A while back there was all this controversy over whether surfing was a sport or an art, and for a time, it really put a line down the middle of surfing. Well it flashes on me that in surfing, art equals style…Style as an external, physical equivalent of an internal, non-physical reality. In other words, style is the difference between surfers. – Drew Kampion1
The late 1960s and early 1970s was a turbulent period in surfing history when involvement and expression on the wave vied with competition. Surfing was described as a play activity, a lifestyle and, by some, an art form. The last idea was fuelled by rhetoric in magazines and films which preached a message of surfing as a lifestyle through which one might drop out, travel and be an artist on the wave. The notion of surfing as art echoes a long-standing debate in philosophy about the place of creativity in sport and games. There are a number of ways activities can be classified, ranging from playful to spiritual, from competitive to sporting.2 However, the main arguments surrounding sports as art can be understood in the following four ways: sport is neither artistic nor aesthetic; sport is quasi-aesthetic and shares some qualities with art; sport possesses some aesthetic qualities but is not art; sport is performance art akin to dance. In the last case, the aesthetic possibilities of surfing might involve the bodily dimension, creativity, grace, speed and expressive possibilities. As Durward argued, ‘…Art is by definition self-expression. In a performing art, the artist is physically involved in that self-expression…A surfer is a performing artist; his medium is the wave.’3 The platform of expressions and involvement therefore formed the basis of the argument for surfing as art, an issue which was also informed by hippie values in this era.
It is possible to argue that surfing values differ from culture to culture. Indeed, these values can all be applied to surfing at different socio-historic points in its development. In simplistic terms, the values depend upon where a particular type of surfing is located in the sports/games/play continuum in any particular era. A distinction made between sport and art was that although some sports are similar to dance, they are sports by virtue of their competitive element. Leaving aside the view that this idea proposes dance in competition cannot be described as art, one possible argument for surfing as art in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that in this era surfing tended to be regarded more as play. Surfers, in general, favoured an anti-contest ethos. This was an approach influenced by the hippie countercultural values embraced by many surfers during the 1960s and into the 1970s. Hippie values were encouraged by changes in surf technique and technology towards the mid to late 1960s, changes which affected surfing values and philosophy.
The ‘surfing as art’ debate was fuelled by two important aspects of surfing in this era, first in surfing media such as magazines and films, second by new surfboard technology and the revolution of the shortboard. The shortboard revolution ushered in an era in which the boards changed dramatically from 12–14 feet in length to 9 feet 4 inches and less. As Gross notes, ‘…between 1967 and 1969, virtually 100% of the active, worldwide surfing community abandoned long boarding in favour of the short board. To put that into perspective, imagine if everything you saw in the water today – short boards, long boards, body boards, everything – was gone in two years, replaced by something you hadn’t yet imagined.’4 Shortboards came at just the right time when surfing values were beginning to move away from showy hotdogging towards a more introspective, spiritual notion of surfing in which one surfed for the ‘good of one’s soul’. Shortboards changed surfing values and performance because they enabled better manoeuvrability and tube riding. The tube also inspired a new aesthetic sensibility in surfers, and this was expressed in surfing magazines and films. The roots of this new aesthetic were in hippie countercultural values. Hippie values, according to Brake, tend to be middle class in origin and stress qualities such as individualism, self-growth, the exploration of alternative lifestyles, ‘doing your own thing’ and creativity.5 These values were expressed in surfing in the late 1960s and early 1970s in surfing magazines and films.
Surfing magazines and films were produced regularly from the early 1960s and they were frequently produced by the same individuals. The first major surf film producer, Bud Browne, spliced together footage of his surf trips to Hawaii in the early 1950s and, as Warshaw observed, ‘…for 90 minutes Browne had defied the cliché, becoming the host with vacation pictures that other people actually wanted to see.’ 6 Browne established the model for film production, distribution and exhibition through a four wall chain of surf clubs and high school halls. He screened the silent films and added his own commentary and music. Other surfers such as Bruce Brown and Greg Noll followed Browne’s example, Bruce Brown famously producing The Endless Summer (1964) to counter surfsploitation Hollywood dross of the early 1960s.
