ART; Home Team Advantage

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
Published: February 15, 2004

THE schoolyard, as every child knows, is a Darwinian jungle. Before the age of 10, we know who runs faster, who’s stronger and tougher, who can throw, catch, hit or kick a ball, jump rope and ice skate, and who is a hopeless klutz. By high school, you either qualify as a jock or not. Thereafter it’s one of the lesser categories of social destiny, like geek or slut.

Considering that athletic prowess — or the lack of it — can brand us for life as indelibly as any religious, racial or sexual marker, it’s surprising that more artists in the 80′s and 90′s didn’t see sports as a vehicle to explore their preoccupations with group identity, adolescent fantasy, the society of the spectacle, the performing self and the politics of the body.

The artists who have grasped this potential — from Matthew Barney and Tracey Moffat to Eric Fischl and Paul Pfeiffer — don’t yet make up a coherent or surging movement. Photographers are more likely than others to explore these themes; witness Collier Schorr’s current show of young wrestlers at the 303 Gallery in Chelsea, Brian Finke’s recent book on high school cheerleaders and football players, and Catherine Opie’s portraits of surfers in the forthcoming Whitney Biennial. But enough work in all media has been made around these ideas that the invention of a new curatorial category called jock art may soon be necessary.

In particular, the ”otherness” of athletes, a group with its own dress and behavior codes, has interested numerous artists in recent years. Surfers have received much of this attention, resulting in the 2002 exhibition ”Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing” at the Laguna Beach Art Museum in California. Ms. Opie’s portraits of these longtime California outsiders ride this wave. So do Mark Wyse’s surfers sitting dreamily on their boards in the middle of the ocean, which were shown at Wallspace in Chelsea last year.

Ms. Moffat has trained her camera on the swimsuit set in her native Australia and made both photographs and videos about the camaraderie of their lives at the beach. But her most compelling series on a jock theme remains ”Fourth,” images of female athletes at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games who had just lost out on the top three places in their event. Exhibited in 2001 at the Paul Morris Gallery in Chelsea, they are altered photographs, leeched of color and printed on canvas.

Like Ms. Schorr, whose high school wresters grapple with one another innocent of any homoerotic message in their actions, Ms. Moffat focuses on displays of physical affection between people of the same sex. Such body language is public conduct entirely acceptable within the code of sports, even on television, but still often suspect outside that arena. In Ms. Moffat’s touching images of women who have trained for years and won nothing for their efforts, personal defeat and generosity of spirit seem to go hand in hand.

If athletes have traditionally been seen as fitting subjects for any sort of visual representation, it has been by illustrators and photojournalists. But contests of brawn and nerve never lost their taint as blood-soaked distractions for the hoi polloi. So to celebrate this heritage, even when it derives from the Greek Olympics more than the Roman coliseum, was a risky endeavor for 20th-century aspirants to ”high art.”

The emergence in the 60′s and 70′s of video and performance moved the human figure squarely back into the center of artistic practice after decades of absence from avant-garde concerns. Body building was elevated by some into an art in itself and received tributes from Robert Mapplethorpe in his photographs of the sinewy Lisa Lyons, and from the Whitney Museum, which in 1976 mounted the show ”Articulate Muscle.” This exhibition, featuring photographs, films and a live performance by the man who 27 years later would become the governor of California, effectively announced — as did other shows of the time — that the old ”high” and ”low” art hierarchy had collapsed.

Any number of works of the period openly celebrated the physicality of making art, including Richard Serra’s classic ”Splashing,” a 1968 performance piece in which he threw molten lead into a wall corner to make a cast sculpture. But Gary Hill’s video installation ”Crux” deserves pride of place in any jock art show. In this brilliant work, developed between 1983 and 1987 and seen here most recently in his 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim in SoHo, he strapped five tiny cameras to his head, wrists and ankles and scaled the face of a cliff.

LURCHING images of his movements were projected on five monitors arrayed like a crucifix on the wall while the sounds of his exertion — grunting and panting — were broadcast through five speakers. A cerebral study of the body disembodied, fragmented into discontinuous electronic parts within a sculptural framework, ”Crux” is also a sensual experience, a demonstration of strength and proof that athletes — like Mr. Hill, a former surfer and rock climber — don’t have to be dumb.

”A lot of video in the 70′s, by Vito Acconci especially, was about the body’s vulnerability,” said Chrissie Iles, curator of film and video at the Whitney. ”But sculpture at the time was always a guy thing. Men welded. Men had muscles.” Mr. Hill’s work, along with that of Mr. Barney, she said, ”introduces the idea that the body is both material and immaterial.’

