“Wyse began photographing his “Surfers” series in 1999 both to revisit a sport in which he actively participated throughout childhood and adolescence, and to expand his investigation of man’s relationship to nature. Wyse’s re-connection with surfing enables him to create images that are objective yet contemplative, universal yet specific. The palpable contradictions within this series result directly from Wyse’s nostalgic familiarity with surfing and his subsequent re-positioning as a seasoned outsider, looking in.
Wyse’s previous body of work, “Landscape,” prompted the viewer’s absorption into the image through an elaborate system of intensely detailed visual cues. In contrast, “Surfers” employs a radical distortion of space, denying the viewer specificity of time and place. Positioning himself above the surf and its riders, Wyse removes the foreground and horizon line, creating a visual vertigo that disrupts the expected serenity of the seascape and forces the viewer to consciously navigate the unknown. It is through this duality of navigation and surrender, that the viewer becomes acutely aware of nature’s vast power and man’s ultimate isolation in facing the sublime.”
This might be a stretch but often when I look at Robert Longo’s wave drawings I can’t help but think about the various real waves these remind me of, and how much I as a trapped urban surfer wish I could be near their giant, glassy faces…A brief comparison of source and interpretation
Margaret River, Western Australia - The Box
Half Moon Bay, California - Three Views of Maverick’s
Teahupoo, Tahiti
Tasmania, Australia - Cyclops
Oahu, Hawaii - Waimea Bay
Oahu, Hawaii - Pipeline
Oahu, Hawaii - Waimea Shorebreak
”For me there are many connections between the bombs, roses, Freuds and waves… Aside from man becoming nature, the waves were about nature becoming man. They‘re so animate, so much about power, and feelings we all understand about being overpowered, somebody rising up and taking over. The bombs are the opposite. We are creating things that could make us obsolete. Which is a frightening thing.”
-Robert Longo
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.”
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.’
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!
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: ”
Erasure, Camouflage, & “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”
ART:21: Can you talk about the photographic sequence “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?”
PFEIFFER: “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is the title of an ongoing series of photographs. It started with five images that were material drawn from publicity stills of Marilyn Monroe, with the central figure removed. And at this point it’s kind of morphed into something else. Now I’m raiding the archives of the NBA and finding photographs that I’m manipulating to, generally speaking, remove a lot of contextual detail to leave a kind of solitary figure in the setting of a crowd of people.
The series started with research that I was doing into, at the time, images of Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn? At that point I thought this has got to be one of the most famous human bodies in the archive. It conjures up so much, it’s such a legend. And so I went through these images and ended up selecting a few of them and then going in and erasing Marilyn Monroe from the image. One of the things that really interested me was that in the process, really what was going on was not so much erasure and it never really is. It’s actually more like camouflage in the sense that you are taking pieces of the background from around the image and very slowly applying these pieces over the body so that in the end you’re presenting the illusion that you are seeing through to the background. But in fact you are inventing background material that wasn’t there before.
What I found out or what I ended up with, which I didn’t really expect, was in some ways the most abstract images that I’ve made so far. Unless you know that Marilyn was there you wouldn’t otherwise know that there was a figure there, much less that it was specifically Marilyn. At the time I was really quite focused on the process itself and the historical resonance and the emotional resonance that I felt working on these images. I’ve been asked after the fact how I would describe that, and I’ve thought that it’s a bit like what people describe as far as ghost limbs among soldiers. In a war people lose a limb and will have this continuing feeling like they still have that limb. Like a ghost limb. Another kind of dramatic example is when the World Trade Center went down. For long afterwards you sort of looked up and expected to see something there. Although it’s literally taking the figure away, in some ways it’s also intensifying something about the figure that used to be there.
Now this year and late last year I’ve been continuing this series under the same title, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” but talking a very different approach. Now I’m starting from images that I’m drawing from the online archive of the NBA. These are images that you can pull up on your screen and then order for something like twenty or thirty bucks a pop, and some of them are quite amazing. They go back to the 1950s and are some of the most striking images of sports legends in the environment of the stadium or the arena with the crowds in the background. And so I’ve been selectively appropriating these images and manipulating them to remove all the contextual detail, so that what remains is not an absent figure but an intensified figure by virtue of the fact that you are lacking some aspects of a context to place it in.