One other film producer, John Severson, an art teacher, produced a 32-page press pack to promote his film Surf Fever (1961). Severson quickly realised that here was an opportunity for transmedia promotion using the newsletter to advertise his films. The press pack evolved into Surfer magazine, which was to be influential in promoting American surfing values and a nomadic lifestyle throughout the western world. Film producers were often involved in the production of magazines, either as contributors or editors: Bob Evans, a prolific filmmaker, also published Surfing International in the early 1960s; Tracks, first published in 1970, was intended by John Witzig, Alby Falzon and Dave Elphick to promote their film production.
Thus the roots of magazines and films were bound together, and it is no surprise that the values expressed in both media were identical. However, there was a caveat: although from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s the idea of surfing as art and the avant garde was expressed in films and magazines, it was channelled through national values. These values formed the basis for differing American and Australian attitudes towards surfing. An analysis of three magazines – Surfer and Surfing from America and Tracks from Australia – reveals that the American (mainly Californian) media tended to stress the romance of the wave and downplay the hardships and dangers of surfing whereas the Australian media tended to emphasise more realistic concerns of the surfer lifestyle including healthy eating and meditation. These differing values evolved from the differing roots of surfing in both countries. American surfing tended to develop from tourist and capitalist discourses and was affected by American national myths of the frontier7. Australian surfing developed from a mixture of middle class beach cultures and the activities of the Surf Life Saving Association (SLSA) which were informed by nationalist, ethnic and pathological discourses.8 Nevertheless Surfer and Tracks included similar types of writing from poetry to short stories. Where Surfer and Surfing were printed on glossy paper, Tracks attempted to occupy a student/outsider aesthetic with production on newsprint and no adverts in early issues. In addition to surfing the articles covered politics, cookery and yoga, in short, a guide to living the good life. Surfers in this era described their type of surfing as ‘country soul’ with its emphasis on a rural lifestyle, an idyll so beautifully evoked in Alby Falzon and Dave Elphick’s Morning of the Earth (1972). The film studied a small community of five to six families who had returned to the land to live and work on farms and, between work, to surf. Like the rhetoric in Tracks, the film was a model of the ideal surfing lifestyle in which nature and the body were in harmony on land and in the sea. Harmony in the sea revolved around the surfer’s creativity and involvement with the wave. However, it was not the Malibu medium wave which inspired the surfer. It was the tube.
Much of the surfing imagery and literature in this era revolved around the tube, the ‘holy grail’ of surfing. The experience of tube riding evoked feelings of spirituality, involvement, experimentation and creativity on the wave, thanks to greater maneouvrability and speed afforded by shortboards. In surf rhetoric it was inferred that shortboards allowed surfers to interact with the wave whereas the long board came between the surfer and involvement with the sea. In his commentary while shaping his board in The Crystal Voyager, for instance, surf guru George Greenough noted, ‘The surfboards in the early sixties were just crude lumps that provided water stability but were difficult to manoeuvre.’ Indeed, Greenough, Bob McTavish and Nat Young promoted the philosophy of involvement with the wave from the mid 1960s. Instead of performing on the wave, involvement ‘was based on powerful turns in and round the curl’.9 Involvement and creativity on the wave inspired normally taciturn surfers to wax lyrical about the tube as an object of beauty in poetry, weird and wacky stories and psychedelic imagery in magazines. Rick Griffin, the resident artist for Surfer in this period, frequently used psychedelic imagery, most notably on the front cover of Surfer March 1969 which featured a highly stylised surfer riding acid waves.10 Griffin also drew a cartoon series entitled, ‘Tales from the Tube’ which reflected the output of underground comics art of the day. An area where American and Australian magazines crossed over was in poetry. ‘Green room writing’ appeared in surfing magazines from the later 1960s, most famously with (the foremost tube-rider in this era), Jock Sutherland making a religious connection by describing the inside of the tube as ‘The Pope’s Living Room’.11 A similar juxtaposition of spiritual enlightenment with danger is described in Aaberg’s article, ‘Invisible Tracks’, for Surfer in 1970:
Within a cavern of peace, a silent hissing, crystal shingles of green perfection, and you’re safe, but locked far and deep within the hole of danger.12
Green room writing was a consistent feature of surf magazines from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. Common themes expressed in the poetry and literature involved birth/ rebirth, and the spiritual aspects of the wave. This was often linked with altered states, birth, death, sex and spirituality the underpinning theme is time, specifically the linearity of time which begins and ends. Referring back to Aaberg’s original statement, the water is described as ‘crystal’, a descriptor used in the title of Alby Falzon’s film of 1973, The Crystal Voyager to describe the ocean. The notion of crystal is that of clarity of vision, prophecy and eternity and it may be argued that by riding the tube, a surfer may step outside time and experience ‘truth’.
