The Santa Cruz skating scene and the greater counterculture were bound to be co-opted by corporations, yet still it feels sad that there used to be times when you could alienate yourself from society by simply hanging out with other kids who don’t fit in. Capitalism has a way of eventually swallowing everything, but we desperately cling to those few things that seem like they’re not for sale.
Artists have been resourceful in addressing the complex and often destructive relationship between art and commerce; however, my representation of the battle between pure authentic artistic expression on one hand and soulless draining financial concerns on another is over-simple. A lot of ’70s illustrators were willing to take up irreverent attitudes towards making commercial art while also dealing with its contradictions.
No single artist better embodies this period than Jim Phillips, whose career took off once he started working as sole art director at NHS Inc., a sports equipment distributor focused mainly on the youth market but also increasingly enmeshed with Santa Cruz’s growing skateboarding and surfing subcultures.
He found a way both to express himself artistically in an unforgiving professional setting and make genuine connections with fellow skaters; his life story is told in Art and Life: The Story of Jim Phillips (2024), which paints an affectionately loose portrait of an epochal moment in hippie history. As a talking head, Phillips is warm and charismatic always ready with a funny story but also able to speak thoughtfully about how 1970s social conditions affected him as an artist.
The movie’s easygoing structure lets it hop nimbly from one shaggy dog tale to another without feeling like mere hagiography. Director John Makens wisely keeps his sights trained just narrow enough that we can start to see what made Phillips tick as an artist without losing all sense of direction in trying to grapple with such a giant, overwhelming subject.
There’s a danger, when dealing with material of this magnitude, that one will end up producing nothing but a Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1968) for the internet era. In concentrating on the specifics of Phillips’s life story and professional triumphs, though, Makens finds a microcosm that hints at larger narratives. It’s a smart way to tread well-covered ground.
There’s also something incredibly touching about the documentary’s exuberant unpacking of the Santa Cruz logo what has come to be seen as Phillips’s masterpiece. This movie asks us to think about that iconic piece of branding as just one part of many within his larger body of work; we get a better sense of how it came about and what an artist goes through when challenged to keep going after reaching some kind of creative zenith.
You will recognize lots of this stuff if you’ve watched a lot of documentaries about how art is made, but Makens’s version of that idea is bigger than Jeff Koons: A Private Portrait (2023) or whatever. He doesn’t dig up anything new, necessarily, but in this case the fun really is in the getting there.
Mostly though, this one’s for young artists who are already fans of Phillips’ work. But hey if you’re not already way deep into Santa Cruz’s underground scene, I’d still say it’s worth seeking out. It has an almost global kind of appeal that speaks to our fundamental human need to find connection within larger communities. The golden era of Santa Cruz skate and surf may have come and gone, but this film offers a bittersweet and clear-eyed look at what those days might have been like.
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