In the last of these images that I completed, for example, I started from an image taken from a game in which Wilt Chamberlain is putting the ball in the basket and there’s three or four figures around him all trying to prevent him from doing that. And the figure that remains is not Wilt Chamberlain. It’s actually one of the minor figures from the margins of the image. All the others were removed and this sideline image was moved to the center. So for me it’s quite striking because, by virtue of being in the margins, I suppose the person who composed the shot wasn’t too concerned with what the figure on the side was doing. He’s reaching up to stop the ball and is in this position that’s so foreshortened that his shoulders almost completely cover his head. His head is thrown far back and his legs are extended out in a kind of extreme way.
Moving this figure to the center makes sense if you see him on the margins. It’s an odd contradiction that you’re left with because now it seems the shot was composed completely around him. And it’s breaking every rule of composition. It looks like his head is chopped off, all of his limbs look awkward. To me it almost resembles the figure in a photograph of a lynching. At any rate, there’s a strange kind of inconsistency to the composition of the image. At the same time this awkwardly composed person is standing dead center in an arena surrounded by thousand of people who are watching—and there is no ball, no basket, no reason for him to be jumping or floating in this way. It is the sense of not just a lack of context, but in a way it looks like this figure has somehow been frozen into this frame. It looks quite airless and almost like a stain on the image.
ART:21: Where does the title come from?
PFEIFFER: Well, the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is an art historical reference in that it refers back to the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, who in some ways was really an innovator in the field of the representation of the figure and was a naturalist and sort of a scientist in himself. He was really involved in defining the building blocks of the figure study and the representation of people during his time. And simultaneously it’s a biblical reference, since the four horsemen of the apocalypse are precisely the figures that appear at the point when the world comes to the end at Armageddon. It’s very dramatic, none of which appears in any way in the photographs. There aren’t even four. At this point there’s eight of these figures in the series. But I really like the combination of a title that conjures up the history of the evolution of the figure study and at the same time a suggestion of a kind of larger epic occurring having to do with some kind of dramatic ending or shifting.
ART:21: How does the process of erasing or camouflaging the figure in photography translate into your video works? What is that process like?
PFEIFFER: The editing process that I use is very slow and ultimately very manual and requires going frame by frame, even though to a degree the process is somewhat automated through software tools. It’s like the computer can only think so much and then the human hand and eye really have to do the rest of the refining work. It’s partially because this kind of editing software is really meant to be used in tandem with other shooting techniques and framing techniques. So that, for example, if you really wanted to remove a figure in an efficient way you should start by shooting the figure against a blue background which is standard practice in the special effects world. Then it becomes very easy. But in my case I’m using found imagery and often archival imagery, which to begin with is not even very high quality. It’s already degraded from age. And I’m often taking an image that’s at it’s ninth or tenth generation by the time it reaches the shelf at a video store and I pull it of the shelf.
So what it means is when I get to the editing I have to go very slowly. A certain amount of the automated tools in the software I can’t use. I just simply have to go and do it manually. I’ve already started to work with other people and build a team to work with me on this. I’ve gone back to my oldest friends in art school who I know are amazing craftsmen because I hung out with people who had the same kind of love for doing this kind of work that I had. To edit a three minute piece like the “Long Count” pieces, it would take me and two or three other people roughly two or three months. And that’s now that we’ve gotten better at it, to do three minutes worth of finished footage.
And what’s curious to me is it’s actually a process that I enjoy. If I had my way and there were no other added complications to renting a studio, I would happily sit in my room and do this work all day. It’s a bit like meditation. I also feel like it’s a bit like painting or drawing in the sense that you leave your everyday consciousness of the world and achieve a certain focus. People would call it right brain focus, but at any rate, it draws you in and can be quite relaxing and enjoyable especially if you don’t have some horrendous deadline to meet. At the same time, this kind of process predates the computer and goes back to the way animation was done in Hollywood early on where you would find practically a room full of what amounts to animation factory workers overseen by a foreman who makes the important decisions about what the figures are doing. Ultimately you have a large team of people who are paid less! [LAUGHS]
ART:21: Let’s talk about the NBA in San Antonio where the process of obtaining your source material is quite different from dipping into an archive of images. The filming process with the Spurs—what were you trying to do there?