Like surf magazines, surf films used experimental and avant garde techniques to express an aesthetic sensibility in surfing. They used methods such as bleaching out and slowing down shots, acid colours, all set to progressive rock soundtracks. Kampion describes surfing films of the late 1960s, early 1970s as ‘stoked paeans of organic bliss and tubular escape’.13 The titles of this sub-genre of surfing films describe the values of soul surfing and hippie culture; Cosmic Children (Hal Jepson), Evolution (Paul Witzig), Morning of the Earth (1972, Alby Falzon), Pacific Vibrations (1972, John Severson). The logline of the latter might apply to any of these films: An example of man in harmony with nature…A life that doesn’t emphasise materialism. Have a good time. The Natural Way. A witness of the Truth.’ In the spirit of their artistic pretensions soul surfing films were often exhibited in art colleges and arthouse cinemas.The link between art venues and soul surfing films is nowhere better expressed than in the work of George Greenough whose ‘fish eye’ footage, shot in the tube, was slowed down to evoke the psychotropic affect of tube riding.The 20 odd minute sequences were placed at the end of The Innermost Limits of Fun in the ‘Coming of the Dawn, and ‘Echoes’ in The Crystal Voyager. His film, The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1970) inspired the exhibit ‘To George Greenough from the Outside Looking In’ (1971) in Sydney’s Yellow House Artists’ ‘Spring Exhibition’.14 It depicted ‘a room painted to appear as if it was cut from rock, with furniture and objects painted to look like they were made of stone’.15 The doors open out onto Hokusai’s print of a tsunami. A piece of curved glass balanced on the curl of the wave ‘providing a fish eye’ view to evoke Greenough’s typical depiction of the wave curling over on itself.
Alby Falzon’s Morning of the Earth is also a useful example of a ‘pure’ surf film, as it gives an indication of the values underpinning surf culture in the early 1970s. Lewis notes that in Morning of the Earth: ‘The body is centralized; the film-maker creates his profound sense of nascence and purity through the deployment of lyrical imagery, violet filters, slow-motion sequences and the omnipresence of a Romantic and idyllic “earth”.’ It is precisely this romanticism which the film-maker invokes against the ‘other’ world of social conformity and control. Surfing is the condition of freedom and rebirth which extinguishes rational-national borders and differentiation that is not simply the purity of surf and surfing.16 Falzon’s aim in making Morning of the Earth was to produce a beautiful surfing movie. The film also showed surfers surfing the exotic and ‘virginal’ surf of Indonesia.
