Ryan McGinley

This was the published group of 2004 Olympic Swim Team in the New York Times Magazine. There is also a slideshow of B-sides photos from the shoot that did not run here.

Rineke Dijkstra

Bull Fighters from Vila Franca de Xira and Montemor o Novo in Portugal

“…Often, one group will lead the artist in another direction, bringing her to an unlikely but related subject. For example, the images of new mothers led directly to the images of bullfighters. Says the artist: The matadors came out covered in blood and exhausted – very similar to the mothers…I did not intend to do the men like that, all macho and the women as mothers – it just evolved from the experience…women make this extreme physical effort…while the men search for it as a kind of adventure. But still, both are exhausting and life-threatening actions. Recently the artist has turned her attention to video and sound installations that incorporate images of teenagers responding to popular dance music.”

From “FOCUS: Rineke Dijkstra” Art Institute of Chicago

 

Gabriel Orozco

Atomists: Making Strides, 1996. Computer generated print

 Oval with Pendulum

Ping Pond Table

Games: Ping Pong, Billiards, and Chess

ART:21: “Ping Pond Table”—where did the idea for that work come from?

OROZCO: The “Ping Pond Table” is connected to this idea of a new space, a new possible space. When you have a normal ping pong game you have a net which is enough space between two spaces. But when you multiply that space by four, instead of two people playing you have four people playing in four tables. You open that space so the net is also open. And what you have there is a new space because it didn’t exist before. I’m thinking in a new game when I multiply by four the knights in the chessboard or when I made the pendulum and the billiard table. In this case I opened the ping pong—the net, that space in between two spaces—I opened it up. And I have a tri-dimensional space now in-between four spaces.

That is the space that I’m interested in, the in-between space. Even in photographs I think what is interesting is in between the photographer and the space, which is the same as the in-between of the photograph and the spectator. To activate that space. To activate means to fill it with meaning and connections so that we can think about it. We can connect with it and make it happen as a space and time in between things.

So in this case it’s the net, the limit and the border between two spaces. I opened that border and it became tri-dimensional, a space in itself. And that’s why I decided to make the pond. I could decide to make anything I wanted. It could be a rug or sand or nothing. But then I liked the idea because the shape of the table has to be round. It’s round because you have to move waiting for the bounce from three different tables, you have to move much more than in a normal ping pong table. I liked the idea of the pond and the lotus. If you want to think in a metaphorical sense of the lotus flower as the beginning of the universe, I think you can do that because it’s a new game. It’s a new space for a new way of playing with the universe, which is this game. I think every game is a universe in a way, or every game is an expression of how the universe works for different cultures. Ping pong is a game about the universe playing or is a game about how the universe is so arbitrary and how it’s constant.

ART:21: Is the lotus a symbol in this work, or is it wrong to think of it that way—of it having a specific cultural meaning?

OROZCO: It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s just that…games, because they have this reference, are expressions of how we believe the universe works in different cultures. We know that chess has that and billiards has that. Ping pong has that too. Every game has a connection to how we conceive nature and landscape. How we order and we structure reality. In the case of the ping pong table I decided to use the shape of the lotus flower and the pond and to have this reference to Buddhism or Indian culture in terms of the lotus flower as the beginning of the universe. Just because I found it interesting. I am not religious at all, but I like philosophy and science fiction and fiction. I like these ideas in which we all try to explain with metaphors and with numbers how the universe works.

And I think it’s fascinating to know all this, but also it’s fascinating to prove it in reality, to see it in reality. You can prove and test and witness all these theories, all these fictions, all these metaphors—very, really ancient—in reality everyday. You can understand why a pond could be the beginning of the universe or the center of the universe. I think it’s quite easy to understand if you look at a pond with so many things happening there. Why it’s the origin of life. It’s just like another way of playing around with the explanation of the universe and how it works. Like in the billiard table with a pendulum, which is how planets move, how the planet Earth moves. And the same in chess. So I think that it’s not just a game.

