Adrien Coillard – Come back from what?
McGrath grind transfer, Lyon
Photography by Fabien Ponsero
Words by Ted Barrow
Have we not, by now, all agreed that time is a flat circle? Instead of rolling out along a line of progress, doesn’t it spin in a cyclical fashion? Things change, sure, but things also repeat. There’s some good and some bad in this attitude towards time. The bad: nothing stays one way for long. The good: that’s okay because it’ll be like that again. Though unpredictable, life tends to have a comforting continuity to it, doesn’t it?
This truism about time takes an interesting form when applied to how we think about skateboarding, however. Most of us learn to skate at a time when we are learning to be human, testing out the boundaries of ourselves against the world around us, which we barely know. We start skateboarding young, when what we think about the world is incomplete and often based on ignorance and imagination. Our skateboard, if looked at one way, takes us through life, sharpening some of its edges while offering a graceful, fluid movement over many of life’s other rough surfaces. This is a spatial, perceptual, and perhaps even mnemonic experience of time, specific to skateboarding. How many of us might not remember one iota of a second of a year of schooling, but can recall with cinematic bombast the minutiae of our first noseslide? As we age, we may even start to see these repeated patterns and cycles as forming some sort of vague outline of how life itself is shaped. Our movement through life is shaped by four wheels and, before we know it, that movement becomes our life, how we measure time: rolling, cyclical, repetitive, ever-renewing.
Switch ride-on 50-50, Bayonne, France.
One way to measure time in skateboarding is through pants. If you’ve been paying attention to the last two decades of trousers in skateboarding, you will have detected some major shifts. The taut denim and recalcitrant twill of the early millennium has ballooned like a slackened sail to the billowing forms preferred by most today. Because things over time unfold slowly, our eyes have time to adjust. What once seemed absurd and shocking now seems normal.
I think of the tight pant era (certainly due for a comeback sometime soon) as one in which the negative space around the skateboarder was brought into high relief. The expressive potential of the shapes made by the skater’s movement became precise. Put it this way: we knew a lot more about the shape of Olly Todd and Andrew Reynolds’legs in 2006 than we do today. Now, with looser denim, style becomes a gestural thing in direct contrast to the graphic, almost grammatical, way it was expressed in the tighter era. And, in their respective eras, neither looked that weird. Our way of seeing movement and processing information through trousers has thus changed over time. It will continue to do so.
Backside nosegrind, Biarritz
It’s like choosing a font: it may read different, but the message is the same. Pants in skateboarding, I mean. If you see the last widely-seen footage from Adrien Coillard, which was probably for most people Cliché’s 2013, Bon Voyage, his pants are, for that time, not bad. Mostly chinos, with enough room for the front slat pockets to fold out when, say, gap to nose-blunting that crazy Lyon hubba by the river, for example. Geez. Did he really do that? That’s some next-level-Geoff Rowley in Sorry type-promise without Geoff Rowley in Sorry-type pants. A part like that, combining crisp finesse and creativity with fluid gnarliness and, all things considered, decent pants, showed promise and then… Not much else after. Without risking speculation, life probably happened. Huge board companies that produce slick and promising parts eventually implode under the outside burden of a cumbersome and ambling market, and a great skateboarder’s talents might float off like obscure motes of dust in the fickle dull suffuse flicker of social media’s attention span.
The question is not whether Coillard continued to skate out of the spotlight, if these photos we see are some sort of orchestrated comeback, but why we need to think of this as coming back at all? Coming back from what? Our field of attention? Not skating? Skating but not filming or shooting photos? Sponsorship doldrums? Eleven years after Cliché’s Bon Voyage, are these even relevant terms and ideas against which to measure one’s life in skateboarding?
Boardslide to switch feeble grind revert, Lyon
Seeing skateboarding as a way to measure progress through time, much past our teens, is a fruitless endeavour. Progress and persistence are constructed mythologies we’re taught to help us get through the tedium of school and the terror of life, as our awareness of how meaningless it all is dawns. If we grow up skateboarding the process of learning, honing, and expanding our tricks and terrains feels like progress. But that feeling is not a fact, and that idea that we must always continue to push forward over time is just that: an idea not a truth. These ideas are how we give shape to time, or at least one way. But skateboarding shapes time in a different way. And I would argue that Adrien Coillard’s exploration of time, through skateboarding, whether seen or not, proposes a different set of shapes. There are gaps and lacunae, a lot of negative space (the past eleven years, for example) and that negative space is now carved by different pants in a new configuration through, in some cases, familiar settings. Isn’t that bank where he’s doing the overturned backside 180 nosegrind transfer, seen here, the same one that he nollie 360 shove-it-ed into (a little kid trick if there ever was one) aand frontside heelflip varial to corner carve to slam (a promising young man trick), in his 2009 Doble debut part? That’s what I mean. Spots have a certain timeless quality that both proposes new tricks to be done while simultaneously promising the possibility of repeated experience through doing old tricks there. I do wonder if this particular Lyonnais banked pit resonates with Coillard in that way: as a spot that meant one thing to him as an adolescent ripper and another thing to him as a seasoned vet. And do these different meanings have anything to do with how we read them in time?
Ride-on 50-50 to 5-0, Lyon
The story of the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) offers a parallel way to think through these issues. The spirit of the age of his generation was one that not only marked its distinction from what had come before, what they called “Gothic” (non-Italian, mediaeval) art and the Classical (Greco-Roman) art of the ancients. Renaissance art was about self-consciously reconstituting the style of the ancients with the imperatives of the day, which focused upon the amassment of power. As a pupil and soon a master of drawing and tempera painting, Botticelli (a nickname meaning little bottle) distinguished himself from his master through the graceful precision of his line, which at the time read as a faithful rendering of naturalistic qualities. His La Primavera or Birth of Venus are hallmarks of Renaissance painting, fusing the past and present into a novel form that reflects a certain attitude towards time. Botticelli and his colleagues considered their contemporaneity, in fact, as a new attitude towards the past, a history to which they were no longer a part. Through political upheavals and his own spiritual intensity, Botticelli’s later work became deliberately archaic: abandoning the naturalistic order and calm serenity for a dream-like proto-surrealism that had more to do with inner vision than outer transcription. As Botticelli aged, he moved away from the rigid lockstep of stylistic progress through time, instead eddying back into subjectivity.
The older we get, the more nutritious these eddies in skateboarding become. All past experience, whether good or shit, can be nutrient-rich fundament for how we skate today.
Taildrop, San Sebastian
We encounter the most recent image of Coillard skateboarding alongside his earliest footage. This adds to his presence, and pushes back against the idea that there needs to be extra shit in that negative space. Things can simply stand on their own. The area between them only serves to define the outline of the things we can see. In the same way that the skinnier pants of 2013 offered a different shape to movement, how we skate defines a different attitude towards time.
If all of this sounds too over-determined and opaque, let me make it clear. To think of Adrien Coillard coming back from somewhere is to imagine a place and a time which do not exist. We don’t know where he was in that meantime, and that’s okay. He weathered the era of vaunted hammer hubba spots and has returned to skate some familiar banks. Skateboarding is in a different place, so are we, Adrien included. If measuring one’s skateboarding in time and not progress doesn’t offer much meaning, let me propose this: skateboarding is only evidence of life lived at its most intense. Good skate photography captures that moment, the click of the shutter and the full extension of the trick acting in harmony with our own regard. There’s nothing to come back from, because it’s always there, just that. And it always will be.
