Garret McNamara

[hellwoman]

Garret McNamara


http://www.garrettmcnamara.com/

[hellwoman]

VISITING ARTIST DEPT.
OBJETS
Issue of 2007-02-05
Posted 2007-01-29


Last fall, Marc Newson designed a surfboard for Garrett McNamara, the rex of big-wave tow-surfing. McNamara took the board—a silvery projectile, fashioned from hollow nickel—to Tahiti, wiped out at Teahupo’o, and considered it a goner. “The next day, driving to the airport,” Newson said recently, “he spotted a massive Polynesian dude with this shiny piece of space junk under his arm.” The board, it turned out, had washed up fifteen miles down the beach. Reclaimed, with a few dings and a fluorescent-pink baggage tag still attached, it was being readied, the other day, as part of an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, the first in New York of Newson’s work.

The show, which runs until March, marks a departure for Gagosian, in that it showcases a designer rather than an artist (though this traditional distinction is becoming increasingly moot). Purists may fret that the gift shop is taking over the museum, but enterprising dealers, like race-car drivers, are happy to draft on the momentum: just across West Twenty-fourth Street, for example, Sebastian + Barquet is offering a Lockheed Lounge—Newson’s rather unloungeable riveted steel chair from 1986—for two and a half million dollars. Over at Gagosian, an unused edition of the nickel surfboard will go for around a hundred thousand. Standing near a pile of work gloves and tape measures, three days before the opening, Newson surveyed the room. It was beginning to fill up with sleek furniture. “Working, it sort of feels like you’re in the Army half the time,” he said. (His clients have included Nike, Ford, Dom Pérignon, and Qantas Airways.) “These projects are what I do when no one’s breathing down my neck.”

Newson, a rough-and-tumble party boy from Sydney, is forty-three. He spent his pre-adolescent years in South Korea, trained as a jeweller and sculptor, and landed, for a spell, in Tokyo. His first break came by chance, when his girlfriend and the entrepreneur Teruo Kurosaki shared an umbrella. In red socks, fringed suède moccasins, and—from his G-Star clothing line—a hoodie printed with a photograph of the interior of a Concorde and a pair of spent cargo pants (“I’m going to have to have them surgically removed soon”), Newson posed a contradiction: a mellow nomad fuelled by a flinty testosteronal intensity. “My inspiration is anger,” he said. “Seeing things and getting pissed off and just going, ‘It’s so awful. Why does it have to be like that?’ ” A frequent trigger of his ire is mobile phones. “At best, they’re O.K. At worst, they’re despicable. They all just deserve to go down in flames!”

Newson has designed a phone, called Talby, after a character in the science-fiction movie “Dark Star.” As thin as a matchbook and resembling a remote control, it is available only in Japan. Here, Newson makes do with a Samsung. Fiddling with its buttons, he offered the opinion that phones ought to be put on cameras instead of cameras on phones. “This thing’s going through the window in a month,” he said.

Squatting on his haunches, he stuck his head beneath a table. It was glossy and brown; extruding from the underside was a stylized fin that recalled the keel of a boat. Newson explained that the piece was made from “a precursor to fibreglass” called Micarta, of which he is using one of the world’s last remaining stockpiles. “I could see it bowing in the middle,” he said, adjusting the top, “so I have to get it completely flat.” A couple of workmen prepared to move the table, which costs a hundred and ninety thousand dollars, onto a platform. “Don’t grab it from the ends,” Newson said. They placed it next to a Micarta desk, which had shallow, curvy indentations on top, like a tray for a Jetson’s TV dinner.

David Adjaye, the architect, strolled in for an early peek. He stopped and stared at a blocky object, with honeycombed holes—it looked like a large metallic loofah. Its official name is Random Pak Chair, but Newson calls it “the ultimate science project.”

Newson shook Adjaye’s hand and began to recount how he made the piece. “It would take almost a day to explain,” he said. “We grew it in a tank, in an electrolytic bath. It was really almost obnoxious.” Newson is taken seriously enough, by people who take these things seriously, that the show’s organizer refers to this chair as “the Random Pak work.”

Adjaye drifted out of the gallery, to be replaced by other modish congratulators. “We met in Miami at, like, two o’clock in the morning,” one woman said, greeting Newson. They compared notes on jet lag. And on: “Where is your main house?” “Which arrondissement?” “Well, Miuccia is an old Communist.”

Later, Newson admitted that he wasn’t really all that jet-lagged; he was just trying to make conversation. His idea of a perfect object, he said, is an egg.



The New Yorker : talk : content

[hellwoman]

No Fear Team Rider Garrett McNamara Wins XXL Monster Paddle Award

Surfersvillage Global Surf News, 16 April, 2007 : - - On Friday evening, April 13, 2007 and a place in Orange County, California called The Grove, the 2007 BILLABONG XXL GLOBAL BIG WAVE AWARDS took place in the epicenter of the American surf industry (make that global surfing industry).

With a few thousand surf enthusiasts present in the big hall, all of them there to hoot, holler and cheer for the surfers who had been nominated to potentially win Billabong XXX Global Big Wave Awards, it was a night to remember.

Especially for a surfer named Garrett McNamara, because when one envelope in particular was torn open, a piece of paper removed from it, and the contents of that piece of paper read aloud over a microphone, it was declared that Garrett McNamara had won the Monster Paddle Award.

McNamara, of Haleiwa, Hawaii, USA was given a big oversize, make believe check for $15,000, his reward for catching, riding, and surviving a Godzilla-like wave at Maverick’s on December 14, 2006. (McNamara also won Surfline Men’s Best Overall Performance Award for the deed).

Later that evening in The Grove, Garrett McNamara explained the wave that won him the XXL awards. “That day — December 14 — was perfect and glassy and the waves were at about 18-to-20 feet,” he explained. “So I see this one perfect wave coming, and think to myself, should I turn around? I thought, not yet. It was one of those glossy California waves and I wasn’t sure.

So the wave got right up on me, I turned around and shoved the tail in. The board stuck immediately and I made the drop. It felt perfect — like cutting butter with a hot knife. I was upside down and backwards, but in control. I felt great. I got to the bottom and looked up and wanted to try and make the turn, but I could see it was all about to come down on me.

I took a pounding, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. When Peter Mel came up and grabbed me on his jet ski, he was just freaking out. He was saying, ‘Oh my God! That was the biggest wave ever paddled into here! No, that was the biggest wave anyone has ever paddled into anywhere! That’s it, man! You’re going to win every award there is!’ I guess he was right!”

www.nofear.com