Probably they are more like philosophical games. I believe that philosophy has to be a practice. Practical philosophy. It’s like the way the Greeks used to solve philosophical and mathematical problems, by walking. Not sitting. It’s easier to solve problems moving—when you walk and you talk—probably because you have better irrigation in the brain or just because you are breathing better. Because you are moving you have better chances to solve complex problems. And also I think in a way it’s an action thing. So I think philosophy is an action, it should be. And to play the games are part of it.

ART:21: Do you ever use the word ‘metaphysical’ to describe your interests?

OROZCO: I never use that word so much, metaphysical. It’s too metaphysical for me. [LAUGHS] I avoid two words: poetic and metaphysic. I avoid those two words because I think it’s a belief problem. I think the poetic happens, what we call the poetic. It happens because of the spectator, not because it is poetic. And the metaphysic is similar. So it is an act, an act of belief or an act of illusion on the part of the spectator. For someone to say, “Yes, I’m gonna do something metaphysical,” or “Yes, I’m gonna do something poetic”—it’s a mistake. So I think if it happens, if there is something that happens that we can call poetic and then somebody is touched and says, “Wow, this is really poetic,” it’s because this person is open for this to happen. And the word metaphysical, I don’t really even know what it means. [LAUGHS] I believe in reality and I don’t know what the metaphysical is. And I don’t claim that I understand what reality is…

ART:21: Can you talk about the billiards table some more? How does the billiards table connect to your belief in reality?

OROZCO: I concentrate on reality in terms of what is happening to me and I try to revolutionize that and try to rethink it and transform it. I try to transform reality with it’s own rules, with the things I found there. So like the market in Brazil, I found the oranges there. Or the “Island in an Island”—it was a bottle with pieces of wood that was there, and I rearranged that. I never carry anything with me.

What I like about games is that a game is a thing on it’s own. You have a little world in this board or in this table, designed to perfection so you can play in a landscape. When it is a good game it’s so passionate that you can really get into this world and just live in it for a moment. When it is a good game, it’s an intelligent thing and that’s why it’s so passionate. Billiards is very intelligent. I mean it’s a landscape, it’s mathematics, it’s geometry, it’s physicality, it’s physics…it’s many things. My favorite is with three balls and no pockets, and you’re trying to make a triangular connection between the two other balls. I played a lot with that when I was a kid. It was more popular in Mexico than pool.

One day I was in France and I saw the Foucault’s Pendulum, and as you know it’s the way that it was proved that the earth moves. You have this pendulum hanging from very high which is constantly moving because the earth is rotating, and I found that fascinating. It’s a permanent motion sculpture. It’s a science too, but at the same time you can consider it as beautiful as…now okay, I don’t want to say a beautiful sculpture because I think it’s much better as an instrument for science, but anyway…I am an artist and I look at it as a possible sculpture. So then I decided why don’t we transform a billiard? What happens if one of the balls in the billiard is a pendulum? I also decided instead of having a rectangular table to have an elliptical table or an oval table. So then we will play closer to laws of the universe. And then when we put this hanging ball with the oval billiard table which is called “Oval Billiard Table with Pendulum,” you can play a game, but you add complexity because now you have time involved. And you have an element which is the elliptical bands. You cannot count on them anymore.

In billiards, because it’s rectangular, you can calculate how the ball is going to bounce. And if you know a little bit about geometry, or just about billiards, you know how it’s going to bounce so you can get these triangular connections. But in this case, because it’s an elliptical space, you are talking about the borders of the universe and it’s always expanding. So when the ball starts to touch the ellipses, these oval curves—it just starts to bounce around and around and then just gets lost totally. So you cannot count so much on the two or three times it can bounce back. It starts to just rotate around. If you were so strong that you can make this ball rotate, I mean have the force to keep it moving, it will be just around the band of the table. On the other hand, the pendulum is moving so you have to calculate when you hit the ball. To hit the ball that is the pendulum, you have to calculate exactly the point of connection, but also the time of this pendulum coming back. So you have to wait and you have to breath and see when the ball maybe is outside of the table and then comes back. And in that specific time you have to hit it. It’s not just that it’s in a specific point in space, but it’s also in time in that point that you have to hit the ball. Anyway, it’s a totally different game and it’s more complex in many ways.