Many of the arthouse pretensions of Morning of the Earth carry over into Falzon and David Elphick’s The Crystal Voyager, the documentary about George Greenough. The final 23-minute ‘Echoes’ sequence, noted above, featured footage shot by Greenough inside the wave accompanied by the music of Pink Floyd. In effect it was a filmic translation and poetic evocation of green room writing in the magazines. Previews and reviews of The Crystal Voyager tended to be enthusiastic in both the surfing press and mainstream publications. Tracks devoted its December 1973 edition to The Crystal Voyager with articles and reviews of the film.In Cinema Papers Quarterly, Flaus noted, ‘Echoes is given special mention: If it were not for the extraordinary final passage, The Crystal Voyager might have claimed our respect, but scarcely our enthusiasm…With the first “ping” of Pink Floyd’s Echoes we are captive to the “lovely impulse” Shelley and Keats wrote of…We are immersed in the patterns, textures, colours of the watery curtain and music of the spheres.’17 The film grossed $120,000 in its initial Australian run. Through careful marketing by Elphick and with monetary support from the Australian Film Development Corporation, it was successfully shown at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and transferred to London’s West End. After its success in Cannes the film ran for three months in the West End of London. Tracks, ever sceptical about the ability of British audiences to understand surfing, ran a short tongue-in-cheek article suggesting that the British climate was so alien to the ‘sunlit hydra power, tanned healthy bodies and the Man-Nature union’ that it was inevitable the film would flop. As if to reinforce this notion Jameson described audience reactions to the film: ‘The screen gives way to Greenough’s voyeurism as the camera’s eye captures the inner regions of the surf-air-sunlight orgasm…A comment from over my right shoulder tells me somebody thought it was a bore’.18 However, Jameson did not account for the film making £100,000 profit in London in its four-month run.
Some surfers too did not think of surfing as art. A small but vocal minority surfaced in surf magazine rhetoric, mainly in letters to the editor from disgruntled surfers. In response to an article in Surfer proclaimingthe new shift in emphasis to involvement,19 an Australian surfer complained, ‘Total involvement, your own thing…this is just pretentiousness…start catering for surfers who enjoy surfing for what it is.’20
The link between art and sport is by no means a new one. As noted above, whether sport can be described as art is a continuing debate and one which it is difficult to address in a short piece such as this. My point is that the debate about whether surfing is art, sport, lifestyle, etc., rests upon its social and historical context. Although surfing in the late 1960s and early 1970s was proposed as possessing aesthetic qualities, these qualities were expressed in different ways dependent upon cultural contexts. Returning to Kampion’s assertion that surfing is style at the beginning of this article, in Surfer magazine it was based upon the creativity and involvement of the surfer’s interaction with the wave. This belief arose from and was supported by hippie countercultural values. American rhetoric emphasising freedom and individuality embraced a philosophy of brotherhood on the wave (a myth which ignored surf rage, localism and attacks on kneeboarders). American magazines and films expressed the artistic decision as a poetic search for adventure, questing for unknown waves through which the American frontier might be extended. Australian ‘country soul’ surfing, however tended to emphasise political issues such as ‘anarchism, anti-capitalism, individualism, anti-development, and ecology…’21 Despite these radical political ideas, Australian surfing values were predominantly based upon masculinity, lad culture and mateship. They were also underpinned by notions of professionalism and competition instilled from the ideology of the SLSA but also from Australia’s colonial status.22 In the 1970s, the Whitlam government with its strong sporting platform began the process of developing the sports infrastructure in Australia. Funding was offered to athletes to travel and to develop rules and competition standards. All of these factors resulted in Australian culture’s more practical and bullish attitude to sport and also surfing. In 1974 competition in Australia took a leap forward with the formation of the Australian Professional Surfing Association (APSA) solely for the aim of organising contests. The prize money won by surfers in these contests was crucial to their strong presence on the world surfing stage.23 A new breed of Ozzie upstarts – Ian Cairns, Michael Peterson and Wayne ‘Rabbit’ Bartholomew – stepped into the gap left when top surfers such as Nat Young dropped out of competitive surfing. Their aggressive ‘surf mongrel’ attitude to surfing, fiercely competitive spirit and commitment to their surfing lifestyles was signalled in the film, Free Ride. Surfing values evolved from play/art to pro/sport.
