Ito and Ryo had decided on where to stage the first photos of the evening’s mission: a piece of public art in front of an upscale apartment building in Ikebukuro. The sculpture is very skateable and comes with a low security risk but hadn’t really been used in any other major videos or notable ads so it was still fresh to consumers of Japanese skate media and unique enough to be interesting to a potential global audience. The sculpture itself is made of red granite and cut in a large strip about two feet wide and fifteen feet long with the top being terraced or stair-stepped ten feet down its length—imagine the foundation for a split-level ranch house.  This split-level creates a ledge about 8 inches high and gives the polished granite a pleasant asymmetry, definitive without being shocking.  The bi-level granite slab is mounted over a bed of fine white stone extending approximately two feet beyond the edge of the granite.  Surrounding the entire piece are soft lights inset into the pavement at the stones’ perimeter, creating a soothing glow.  Ito wanted to do a krooked grind along the entire length of the ledge, pop off the end and float over the gap to the pavement on the other side.



Ryo methodically places the lights, shoots a few frames, moves the lights again, walks around the sculpture taking more photographs with his high-end SLR digital camera. He pulls one tripod flash farther away and repositions another close to the ground and aiming it up to illuminate the line the space Ito’s body will pass through. People occasionally come out of the supermarket adjacent to this small plaza, walking past. Some stare curiously. As Ito begins to warm up, his actions give pause to those strolling by. They peer into the bright circle of light as uncertain spectators in a sudden theater cast up out of the ordinary evening. Ryo’s lights create an interior world of performance where Ito rides repeatedly in and out, made into a spectacle and a kind of weird freakshow, one that looks legitimate because of the assemblage of technology—the remote flash units on slender poles and Ryo moving from one contorted position to another. I constitute another aspect in this scene, a foreigner, with a video camera also shifting around the scene, clearly focused on Ito’s actions and connected to him and Ryo by a shared intense affect as well as the invisible but powerfully present sight lines of the optics we fix on Ito, both tracking and seeming to draw him forward to us. Ryo and I train our cameras on Ito and follow his repetitive attempts at making the trick. We talk very little. Occasionally Ryo calls Ito over to look at an image where they confer on the angle and the lights. I am struck by our rhythm and the lines of connection pulling us all together into a kind of embodied, machinic choreography. It is a form of media-body assemblage. We can think of this assemblage of skater, camera, and obstacle-plaything as a job site. Doesn’t being at work confer legitimacy? A claim to space? At the same time we are all intruders, disrupting the orderly passage and flow of the street, the sidewalk, the entrance to the supermarket.

If Ito were here alone, or we were all just skating together, the sculpture would the organizing center for our play, each of us trying different tricks, moving across and through the space along different trajectories, at different velocities. But in this instance, the play of skateboarding is rerouted into the hard time of repetition. The space becomes staged and linear. To be efficient, Ito must follow the agreed-upon line so that Ryo’s lights and his lens illuminate and capture the trick effectively. The sculpture-obstacle is a plaything native to the city, around which skaters would imagine experimental lines, taking familiar tricks from other times and terrains and testing them here on this new thing. The conversation is social and spatial all at once. Now, however, with this the purpose at hand, experiment has been foregone. Getting the trick, landing it, the make is the imperative. Read more about this dynamic here in Getting the Make.

More than an hour has passed and Ito has landed the trick only a few times. Itoshin goes to the car and pulls a fresh shirt from his small satchel, strips off his soaked shirt and wrings it out, leaning over so his sweat splashes close to the darkening pavement.  His torso shines in the antiseptic light coming from the grocery store windows as he shakes the fresh shirt out once, almost ceremoniously, before folding it over and rubbing himself with it vigorously, chafing away the sweat.  He jogs back to the granite table-sculpture and pulls up the two borrowed sheets of wood he used as an improvised surface to cover the decorative stone so he could ride closer to the table itself.  Earlier in the session he’d gone hunting in the alley and found the sheets attached to a garbage cage of an adjacent apartment building. He’d ripped the boards from their flimsy fastenings and appropriated them to temporarily solve the barrier presented by the loose stone around the sculpture. Now he holds them delicately, almost like sheets of glass, as he skates with them back to the garbage cage. Leaning them against the cage door, he bows slightly to them in a gestural apology for his presumption in removing them and the trouble he’s caused the caretaker. Then his head angled up, scanning to see if he’s observed. He quickly skates back to the car.  