It’s also much more boring than a normal billiard game [LAUGHS] and also I didn’t put any rules except the basic rules of hitting two balls with your own ball. But nevertheless I think it can be interesting and I think also what is important is that you can actually play. It’s built with everything so that you can play and people play it. I play it sometimes and the rules have to be invented because it’s a new system, it’s a new world and with new laws. Then you have to invent the rules. Of course, I don’t like to invent rules, but somebody will do it if they want to make some competition in that game. For the moment it’s just a game to watch, I think, or to play and you watch. But I think it’s nice to watch because it’s a different kind of magic.

ART:21: Maria, your wife said that you like to make rules for games. That you’re always inventing new games to play.

OROZCO: Well I like to make new games. I like to improvise games in situations and then I like the rule just because the rule makes the game grow. I like to make a game grow by trying to understand the geometry of the situation. And then you have to make some rules and times and scores and points and bounces, how many bounces and things like that. So I like to do that. It’s quite silly, but normal.

ART:21: Can you talk about rules as they relate to your chessboard piece “Horses Running Endlessly”?

OROZCO: Well, the knight in chess is very, very interesting. It’s fascinating because of how it moves. It moves two squares and one, but in reality it’s moving between squares. What it’s doing, that knight, is it’s jumping and it’s virtually crossing between squares to get to the other squares. That, as a notion of space, is beautiful. Because a board is a very bi-dimensional field, black and white. And all the other pieces, they move diagonal, up and down, et cetera. But when you conceive of the piece that is jumping between squares—it’s a very beautiful notion.

This is thinking in the game as a landscape, a micro-landscape. And you know again chess is a product of a culture that has a notion of nature. Those notions of nature—in terms of how it works, how it’s controlled—are expressed in the games that people invent in their time. And that civilization that invented chess, it has a very precise notion of landscape nature and control and production and production of the space and production of a country. It’s a battle but it’s also a science.

I play a lot and I wanted to make a chess game that was about the knight—the horse—and then I multiply it by four. They’re all horses so there are no queens and kings, towers and bishops, just horses. And they’re running endlessly because they are all together running in this open field. You have a game that I didn’t put any rules. If you want you can invent a game in which the horse eats another horse and then somebody wins, but it’s very boring to see horses eating each other. So I suppose nobody is going to invent that game. How the colors in the board are placed and multiplied by four is the logic of the game itself. It’s transforming into something else but it’s still a game.

ART:21: Does this piece in any way have a reference to Marcel Duchamp—who was an expert chess player?

OROZCO: Not really. I don’t think it has a reference to Duchamp. I think it has reference to chess. It’s stronger—the reference to chess and to landscape and to my own work—in terms of playing with reality as a board. Like “Crazy Tourist,” like “Island to an Island.” In terms of the scale, landscape, and the construction of reality to make it that field of perception. And I think it’s connected with reality, but reality in terms of culture.

When we speak of reality it’s not nature. It’s not like a concrete outside. It’s always talking about cultures and specific objects. It’s not like metal is natural thing or stone is a natural thing. Stone is so charged with culture that we cannot claim that there is such a thing as a pure stone or metal or clay or water. I think for water and all the elements it depends on the culture they are in. They have a cultural charge and for me to use a chessboard or a stone, it’s the same. It has the same cultural charge. It depends on the culture that you are working in. So to claim that there is a thing, a pure thing call iron, it’s not true. Iron means a lot of things and the artist who is using iron, he’s aware of what it means to use iron, to use marble, to use diamonds. Because those materials, they have this meaning and they have this charge. It’s the same if the material is a little bit more physically elaborate like a chess board. But in terms of culture and in terms of meaning, they have the same complexity and specificity.

When I’m using a chessboard as the work, I am aware of the complexity and the specificity of this game. But it’s interesting when—if I will be using stone or marble—I don’t think people will say, “Oh, he’s influenced by Michelangelo.” And when I use a chessboard they think of Duchamp, but it’s a bit ridiculous because the marble and the chessboard, culturally, they are as complex, as charged. They have so many meanings that to claim that connection can be very superficial at the end. If I use an orange or a billiard table, both are complex and they are cultural and they are social and they have meanings and it depends on the context and depends in my connection with that. So I think my influence is more in connection with everyday cultural objects that I am encountering and that are part of my life.

