To get this good, the videos seem to say, you have to be prepared to fail. Or, to put it in Dave Grohl’s terms:

Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy an old f****** drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they'll suck, too. And then they'll f******* start playing and they'll have the best time they've ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they'll become Nirvana.[1]

More than this, however, the bail tape marks failure as necessary. Not as a parergon, such as Pound’s evisceration of Eliot’s verse, or the outtake footage, but as part of the creative process itself. If anything, later ‘success’ is an after-thought.

But in skateboarding, the bail is a badge of pride: it is a notion of a trick hard-won, proof that one’s mastery is by no means effortless but markedly effortful. Even in specifically brand-expanding, commercial ventures such as the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater gaming series, the professionals include footage of failures.[1]

There are countless examples from even a cursory search online, but I chose those featured in Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater 2 quite simply because it is a joyful nostalgic artefact for me.

Considering ‘mistakes’ as neutral events is one thing, but the implicit dialectic remains untapped: what’s so special about getting things right? Christian Flores, upon successfully landing a trick that has taken heavy physical and emotional tool, throws away his board and walks off. Here we see the creative process at its purest: we are granted access to the entire journey, not as a stylised or edited narrative but as a human endeavour in which to participate. And here the tacit parallels to artistic research announce themselves, for the initial goal fades into what is experienced and discovered throughout the drive towards it. 

This study is not a singular entity nor can it ever really be considered complete. With any form of artistic research, experimentation, trial and (mostly) error form its backbone. I believe we can learn from skateboarding culture, here: we do not arrive with our theses fully formed, but inchoate at best. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge my many mistakes made on the road to the final output. None of my techniques, compositions, gigs – none of any part of my thesis appeared fully-formed, but had violent gestating periods. A lie through omission is still a lie. I hope to learn and demonstrate something through my love of skateboarding. Because failure requires faith in humanity, and must be at the heart of artistic research. So here are my bail tapes. Gnarly.

ON SKATEBOARDING AS ARTISTIC RESEARH

Here’s some fridge-magnet wisdom for you:

I’ve learnt so much from my mistakes, I think I’ll make another

A statement perhaps worn out by its sheer ubiquity, of unverifiable source yet commodified in innumerable ingenious forms (baby-grow, anyone?). When it comes to the creative process, however, this bon mot is, from the reader/listener/audience perspective, entirely glossed over.

I do not mean those who rely upon ‘mistakes’ within a creative process, to provoke the unexpected, galvanise progression or spark new ideas. Rather, I talk markedly of mistakes, things going wrong – perhaps badly – and interrupting the creative process, or the creative expression, entirely. Be that for audience or creator is unimportant. The subject here is not the potential to transform what is perceived as a mistake into opportunity, nor to transform ‘mistake’ into what Herbie Hancock calls ‘something that happened’, but to revel in something definitely going wrong. Because while it is immensely valuable to be able to nuance one’s perspective to identify ‘mistakes’ as neutral events, one cannot say that in life there are only neutral events. Mistakes happen. More magnet mantra.

You’re making the wrong mistakes[1]

Kelley’s phantom of Monk is somewhat closer to what I want to illuminate: some things definitely are wrong.

To my mind, and I welcome correction, the only creative art-form that truly celebrates mistakes, failures, is skateboarding. No other form of expression presents or documents its failure so proudly. Where are the poets’ bail videos? The musicians’ failed takes? Sure, we can see Eliot’s original draft of The Waste Land, but only replete with Pound’s copious corrections and even then only as a supplement to the canonical poem itself. We can hear Bonham swearing while recording ‘Fool in the Rain’, but that was never part of the product that we as listeners, as engagers with the art of Led Zeppelin, were meant to hear. Instead we are gifted the complete product and daren’t catch a glimpse at the hours of work that goes into it.[1] If we are, it becomes an exclusive, sneak peeks which are titillating by their very nature of being unintended for our viewership. Behind the scenes footage, or that cinematic outtake encapsulates this idea.