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.
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.’
Not long ago, Nike, having repeatedly failed to crack the rebellious skateboard market, had its ad agency hire a bunch of Ph.D. students in anthropology to produce ethnographic studies of skateboarders’ tastes. Eventually this led the company to hire the graffiti artist Futura, who designed a limited edition of the Dunk basketball sneaker that Nike made in the 1980s. The sneaker was sold through skateboard stores, and sneakerheads snapped it up. Like art museums, sports companies have found that the best way to tap into the coveted youth market is to bring outsider artists in.
America has become like a giant playing field. We dress in neoprene and Lycra, tattoo our bodies in ways that mimic the logos on athletes’ uniforms, and collect sneakers as if they’re Ryan McGinley photographs. They’re sometimes worth nearly as much.
We consume reality shows rooted in the old Roman gladiatorial games, and our political leaders hawk war to us on television the way Vince Lombardi psyched up hisGreen Bay Packers, saying that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing (except, as true athletes know, for losing).
Meanwhile, late modernism’s cult of the gym-toned body has elevated narcissism to the level of religion, extreme sports being our equivalent of what flagellants did in the Middle Ages. Skiers schussing down Everest or climbers clawing up K2 seek what Kant called “the terrifying sublime” by filtering natural beauty through death-defying stunts. When a society like ours, inured to traditional forms of beauty, comes to equate shock with awe, the true sublime gives way to its glitzier simulacra. Which is pretty much what the photographer Andreas Gursky provided us not long ago when he shot a soccer match in Amsterdam from an improbable eagle’s-eye perch above the stadium. The glamour of his panoramic picture is derived from the prowess in accomplishing it.
For contemporary artists, and for fashion designers, too, sports have become a metaphorical gold mine. As a meditation on disenfranchisement and loss, the Australian artist Tracey Moffat shot a memorable series of pictures at the 2000 Olympics of fourth-place Olympians, the ones who just missed getting a medal. Collier Schorr photographed high school wrestlers as a measure of masculine identity and a window onto teenage subcultures. Wrestling is brutal and also touching, Schorr said, so she suspected that “a lot of people see their own struggles as teenagers in the pictures.”
Art has always trafficked in sporting symbols, of course, beginning with the art of the ancient Assyrians, who carved hunting scenes into stone as emblems of their imperial ferocity. A long history of art in China and India includes countless scenes of Mughal emperors hunting animals like antelopes and tigers. In Western art, the virgin huntress Diana, when spied in the nude by Actaeon, turned him into a stag, after which his own hounds devoured him. (No wonder Freud loved ancient myths.) In Titian’s hands, Diana, protectress of pubescent girls, became a sporty archer in tie-up sandals and bracelets, hair gathered in a loose bun, a silky tunic gaping to reveal one breast, shooting an arrow at her hunky voyeur, who has newly furry ears and a shiny nose, dogs nipping at his crotch.
The connection between art and sport has depended on a mutual infatuation with physical perfection, which translates easily into sex and power. In Leni Riefenstahl’s orgiastic paean to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, the camera ogles naked, beaming, German swimmers giving each other rubdowns in the sauna, then leaping off the high board, doing pirouettes and swan dives (it’s raining men!), more and more of them presented in erotically slow motion from above, below and underwater, plunging into the pool, then leaping back out of it, in and out. (Riefenstahl included backward shots to heighten the cinematography’s kinetic abstraction.) It’s so seductive that you might almost overlook the inconvenience of the fact that these beautiful people were Nazi ideals, as Dolce & Gabbana perhaps unconsciously did in last year’s bizarre replay of Riefenstahl’s Aryan men, dressing the models in tank tops and shorts.
But then, art has never necessarily been moral, which is why Riefenstahl’s boss, one of the most aesthetic of tyrants, negotiated to buy from Italy the most famous work of sporting art in Western history, the divine Discobolus by Myron — a sculpture of a discus thrower, arm raised, knees flexed, torso bursting with muscles, the epitome of grace and anticipatory release, and the culmination of all that sexy Greek art about athletes. “Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” as the historian Winckelmann put it. For Hitler, this meant Teutonic, and it became Riefenstahl’s model.
Notwithstanding her Nazi links, she established the visual template for later artists. You might even say that much of the performance movement of the late 1960s and ’70s defined itself in relation to her. When a skinny Bruce Nauman in a white T-shirt filmed himself falling backward into the corner of a room, then pushing himself upright, then falling back again, he was echoing, consciously or otherwise, Riefenstahl’s use of repeated movements, her disorienting camera angles with their resulting abstraction. Her heroics became his version of a Beckett play, sport as nihilism, and in the process, Nauman established a whole new image of athletic cool.
Leap forward to Jeff Koons’s 1980s basketball (the Julius Erving model) immaculately suspended in a tank of water, like Dr. J himself hanging in midair before a dunk. It served as an affectless sign of capitalist excess, with a nod to Minimalist form. Gary Simmons then paid Koons homage by arranging pairs of gold-painted sneakers as if in a police lineup, using sports to riff on crime and race. After which David Hammons, the bricolagist, fashioned a crude backboard out of a window frame fringed by ruffles of rubber tire, turning Koons’s device into a symbol of broken ghetto dreams.
But no artist has absorbed sports more thoroughly into his work than Matthew Barney, the former J. Crew model and high school quarterback turned cryptic filmmaker and self-mythologist, whose looks come straight out of Riefenstahl. Barney’s work, building on Nauman’s and on other ’70s video and performance artists’, is partly about acting as a kind of model, a symbol (he talks about letting the body be “a tool”) in scenarios that entail athletic feats — climbing an elevator shaft, leaping off a 40-foot pier or off a bridge with a bungee cord, straining at the end of a tether and trying to make marks with a piece of chalk on paper affixed to a wall. Call it extreme sports art.
Barney is operating at the limits of coherence and endurance — both his limits and ours. He likes the analogy of muscle being built up through exercises that break down tissue. Art, like sports, requires effort, risk and resistance. In a sense, he’s asking his audience to take a leap, too. It’s the perfect sports metaphor.
by Dave Hickey
It’s in the third quarter. The fifth game of the 1980 NBA Finals. Lakers versus Seventy-Sixers. Maurice Cheeks is bringing the ball up the court for the Sixers. He snaps the rock off to Julius Erving, and Julius is driving to the basket from the right side of the lane against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Julius takes the ball in one hand and elevates, leaves the floor. Kareem goes up to block his path, arms above his head. Julius ducks, passes under Kareem’s outside arm and the nunder the backboard. He looks like he’s flying out of bounds. But no! Somehow, Erving turns his body in the air, reaches back under the backboard from behind; and lays the ball up into the basket from the left side!