From ART21 Interview

Richard Fauguet

Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno, ‘Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait’

A well-written, critical post about the film

Short Cuts
Paul Myerscough

The average maximum temperature in Madrid in mid to late April is 18°C. It would have been somewhat cooler than that in the Bernabéu Stadium, at 9 p.m. on 23 April 2005, when Zinédine Zidane walked onto the pitch with Real Madrid to face Villarreal, even under the floodlights and swathed in the body-heat of 72,485 restless spectators. But by the time Darius Khondji’s high-definition cameras find him, four minutes into Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, ‘Zizou’ is already sweating. Every few seconds, he blows the droplets away from his mouth; they collect and drip from his earlobes and his chin. There is no impression of effort – there is never any impression of effort – but Zidane’s adrenaline is up, his concentration complete. Even standing still, he is working hard.

The film is 90 minutes long, a real-time record of a single football match made with 17 cameras placed at different vantage points in the Bernabéu, all of them trained exclusively on Zidane. We see the kick-off on a television monitor; but the film camera immediately draws nearer to pick out Zidane, who blurs and dissolves as the frame narrows still further; his gait and monk-pattern baldness are easy to recognise even as he fragments into countless green, red and blue pixels. The point is made: the galáctico, like any modern celebrity, is available to us only through his mediation, and the more pervasive his image, the more frustratedly we recognise that he remains finally opaque, unreachable. The film begins and ends with a neat ideogram, a superimposition of the letters of Zidane’s name: the effect of his total presence is to obscure him completely.

This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling. Watching Zidane at work in this way is an extraordinary experience. He is in possession of the ball for only a tiny fraction of the game, a total of perhaps two minutes or less. Much of what he does in those two minutes is exhilarating. In one moment, he leaps and curves his body in the air to catch a long, high ball at his midriff, killing its speed so that it drops to the turf at his feet; in another, he feints to cross the ball with his left foot and in the same motion releases it in the opposite direction with his right; again and again, he carries the ball at speed into the heart of Villarreal’s defence, guarding and propelling it with delicate touches as the defenders back-pedal before him. These sudden bursts of movement – in which Zidane, however frantic the activity around him, retains an absolute poise – are the only moments when the action of the game coincides with what we see. Between times, we watch him as he stalks the field, tracking the ball and waiting.

This kind of thing has been attempted before. In 1970, Hellmuth Costard filmed George Best playing for Manchester United against Coventry City. Costard was forced to shoot Best with fewer cameras and from a greater distance, so that he most often appears full-length and as part of the game going on around him. The resulting film, Fussball wie noch nie (‘Football Like Never Before’), is very different from Zidane partly because of these aesthetic choices and technological constraints, but also because of the differences between the two subjects. Best was as exuberant on the pitch as he was off it; his gifts were extravagant, and he liked to show them off. His charismatic style, and his fallibility as a player were continuous with his media persona, so that we both recognise him and imagine we get to know him better by watching Costard’s film.

This is not the experience of watching Zidane. His cropped hair, his leanness, give an impression of asceticism. His features are still, his eyes shadowed under heavy brows. There are flickers of consternation, of irritation, of concern, impatience and contempt; he smiles only once, sharing a joke with Roberto Carlos. But for the most part he is impassive. Even after his finest moment, in the 70th minute of the game, when he glides through the Villarreal defence, spins on his right foot and loops a perfect cross with his left for Ronaldo to score at the far post, his expression barely changes. It has always been the convention in Hollywood cinematography that the close-up guarantees intimacy with its subject; in this, it shares with one important tradition of portraiture the notion that the image should express interiority. In Zidane, the relentless scrutiny of his face yields little in the way of an inner self, still less anything that would help us to account for his sublime skill. We feel for him, but do not identify with him; he is alone, lonely even, and distant, other.

