Recycling Gonz – part 2

This is not my beautiful web site. This is not commentary on the art of Mark Gonzales. This is not a love song. Darn it all if I did’t already include recycling in the title the first time I posted something about the Gonz’ performance art fencing getup. This time is was going to be in reference to the fact that I’m doing a lot of housecleaning on the old hard drives of Skate and Annoy, and as a result you’ll be seeing a lot of less than fresh news. Yes, these items will likely have appeared elsewhere first. For instance, I just had a URL for the image of this Mark Gonzales action figure from Caught in the Crossfire, forwarded to me from MC. Caught in the Crossfire has no search feature so I couldn’t get the info. Eventually I tracked it to this undated post. It looks like they originally got it from Skate Daily (big surprise) and they have no search feature either. This is a disturbing trend. So in keeping with the post-modernist theory that it didn’t happen unless it is archived on Skate and Annoy, I bring you this Mike Leavitt hand carved Mark Gonzales action figure, limited to an edition of 10, from way back in 2006. I don’t care if you’ve seen it before, becasue you’ve never seen it in conjunction with a link to the original performance art that inspired it. An now I can move one more thing to the “finished” folder. If I had waited another year, the original event that inspired this action figure would be 10 years old. This is for the 20 year old skaters who obsess over the Gonz.

Mark Gonzales action figure, hand carved by Mike Leavitt.

Though Leavitt calls them action figures, with prices ranging from 4600 to $1000, I’m going to go out on a limb and call these sculptures. MC does a good job of rendering a 2D cast of characters on used skateboard decks. I’m sure you could acquire a custom one for a lot less than $600.

Mark Gonzales presented as a series of two dimensional still images captured at a rate of 24.7 images per second and sub-sampled to 15 frames per second in a manner that the human ocular sensors and brain process as continuous motion. Details.