I take on the role of assistant, gathering the equipment bags together as Ryo disassembles the flash units from the tripod stands.  I follow behind him as he packs the delicate flash units into specially padded compartments of a case. I collect the fully extended tripod stands, collapse the legs together, and slide the telescoping lengths into itself.  A slender canvas bag impossibly swallows the tripods and Itoshin hoists it to his shoulder and skates over to the car as Ryo slings his camera bag.  With practiced quickness Ryo loads the various bags in succession as Itoshin rhetorically asks, “Got everything?”  The wordless answer comes as Ryo gently closes the hatchback.  Ito skips to the passenger side, calling, “Dekita! Otsukaresama!” I/We did it! You must be tired! With those brief words Itoshin proclaims the session a success and acknowledges all of our efforts within a collective space.  This is a familiar phrase used by an individual nominally responsible for a group task to signal a collective conclusion.  Though Itoshin was the object of the camera’s gaze, he exerted a compelling spell on our scopic energy as the rider magically transforming space, multiply rewriting its meaning with his failed attempts.  With the authority conferred through spectacularly active body alive with skill and desire to make the trick, he was required to announce our collective work finished.  Ryo shot many photographs and there were a few he’s pleased with.  The rider and photographer consulted throughout the session, with pauses for Ryo to adjust lights or to change his own vantage or to show Ito a particularly good shot on the playback screen of the digital camera.  In the end though it is Itoshin who must be satisfied.  This contravenes the logic of the camera. The camera’s framing gaze decides what is enough, when it has been satisfied, when it has received what it demands of the world.  It is this invisible power of the camera to narrate the world, to organize the energies of those placed before the lens, that is undermined by Itoshin and Ryo throughout this session.  Ryo has to adapt to what is there.  He has to anticipate the lines of flight that the architecture will concede to the body.  At the same time Ryo also must continually measure the capacity of Itoshin to push against this limit and to flow along the edge—the edge of both bodily energy and the physical edge of the tiered granite sculpture.  The success of the image-making event lies in Itoshin proclaiming the trick to have been made, and not in the reductive, verifiable claim that he simply “never fell” and rode the board from one end to the other of the edge in a specific posture and then dismounted.  Instead, we depend on Itoshin to proclaim the trick made when he feels complete, when the continuity of the trick happened in a single motion, moving forward through space, changing scale, composing the body and board in the posture of the trick such that the physics congealed smoothly around this display of energy, erupting in a final burst as Itoshin landed on the sheets of borrowed wood and rode away, his body changing from intensely charged and poised into a mode of confident calm.   

What Ryo is producing has not yet been fully evaluated.  The final photograph, now residing within an unedited series of images, has only circulated between the three of us, all of who have some claim to make against the photograph’s aesthetics, the photograph’s truthfulness and its ability to embody the energy and feeling of Itoshin making a trick through, on, across this space.  I suggest though that our collectivity, our shared energy, serves as a kind of multi-positioned witness and participant, a collectivity that verifies the images and accords them a soulfulness, a potential to act on a future viewer outside this time and space with all the power of Barthes’ punctum.  All of us, as skaters, can feel in Itoshin’s performance his techniques of the body, the necessary commitment, and the flow that the trick and the architecture require in perfectly deployed unison.  We know the near impossibility of the “make”—the final landing, to ride away from an energetic improvisation and to so close hole in the spatial grammar.   There is something there greater than the performance of a model contorting her/his body to at once satisfy and provoke the imagination of a fashion editor. 



Though I hardly feel myself to have contributed, other than in feebly following Ryo’s lead in dealing with the equipment, Itoshin’s declaration acknowledges my part in this (self)production of bodily spectacle.  The hour and a half we’ve spent here disappears as we erase signs of our presence. Only a line of wax that Itoshin had rubbed onto the ledge to speed his trick remains as a dark, uneven line marking his violently delicate ritual.  With the tripods down and the flash no longer erupting, the sculpture has receded back into its larger environment, no longer rendered exposed and exceptional.  I realize how significantly the flash tripods and their light served to inscribe/impose a site of “purpose” upon the plaza and how this added inscription authorized a much longer claim to the space than a lone rider might have exercised.  The focused work of the three of us, two with cameras, one with the board, signaled a collective labor to observers, passersby, and the workers at the grocery store.  This was not a simple game, an irrational eruption in the polished order of the plaza and the apartment building it enhances.  The flash bursts not only froze time for the open shutter of Ryo’s cameras, but also froze space, transfigured it in the harsh, irregular rhythms that followed Itoshin’s movement through space.  Having broken down the “shoot”, the created/appropriated space dissipates under Ryo’s methodical direction.

We pack up Ryo’s Honda small station wagon and roll out, cruising towards the massive towers of Shinjuku to the south.

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