Gordon’s film wouldn’t have been given a cinema release – his work is normally shown in galleries – if it hadn’t been for the way Zidane ended the last game of his career in July. Captaining France in the final of the World Cup, he was sent off for violent conduct: in what must immediately have become one of the most widely seen sporting images of all time, he drives his head – forcefully and, it must be said, with considerable grace – into Marco Materazzi’s chest. He was, he claimed later, responding to the Italian defender’s ‘very hard words’ about his mother and his sister. In the final moments of Zidane – it is stoppage time at the end of the game, and Real have all but won, having come back from a goal down to lead 2-1 – a mêlée begins off-screen. Zidane, who is thirty yards away at the time, suddenly breaks from the frame. Another camera, further away, finds him again as he jogs, then sprints towards the arguing players. He catches one of them with a glancing blow, and is protectively wrestled away by David Beckham. He stands alone again, as he has for much of the film, but awkward now and a little wretched. The referee dismisses him, and the film ends as he leaves the field, shrugging off the attentions of his team-mates.

More than anything, in this moment, it feels as though we should have been able to see the explosion coming, that having watched him so closely for so long, the signs should have been there. They weren’t, of course. Watching Zidane at work is different from interpreting an actor’s simulations in a Hollywood movie, different from examining a painter’s attempt to express his subject’s essence. Searching his face for 90 minutes brings us no closer to understanding his actions at the end of this game, just as no account of his interaction with Materazzi can account for his final self-immolation. If that’s what it was. Unlike any other player on the pitch that night in July, Zidane was the only one with nothing left to prove. He had won everything there was to win, every trophy, every personal honour, many of them several times over; and eight years earlier, he had scored two goals in France’s 3-0 World Cup Final victory over Brazil. How do you end a career like this? In this year’s final, Zidane missed his chance at the perfect climax – a winning goal in extra time to regain the cup for France – when Buffon, the Italian goalkeeper, tipped his powerful header over the bar. He was sent off minutes later. You couldn’t explain why by reading Materazzi’s lips, or by watching Zidane, or by studying the biography of this son of Algerian immigrants, the story of his rise from the poor northern suburbs of Marseille to become the greatest footballer in the world. There are, though, more economical forms of explanation, sometimes from unexpected sources. At a party the day after the game, a friend of mine overheard a psychoanalyst, asked why she thought he’d done it, reply: ‘You know, I think he’d just had enough.’

From The LRB

Laurent Perbos

Awesome More Work Here

 

Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon raises dogs. Pitbulls and mastiffs mostly. They live in breeding sheds and kennels in his backyard. Some are “sporting” dogs that he trains and fights in and around Southern California and Mexico. One is a full brother to Bain, a former Yojimbo in the world of dog fighting, the sport of kings. Mention Bain to anyone in the dog-fighting business, Pettibon tells me, and, well, you get this certain look.
Pettibon unloads all of this in the middle of a conversation ranging from punk-rock history to horse pedigrees to comic books to art criticism. On the subject of dogs he suddenly seems to feel like he’s revealed way more than he intended. So he drops it. This is the way with Pettibon. In his pogo-ing from topic to topic he is both excessively careful with his words and bluntly indiscreet. It’s a quality that also comes across in his drawings.

Born in Tucson, Arizona, and raised in Hermosa Beach, California, Pettibon sacrificed a career as a public-school math teacher for a desperate, thankless existence as an internationally exhibited artist and dog fighter. His art career began in the mid-1970s when his brother Greg, a guitarist for the seminal punk band Black Flag, founded SST Records. Pettibon became the label’s unofficial artist, creating album covers and concert flyers for Black Flag, the Minutemen, and others. His style—a pairing of figurative drawings and text done in black ink on paper—is often associated with the seventies punk counterculture of his youth. But Pettibon will tell you that’s a brainless oversimplification.

Though he vigorously resists attempts to categorize his art, Pettibon acknowledges a debt to various sources of inspiration: comics, noir films, books, television, pop icons. His work can sometimes seem like a cataloging of pop-cultural moments. Charles Manson, Ronald Reagan, and other broken, twisted speed freaks figure prominently, as do punks, surfers, hippies, baseball players, locomotives, and Gumby. Whole phrases are lifted directly from books—Henry James, Fernando Pessoa, William Blake, the Bible—or are reshaped and given new meaning by the artist.

Despite this, Pettibon’s art is also deeply personal. Each drawing seems oddly idiosyncratic, almost painfully revealing. Individually, each is like a snapshot of a larger narrative.