PFEIFFER: I started out in this process thinking, I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to accumulate footage from commercially available tapes and off the TV, and wouldn’t it be great to take it one step further, or one step closer to the source and try to get exactly the images I want on the spot? Especially because I’m working with special effects software to do a lot of the manipulations that I am doing. And what I have or what I can generally afford is a consumer level version of much more expensive machines and software that only Hollywood can use. So I’m really interested in trying to figure out how to move past the consumer level. Not necessarily to do something more Hollywood, but to my mind kind it’s a way of getting deeper into the material.
Ultimately, if you look at how the images are made that leads back to Hollywood and back to professional sports. It’s these places that the tools were really made for. The consumer tools are a secondary output. Everything is really tailored for a much bigger industry. I find it really an interesting possibility to work somehow closer to that, even though I know that with copyright issues and all the money that’s involved there’s plenty of reasons not to.
When I was developing a plan for the ArtPace residency in Texas, I found out that the Spurs—the basketball team in San Antonio—and the owners of the Spurs, are quite friendly to artists and they are patrons of the arts in Texas. So through ArtPace I approached them, and lo and behold they were like “Sure, you can come and shoot as much footage as you want at the game.” I approached it as kind of an experiment. Wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do and how I was going to do it but thought, let’s just go in there and try something out and discover a few things. One was that after a few days of shooting it became clear that what I could shoot—and actually they gave me a camera man to work with, they were so generous—what I could shoot and what I could tell the camera man to shoot, in the end wasn’t necessarily more interesting than the kind of stuff that I could pull of the television in a way. The television broadcast crew has ten cameras instead of just one, with fancy track systems that allow for really smooth motion shots.
The footage that I could get off the TV is of a much higher quality then what I could actually shoot myself on the court, without my duplicating the infrastructure and having ten cameras myself and doing what they were doing precisely. The other thing that I discovered is that there’s an enormous amount of activity happening in the stadium beyond the game itself, and that’s what I found myself really interested in and focusing on. At a certain point I just stopped filming the game and turned my camera around and started filming the crew. Season Three! [LAUGHS] I mean the camera crew in the arena, and watching how the whole spectacle worked. Which is quite amazing. The final effect is that it’s extremely difficult to sit in the arena as an artist with a camera and be dispassionate and be removed from the emotional intensity that’s going on. At a certain point, especially if it was a good game, I just wanted to put down the camera and just watch. How do they do that?
It’s a fascinating thing because I got to talk a bit with the people who produce the games, not the players, but the audio visual technicians who produce the games. And they are timing the bringing down of the lights and the bringing up of the lights at every moment. And where the camera men are standing. It’s interesting to watch the camera men because often times you’ll have a row of three or four camera men, and they are so well trained in terms of following the game that it’s like a ballet. Without even looking at each other they move perfectly in tandem. The sight of four cameras all moving…it’s almost like a chorus line.
ART:21: Do you think filming live events has generated a shift in your thinking?
PFEIFFER: Well I guess it relates to me to the idea of a reduction of things to images. We have great power today to make images that are truly spectacular and to achieve a kind of perfection, and there is something terrifying to me about it as well because maybe these images become so perfect that you forget everything else. So in a way there is like a shrinking possibility in the mind or in the imagination. It’s kind of like if you’re served literally five hundred channels on TV, why go out? There are obviously plenty of reasons to go out, but there’s something really seductive at the same time about the comfort of pre-digested images that are available. It makes me wonder if ultimately what we are talking about is not just the proliferation of images or a more distracted viewer or freedom of choice in terms of the consumption of images, but really a shrinking of the imagination.
“…To the few who can bring down a hoop, it’s a taste of truly being on top of the world. In a game of constant movement, this is a moment that can end the game instantaneously. Game over.”
From These Crazy Dudes’ proposal for show, see a lot more of their work @ VBPA