Although surfing films and magazines infused local surfing communities around the globe with notions of surfing as spiritual and as an art form, as noted above, not all of these messages were wholeheartedly accepted. Surfers tend to express their personal attitudes in their philosophy of surfing whether in their local contexts or as individuals. Surfing provides surfers with a range of lifestyle opportunities which have evolved, filtered through various national, global and historical contexts. This article has examined one such historical era in which surfing was promoted as art. The expression of art in surfing, however, was tempered by national and local contexts. Today, although surfers perform diverse values and identities, the influences of soul surfing can still be identified in the continuing debate on the aesthetics of surfing, the rural idyll and the search for that elusive ‘perfect’ wave. All of these can be traced back to the time between the early 1960s to the early 1980s when an elite of charismatic figures influenced and inscribed their values in the surfing media. Whether surfing is art or not is a debate that remains significant today with notions of surfing as ‘dancing’ and the rise of a new generation of soul surfers.
— Joan Ormrod
1 Drew Kampion (1969) ‘Style: A Common Man’s Look at Artistic Wholes’, Surfer, 10(1): 29.
2 The debate on different values encapsulated in various sports is fully discussed in Robert G. Osterhoudt (1991) The Philosophy of Sport: An Overview, Champaign, Illinois: Stipes Publishing Co. It is a debate which is too complex for an article of this length which focuses on the historical and cultural effects of the notion of surfing as art.
3 J. Durward (1970) ‘Surfing and the Artistic Decision’, Surfer, 11(2): 100–02.
4 George Gross (1998) ‘Moving Forward: A Greenough Scrapbook, 1960–1970’, Surfer’s Journal, 7(4), http:www.surfersjournal.com/greenough_vol/no.4/greenough.feature.htm.
5 Mike Brake (1990) Comparative Youth Culture: the Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain, and Canada, London: Routledge.
6 Matt Warshaw (1999) ‘Rough Cut: Surfing on Film’, The Australian Surfer’s Journal, 2(2): 10.
7 Joan Ormrod (2005) ‘Endless Summer (1964): Consuming Waves and Surfing the Frontier’, Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, 35(1): 39–51.
8 Douglas Booth (1991) ‘War off Water: The Australian Surf Life Saving Association and the Beach’, Sporting Traditions, 7(2): 135–62.
9 Matt Warshaw (2003) The Encyclopedia of Surfing, New York, London: Harcourt: 720.
10 A gallery of Surfer and other rare surf magazine covers can be found at Surfbooks.com: http://www.surfbooks.com/surfermagazines.htm.
11 Drew Kampion (1970) ‘In the Pope’s Living Room with Jock Sutherland’, Surfer, 11(6): 72.
12 Denny Aaberg (1970) ‘Invisible Tracks’, Surfer, 11(2): 77.
13 Drew Kampion (1998) Stoked. Koln: Evergreen: 112.
14 Albie Thoms (2000) Surfmovies, Australia: Shore Thing: 112.
15 Thoms, 2000: 112.
16 Jeff Lewis (1998) ‘Between the Lines: surf texts, prosthetics and everyday theory’, Social Semiotics, 8(1): 55–70.
17 John Flaus (1974) ‘Crystal Voyager’, Cinema Papers, July: 276.
18 Neil Jameson (1974) ‘No, George. They’re not ready for this!’, Tracks, December: 8.
19 Drew Kampion (1968) ‘The Super Short, Uptight, V-Bottom, Tube Carving Plastic Machines’, Surfer, 9(4): 40.
20 Peter Murphy (1969) Letter in Surfer, 10(1): 10.
21 Margaret Henderson (2001) ‘A Shifting Line Up: men, women, and Tracks surfing magazine’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 15(3): 321.
22 McDevitt, P. F. (2004) ‘May the Best Man Win’: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan.
23 Phil Jarratt (1977) ‘The Pros Get Organised’, Tracks, January: 33.