The following interview was culled from a couple of marathon phone conversations with Pettibon from his home in Long Beach.

—John O’Connor

III. “I DO ACTUALLY LIKE BASEBALL
AND SURFING AND GUMBY.”

BLVR: The reoccurring subjects in your work—surfers, trains, ships, baseball players, people like Charles Manson and Elvis—what do some of these represent to you?

RP: I don’t think I’ve ever done an image that was meant to be reoccurring in the beginning. What happens is that after drawing one you can’t leave them. They have more to say to you. In a way it can take on a life of its own. I guess people probably think that these are images that only an excessive relationship leads one to doing, like fifty Gumby or Manson drawings. But it’s not like that. I do actually like baseball and surfing and Gumby. Manson, I’m not a big fan of some things about him, but there are some other things that are interesting. I’m not making a case for anything he did. But as a subject matter, on paper, there’s something to it, there’s something to write about there. There are certain figures, without even my meaning to do it, that become subjects. Whether it’s people or trains. Sometimes it’s more the visual nature of the subject that leads me to it. Visually they can be obstacles to try to overcome. But for whatever reason, they don’t start as serial projects. Otherwise I would have done them from the beginning. It’s always been after the fact.

BLVR: With writing and drawing, does one bring out the other for you?

RP: It’s not that exact, as if I dream in images and my waking thoughts are in text, or as if my daydreams become my captions and illustrations. I don’t know if it’s good to separate the two too much actually. But yeah, one depends on the other. There’s always a latent or inferred image in my writing. And I can almost always assume if I do a drawing that it will eventually have text. Now, I can only take this so far, because it’s almost starting to sound like an apology for writing, as if it’s this impurity imposed on the visual image. In art, impurity is not a mortal sin. You have to navigate through it. I say that only because there’s not too many of my drawings that don’t have text. There are some, but not many. If I were doing cartoons it would be a lot easier.

BLVR: You won the Bucksbaum Award this year at the Whitney Biennial, which is “awarded to an artist who possesses the potential to have a lasting effect on the history of American art.” Do you consider yourself a representative figure in American art?

RP: Is there a developing consensus that I’m not? That the award was unjustified? [Laughing] I know they want me to return it. I’ve heard rumors that they made a mistake and the whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding. They’re apologetic about it. But I told them the money’s gone. I spent it all at the track.

BLVR: Dogs or horses?

RP: We don’t have dogs in California anymore. It’s a licensing thing, government payoffs, special interests. It’s just horses now. But I raise dogs for fighting.

BLVR: Isn’t that illegal?

RP: Yeah, but in L.A. everything’s illegal. Even breathing.

BLVR: We’re talking blood sport, right?

RP: Well, listen, I train them and I fight them. It’s not a big deal, and it’s not something I like to talk about, really. I also have a charity where I give dogs to underprivileged kids. Not everyone can afford to buy a dog, and it gives kids the opportunity to attain a certain level of responsibility.

Excerpt from an interview in Believer Magazine

Raymond Pettibon, Venice Beach, CA 2006

ART21 Teaser
 

Tom Sanford

First Round of the 2006 NBA Draft

Icons
The icons display various sports teams´ logos and companies’ logos, The Yankees, Starbucks, Mac, Paramount, Coca Cola etc. All these brands define what it is to be American. These logos are made as icons in order to compare these to the religious icons that are worshiped as such. I decided to pick twelve logos and do them as gold icons, twelve being a kind of a religious number. I did not want to pick the companies in order to portray these in a negative way. I picked the companies that have a really strong identity which people have a strong relation to.

Jesus Walks, 2007. 176,5cm x 208,5 cm oil, acrylic, fake silver and fake gold on wood

This is the American crusade over Iraq showing a possible American/Christian victory. Jesus is leading the Americans but he is not depicted as the religious version we are used to but as a character taken from a film where Jesus is hippie-like and fun loving and not like the crucified Christ. I thought this Jesus-character would fit in well in the painting to show the Americans´ crusade into Iraq stepping on dead bodies etc. The Jesus character is taken from Kevin Smith´s “Dogma” (1999) where he is called Buddy Christ.