Indeed, no artist has more imaginatively probed and stretched what might be called a jock aesthetic than Mr. Barney. His startling 1991 debut at Regan Projects in Los Angeles and the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York made numerous explicit and cryptic references to organized sports. A weight-lifting bench made of frozen petroleum jelly, a video of himself dressed only in a jock strap and hanging from the ceiling of the gallery, and wrestling mats throughout the rooms imparted to these art spaces the creepy atmosphere of a gymnasium for mutants. (As a Yale art student in the late 80′s, he staged many of his performances in the school’s athletic facilities)

Mr. Barney’s blown-up photographs of Jim Otto, the former Oakland Raiders center who wore 00 on his jersey and was voted into the Hall of Fame for his iron-man endurance (he played in more than 220 games) also adorned the gallery walls. As a high school football player growing up in northern California, Mr. Barney idolized Mr. Otto and has used a fictionalized version of him as an archetype of masochistic toughness in the ”Cremaster” film cycle, which played last year at the Guggenheim Museum.

The unacknowledged or suppressed sexuality of men’s sports are recurring themes in Mr. Barney’s work. He is not shy about exploring the homoerotic echoes of professional football, which, if mentioned on a Super Bowl broadcast, would inspire a louder furor than Janet Jackson’s breast. Mr. Otto played a position that required another man, the quarterback, to put his hands between Mr. Otto’s legs on every offensive play. The 00 on his front and back represent in Mr. Barney’s mind the twin orifices of mouth and anus, a polymorphously perverse association that links Mr. Otto to dozens of other creatures in the ”Cremaster” mythology. What artist or filmmaker except Mr. Barney has ever credited N.F.L. highlight reels as a major influence?

Paul Pfeiffer’s videos of professional athletes take a cynical view of the sport’s arena. In ”Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon),” completed in 1999 and one of the standouts of the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Mr. Pfeiffer isolated a few seconds of the basketball forward Larry Johnson, a former New York Knick, as he was exulting on the court. Edited in rapid forward and backward motion, and projected on a tiny digital screen, the star athlete appears shrunken, trapped by the technology — in this case, television, whence the clip originated — that packages him for the public.

At the same time, Mr. Pfeiffer has manipulated these images, turning a celebratory yell into spasms of rage or pain and contorting a black man’s face and body so that he resembles a frightening beast: King Kong.

Along with the hot-button issue of sports and race, and the ambiguous relationship between players and spectators, Mr. Pfeiffer has addressed the genetic freakishness increasingly required of those who strive to excel at the highest levels in football or basketball.

For his macabre still-life ”Memento Mori” from 1998, he arranged 30 real and synthetic flies in a specimen box and pasted paper cutout heads of the 1997-98 Most Valuable Players from each of the 30 N.B.A. teams on their bodies. It’s like a Joseph Cornell box executed by a teenage David Cronenberg. But with young players growing bigger and faster every year, and with so much money to be won instantly when a prodigy from a poor family turns pro, the temptation to create model athletes — to breed them like fruit flies for special traits — no longer seems like science fiction.

If the metaphors of physical transformation in Mr. Barney’s work about sports are ultimately organic, self-fulfilling and benign, they have a sinister tinge in Mr. Pfeiffer’s. For him the ownership of the performing body by corporations and the choreographed flights of the ubiquitous pitchman Michael Jordan (”his reach defines the meaning of community in the television age,” Mr. Pfeiffer has written) recalls the sterility of ”Brave New World.”

IT’S not hard to imagine a jock art exhibition that would begin with the baseball players and rowers of Thomas Eakins, the club fighters of George Bellows, and the hunters and fishermen of Winslow Homer and conclude with work by many of these less traditional artists. Within the documentary photography tradition, Lee Friedlander’s 1998 series on the astonishing track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee concentrates on her rubbery, almost liquid physique, while Brian Finke’s smart and sometimes hilarious book ”2-4-6-8: American Cheerleaders and Football Players” offers a privileged tour inside the often closed society of high school sports.

The 20-something generation of men who spent their youth on sports-video games, whose sales have outstripped Hollywood videos, will no doubt soon be making art works — if they aren’t already — about them. (The Whitney Biennial will feature a video game by the Velvet Strike Team in which the player shoots peace signs instead of bullets.) If more artists have not embraced athletic themes, that may be because so many of them in their youth felt oppressed by this socially dominant culture. Professional sports teams compete with — and pretty reliably beat out — art museums for public dollars and glory. In prestige and income top athletes, not top artists, rank with corporation presidents, Wall Street arbitragers, movie and music stars.

But one of the virtues of art since the 60′s is that anything can be material for a work. If nothing else, the opportunity for revenge against these jocks and professional athletes and their looming shadows would seem too inviting to ignore.

Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

From The New York Times