The Art of Skating Institutions: Incidental Positionality as an Artistic Strategy in Reappropriating Civic Space

This thesis accompanies the project Civic Skateboarding developed for Leeds 2023 Year of Culture that culminated in a mini-festival seeking to support the growing female and marginalised gender skateboard community in Leeds, UK. Starting from John Latham and Barbara Steveni’s conceptions of the ‘Incidental Person’ for the Artist Placement Group (1966–1979), this thesis considers what we might deem the incidental positionality of the contemporary artist working within socially engaged art practice and how this offers opportunity for increased inclusion and participation in the use of civic space. Intentionally adopting an incidental position between the local skateboard community, arts organisations, universities, and the local authority, the key question of this research is how the role of the artist can be utilised to establish mutually beneficial relationships in support of actively excluded groups, such as female and marginalised gender skateboarders, who are disproportionality affected by a lack of safety in public space. Seeking to be what Natalie Loveless might term ‘polydisciplinamorous’, there is an intention in both the production, dissemination and analysis of this practice-based research to simultaneously court the fields of socially engaged art practice and skateboard academia. This research attempts to align the prefigurative power of socially engaged skateboarding with artistic concepts such as Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s notion of the ‘not-yet’ and the practices of ‘gotong royong’ (mutual assistance) and ‘nongkrong’ (hanging out) employed by Indonesian artist collectives such as ruangrupa. In doing so, a range of concerns emerge: addressing gender exclusions within skateboard culture and skate urbanism; the leveraging of evolving arts funding policies; the adoption of agonistic or affable artistic approaches; strategic entitlement and the disambiguation of grey space; the moral right of the artist and what protections this may afford; as well as the resolution of deep disagreements, or what Jean-François Lyotard describes as ‘the differend’.<p></p>