I have put in some actors who have played soldiers. For example: On top of the dead bodies you see the character Dutch from the movie Predator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) and George Clooney´s character from the movie about the first gulf war, Three Kings (1999). You also see the helmet from my favourite Vietnam movie, Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987).

In the painting you also see myself with this foam finger cheering on, it is like although many Americans are very aware and critical of what is going on and vote against the government it is not really democracy, we cannot really vote them out. I am showing the American imperialism: a combination of a very nice life style and all the crimes we are responsible for around the world. In the painting I am wearing a Reggie Bush football jersey, number 25 New Orleans Saints. During the Iraq war we had this terrible hurricane, Katrina, in New Orleans but nothing was done because all the focus was on Iraq and the government spent so much money on the war in stead of helping our own people in the backyard. Reggie Bush is a black man, and most black people in the US have the names of the families who used to own them as slaves so Reggie Bush could have relatives who were owned as slaves by the Bush family!

In the painting you also see this Arbusto oil drum. Arbusto was established George W. Bush and one of the major investors was the Bin Laden family! You also see George W. Bush as a cowboy.
Also appearing is Britney Spears (just after painting her hair I heard that she had shaved her head!) as a Dallas cowgirl cheerleader in the position of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, albeit in a white trailer trash version. You also see a bumber sticker “First Iraq then France”. I actually saw this sticker on a car near my studio.

I know Thomas and I are really excited to have Tom’s piece depicting twelve shamed sports stars in similar style to the above NBA Draft portraits. Come and See It!

 

The Institute for Aesthletics

Aesthletics: Game Designers Should Create More New Sports
By Clive Thompson 05.07.07

I catch the Whiffle ball with one hand, spin around, and begin dribbling it off my bat as I drive for the goalposts. Damn: I’m swarmed by defensemen frantically waving their bats and trying to block my shot. Taking a dive for it, I spy an opening — then smash the shot past the goalie.

Woo hoo! I’ve just scored the first goal in a ferocious game of “Whiffle Hurling.”

Yes, Whiffle Hurling. I suspect you’ve never heard of it. Actually, I’m positive you’ve never heard of it — because the sport didn’t exist until two years ago.

Whiffle Hurling was invented in July 2005 by a Tom Russotti, an MFA grad student at Rutgers University — and the sole practitioner of what he calls “aesthletics.” So far, only 10 games of Whiffle Hurling have ever been played. I can personally attest that it’s insanely fun and offers up a genuinely new blend of activity: The crazy intensity of Irish hurling mixed with the low-stress, low-injury appeal of Whiffle ball. It manages to be simultaneously casual and intense, which is perfect for nerds like me.

And it also poses an interesting question: Why don’t more people invent new sports?

After all, we live in a golden age of play. The video-game industry is bristling with innovation: You’ve got haptic controllers on the Wii, titles like Eye of Judgment merging card-games with computers, and the increasingly strange economic activity in online worlds. Our culture is clearly hungry for new forms of play.

Yet how many new major physical sports have you played in recent years? Zero, I’ll bet. The pantheon of major team-sports — football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey — hasn’t significantly altered in decades.

So Russotti decided to expand the field a bit. By creating a new sport, he decided, he could level the playing field between athletes. When you join a pickup game of basketball or football, it’s always slightly marred by the fact that some of the players will be totally experienced — making it slightly more dull for the less-expert folks. A new sport wouldn’t have that problem.

Russotti began casting around for ideas, and while visiting a family vacation home in the country, found a pile of discarded Whiffle bats. Presto: Russotti decided to design a variant of hurling that uses Whiffle plastic. The rules are generally similar to the old Irish sport: You can catch the ball with your hand and remain stationary, but to move you have dribble the ball on the Whiffle bat. Otherwise you have to pass by hitting the ball.

“I figured it’d have all the action, the exhilaration, but different physics because of the plastic balls and bats,” Russotti told me when I met him and a gang of friends in New York to play the game. (He also instituted some delightfully silly rules: One team is required to wear sombreros.)

