blue municipal garbage truck that chunters up behind the Capoeira dancer.