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ED TEMPLETON
By Scott IndrisekPhotos By Adam Wallacavage
Southern California native Ed Templeton is a study in contradictions. He’s a non-smoking, teetotaling, vegan “hippie who hates hippies,” and a former pro skateboarding prodigy who went on to launch a fine-art career. He’s one half of that ultimate modern anomaly-the happily married couple-and is currently an editor for ANP, a free-of-charge, free-of-advertising art magazine. Templeton’s iconic status is safely assured; the only problem might be in deciding where to pencil in his legacy.
Templeton grew up in Orange County, skating from the age of 13 and helping to refine the future of the sport. “[Around 1985] was one of the peaks of skateboarding in the cyclical nature of how it’s developed,” he says. “It seemed really short-we were completely un-sponsored in ‘85; then in 1990 I turned pro.” Templeton’s early skate fame gave him a forum to discuss issues like racism and homophobia that weren’t getting much play among the Thrasher set. It also gave him free reign to lead skateboarding away from the halfpipe and into the terrain of the real world, though he’s predictably modest about his pioneering role. “People like Jason Lee, Ray Barbee, Jeremy Klein, and myself were taking freestyle tricks and going down stairs with them, skating rails, banks, and anything that suburban architecture laid in front of us. I almost invented a bunch of tricks, but you never really know who did it first. When I’m done I will be forgotten. History is harsh.”
The mid-’90s would turn a 20-something Templeton into a businessman and an artist, a kind of unwitting archetype for a new Renaissance man of street culture. He launched Toy Machine Bloodsucking Skateboard Company in 1993, splashing the signature decks with his own cartoonishly demented characters. Inspired by surf/skate photographer and painter Thomas Campbell, Templeton decided to submit samples of his fine artwork to the legendary Alleged Gallery, helmed by Aaron Rose in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “I was mainly a skateboarder who was interested in painting and doing it completely on the side, and then it kind of blossomed from there,” he explains.
Templeton began experimenting with photography in 1995, once again finding himself on the vanguard of a new cutting edge: the mix of social documentary and personal expression, exemplified by precursors like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, which would come to define a certain moment in the late 20th century. “I realized I was missing out on all this great subject matter that I was living around,” says Templeton, whose skating career sent him across the world for contests and expos. He soon branched out from shooting the insular scene, and began turning his camera on the minutiae of his daily existence. “Every free moment, I’m walking around the streets shooting photos of life in general-but I don’t stop there, I keep going, into my own house. I study a lot of photography books, so that I feel I can build from that point and make it my own, and avoid the idea of ‘Why the fuck is this guy shooting his life, and who gives a fuck?’” Most notorious are the candid nude shots of his wife, Deanna, which Templeton regrettably notes receive an undue amount of attention. It’s not titillation or exploitation though, but rather the natural end result of collapsing life and art, of making them into one singular entity. Deanna Templeton naked, railslides, teenagers smoking, Parisian street scenes - they’re all just part of Ed’s photographic record.
Templeton’s growing oeuvre of paintings and photographs were showcased in 2004’s momentous “Beautiful Losers” group show. This seminal exposition, which also included work by Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee, and a slew of others, brought together a new creative vanguard whose visual lexicon left an immediate mark on the culture. Templeton is reluctant to call it a movement: “This is an organic thing Ð countless artists, photographers, and designers that grew up and developed at the same exact time.” But in many ways, “Beautiful Losers” does define a group sensibility, one that draws from youth and street culture in a way that traditional gallery work rarely does.
The corporate world is never far behind the zeitgeist, and Templeton’s aware of the pitfalls. “I think most of the stuff I do is kind of thorny, and not in danger of being co-opted by Mountain Dew or Taco Bell or something,” he says. “The thing I dislike is art that seems to have no craft-it’s just a clever idea, and you have to have gone to years of art school to understand why it means anything. A fabricated blue cube mounted on a wall says nothing to me, but a painting made by hand about a subject dear to the artist says a lot more. Seriously documenting a certain time or group of people - that has a chance of going down in history as interesting. When I decide to put a photo in a book, I’m looking at it very critically and thinking, Will this last?”
As for his own legacy, the mark he’ll leave, and his induction into the pantheon of Cultural Icons? “It’s great! Just drag me and let go, and I disappear in a poof of smoke.”