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There have always been beggars and flâneurs. Modern cities spawned them and banished them. They don't produce anything, they simply occupy space and differ from other city dwellers in their speed; compared with the bustling passers-by and the hurrying workers they move in slow motion. In a time before cars dominated our cities, children and young people played outdoors in streets and lanes. Soon they were transferred into playgrounds and sporting fields, which were then made desolate when funding was withdrawn, or when parks were privatised and turned into advertising space. In the course of the last four decades cities have been covered in concrete in order to speed up product flow and consumption. There has been a merciless process of optimisation and displacement. Still there are ongoing attempts to re-conquer urban space and to use it in a self-determined fashion. A more recent example of this are street climbers, free runners and practitioners of Parkour - extreme physical disciplines that engage with the urban environment and which are documented on the video sharing portal YouTube.
 
The development of the skateboard, of rollerblades, BMX bikes, street ball and breakdance, can be understood against this background: as a gesture of reclaiming public urban space - although, taking into consideration the actual situation, there is no reason to idealise the re-conquest. The last forty years have seen street culture infiltrate and influence magazines, fashion, film and music; and it has found its way into public institutions such as museums, universities, or galleries.  Just like pop culture, street culture thrives on live action and vitality, and both tend to dissolve in the process of being documented and institutionalized. To prevent self-reflection turning into self-dissolution, pop culture developed its own style of writing, which has now grown a bit long in the tooth. On the visual level, the achievements of experimental cinema were co-opted, perfected and commercialised by MTV: fast paced, loose hand-held camerawork, extreme camera angles and seduction through trash aesthetic.

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In Calligraphy and slowburn, 2006, Gladwell complicates the setting. Jeong Kyu-tae, a BMX trick rider, presents himself not outdoors in an urban environment, but in a museum, in front of a calligraphy wall. The rider calmly mounts his bike, finds his balance, goes up into some sort of handstand and then returns to the floor. As in Storm sequence, Calligraphy and slowburn takes the performer out of his usual context to isolate him in an unfamiliar surrounding. The film makes us realise that we are watching a language and its visualisation: the movements performed by Jeong Kyu-tae are like drawings; they are signs which on first glance appear just as abstract as the calligraphy in the background. In both cases, we have to learn a language which is the result of precise and controlled movements. By establishing an analogy between BMX acrobatics, sign and drawing, Gladwell connects in a light and laconic way traditions and cultures which seemed impossible to bring together. Double linework, 2000, used a similar approach: a double projection shows a skateboarder from above, running along the white line in the centre of a road. Double linework appropriates the international system of road line marking with ease and concentration, and transforms it into a global drawing.

All the films mentioned here are based on formal rigour. They focus on one single location, actor and moment, they choose a fixed camera angle, and avoid any tricks such as zooms and fast cuts. Gladwell's concentration is equal to the performer's total concentration on his or her act. By doing so, these films make comprehensible the core and the ambiguity of street culture: its search for presence through total immersion and its attempt to re-conquer urban space by getting lost.

 
Shaun Gladwell is represented by Sherman Galleries, Sydney.
 
 
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the article in full in the June 2007 issue of Art & Australia.