As we raced around the field, I quickly intuited some basic strategy. For example, I realized that I didn’t need to drive up too close to the goals — I could shoot successfully from midfield. Then I realized that it paid to be aggressive: If the opposing team was about to gain control the ball, I’d dive headlong into the mud and whack it away — using something closer to a golf swing. Pretty soon I’d developed a reputation on my team for being psychotically willing to fling myself nose-first on the ground.

Meanwhile, one of my opponents demonstrated a scarily amazing facility for dribbling the ball long distances — which let him easily traverse the field, since you’re not allowed to interfere with a dribbling player.

Essentially, were figuring out how to play. And this is, counter intuitively, a big part of what makes a new game so great: You get to explore the intriguing and unpredictable ways that the rules interact.

Video-game players understand this implicitly: We often find that the thrill of a new game is in theprocess of mastering it — not the mastery itself. (Indeed, once a video game is mastered we often stop playing it.) You never get this experience with an existing, well-known sport like soccer or football, because the rules have been exhaustively explored.

Russotti, too, has had to gradually fine-tune Whiffle Hurling as he watches how the athletes interact. During the first game, he discovered that offensive players were camping out near the goalposts, which made it trivially easy to smash a goal past the goalies. (I love it: Camping.) So Russotti instituted a 15-foot goal-shooting line. And after personally suffering a brutal black-eye injury in the first five minutes of the inaugural game, he instituted a “no physical contact” rule.

This is other delicious thing about playing a new sport: You get to watch the rules evolve, which gives you front-row insight into the intellectually fascinating process of game design. Baseball and football and hockey all underwent the same tweaking process, but because they don’t change much any more, people don’t think of them as designed objects. And because we don’t think of them as designed objects, we don’t think about designing new sports.

The irony, of course, is that Russotti is merely doing what children already innately do. Children in playgrounds invent their own physical games every day. It’s a completely natural human activity, but it’s drummed out of us once we go to school and are told that the small group of advertising-supported team sports are the only “serious” ones. For the rest of your adult life, you never deviate.

Unless, of course, you hook up with Russotti. In a few weeks he’s going to showcase another new sport he’s invented: A version of basketball played with three opposing teams, three nets and two balls.

I can’t wait.

From Wired Magazine

Alec Soth’s Blog (Now Defunct)

Alec Soth’s Blog has a ton of amazing thought and dialogue in its archive, but alas he has moved on to other frontiers. Browsing through it I found a category titled “baseball” I leave it with this picture and excerpt of an excerpt:

Andrea Modica
 
“I’ve previous mentioned Andrea Modica twice (here and here), but failed to mention her terrific pictures of Minor League baseball players. Modica was interviewed about the work as part of the Smithsonian Photographers at Work series:

How did your series of pictures of baseball players come about?

I was on a date and we went to a baseball game. Now I had absolutely no interest in or knowledge of the game at that point, but I live in a tiny town and one thing you can do in the summer is go to a ball game. Although I wasn’t interested in the game, I could get a close look at these players, because in minor league baseball you can sit right near the field. They’re very close. So this pitcher walked in front of me and I noticed his cheekbones. I thought, “My, what fabulous cheekbones, and how that little cap sets them off.” While I watched the game, I wondered who on earth would choose this for a career. I mean, hitting this little ball around seemed so silly. These guys work very hard, they make very little money, and maybe two percent of minor league players go on to the major leagues. Knowing that, I was really curious about why they would do it, and I thought about this so much that it occurred to me, almost in a dream, to photograph these players. And I’ll tell you something, I woke up in a cold sweat. I was so scared of this particular project.

Why did you make portraits of the players rather than pictures of the game being played?

Because of my intense curiosity about them. After putting it off for a while, I contacted the team owner and asked if I could do this. He said yes, if I also got the team manager to agree. Sometimes when I was working with these guys they exhibited certain behavior that made me very uncomfortable, which was hard to deal with. But a certain discomfort was also a part of the family project.

You find this tension surrounding your differences with certain people stimulating?

I figure that if photographing a situation makes me this nervous there must be something for me to learn, and that makes it worth doing. It’s not only about taking good pictures.

I like that Modica is honest about her fears and her motivation. These pictures are as much about great cheekbones as they are about baseball. There is even a homoerotic quality to some of the pictures: ”