Mark Wyse

Mark’s Website

“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.”

From kunstaspekte 

Opening Reception Madness

Thank you to everyone who came out and balled, ate ice cream and had a generally radical evening

Sarah Stolfa

Check More Here

Robin Rhode

Robert Longo

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

Jim Dow

Working with a camera that makes 8″ x 10″ negatives, Jim Dow traveled to 25 stadiums—14 American League and 11 National League—and took three exposures of each that together give a panoramic view of the stadium. He chose to photograph empty stadiums, without players, fans, or vendors, because he was most interested in the architecture itself. Baseball fields are more or less regulated. Each has the same dimensions for the diamond and the stretch between the foul lines. Each stadium has a billboard and stands on all four sides. There is nevertheless great variety. The distance to the outfield walls and the nature and height of the walls vary. Boston´s Fenway Park has the Green Monster looming 37 feet high in left field. Chicago´s Wrigley has a bank of ivy that swallows balls missed by the outfielders. New York´s Yankee Stadium and Houston´s Astrodome had the longest distances for a ball to travel out of the park. Other variances are color of the seats (red, blue, green) and the views outside the walls, which can be a mountain range, a park city neighborhood or industrial sites.

Fenway (Boston, 1912) and Wrigley (Chicago, 1916) are the two oldest still existing fields. Ten of the 25 that Dow photographed still exist, although three of those have changed their names.

A stadium, Dow feels, “symbolizes the enduring attraction of the sport itself as opposed to the changing fortunes of the players.” He has been photographing stadiums since 1980, concentrating on the major leagues in the early ´80s, and since 1984, working almost exclusively on minor-league baseball in the United States. “To some degree,” he says, “the stadiums mirror everything from affluence to pretension, or lace of same, of each locality.” One critic wrote that Dow´s stadiums “have all the grandeur and loneliness of ancient ruins.” Dow is aware that the stadiums embody memories as well as dreams. Each player faces not only his own prior accomplishments but every prior player´s feats.

More Sports Exhibitions from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

More on Jim Dow at Janet Borden, Inc. 

Gregory Crewdson

Photographs in and around Lee, Massachusetts, from his graduate school thesis project

Ralph Nader’s League of Fans

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From The Nation:

Ralph Nader is best known as a legendary consumer advocate, a person who has touched virtually every aspect of our lives from car safety to the quality of our food. He’s also a notable thorn in the side of Democratic Party activists desperate to win a presidential election and flummoxed by his quadrennial candidacy. However, few people know that Nader is also an avid sports fan. He was responsible for the launching of the League of Fans, a sports reform project, and he has also passionately pushed for a “Bill of Rights” for the American sports fan. In addition, he has recently made the sports pages by raising serious criticisms of NBA referees–assertions he has made for years that are finally being taken seriously in the wake of statements made by disgraced former referee Tim Donaghy.

When did you become a sports fan?

I was really taken by Lou Gehrig when I was a little boy because of his demeanor and his stamina. Remember, he played in over 2,000 consecutive games at that time, which was since eclipsed by Cal Ripken. But you know how everyone has a sports hero when they’re a boy? This one really stayed with me. The concept of stamina and persistence. And it turned me into a Yankees fan.

Persistence is a word that a lot of people associate with you in your public life. Is Gehrig an inspiration in this regard?

Oh, most definitely. There’s only one picture in my office on the wall, only one: Lou Gehrig.

When did you realize that League of Fans was a project you wanted to be involved in?

Well, actually there’s a precursor. We had a fans’ group in the 1970s that put out a very probing newsletter. The idea then was how fans are being ripped off; they had no voice; they had no organized role. They were being overcharged. They were being subjected to blackouts in their hometown for example, if the stadium didn’t sell out. This was also the beginning of a move for tax-funded stadiums and ballparks. There were really quite a lot of issues. We had 1,000 dues-paying members, but we couldn’t get it beyond that. But my desire was to have fans organize–because after all, they’re consumers. They’re consumers at the service of mammoth sports enterprises that have antitrust exemptions, that have all sorts of tax-depreciating rights for their players.

I mean, it’s almost a mint to produce money. They gouged the fans as consumers; parking, food, tickets, and they gouged them as taxpayers too. So it was really a composite situation that is replayed throughout the economy between large corporations and consumers. Since, as sports fans, we’re very, very clever and understanding of the rules of the game, the strategies and the players, and…know the history of the players and teams and [are] loyal to the teams, I said, “Imagine if voters did their homework, and imagine if voters had that kind of tactical and strategic sense. Imagine voters who rooted for rookies–if voters wanted to give new candidates a chance to play on the field. So we started leagueoffans.org, and once again we came up with all kinds of needs to organize fans–especially to oppose tax-funded stadiums while clinics, libraries and schools were crumbling the the same cities for lack of public investment.

Yeah, there was over $600 million dollars spent to build the new Washington Nationals’ baseball stadium, but if you look around Washington, DC, you see schools crumbling, clinics–the usual urban deterioration. And not enough recreational facilities for youngsters so they can engage in participatory sports, not just spectator sports.

(more…)

ART; Home Team Advantage

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
Published: February 15, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The New York Times

Matthew Barney

ART:21: How close does the filming process follow the pre-written script and storyboards for “CREMASTER 3?”

BARNEY: It depends. You’ve seen the way the storyboard is structured and in certain cases it follows how a real storyboard would be drawn. If there’s a detail of something we’re shooting that needs to tell a story itself, those tend to be drawn. Bigger, narrative situations are really just organized as written lists. They’re scheduled by camera setup in cases like this where the camera car was there for a day, so we covered everything we could from the car. A lot of these angles—aside from the moving camera car are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted, which is something we do often, and it happens a lot with sports references that are made in all the projects.

This is a kind of anchor, a place, mimicking sports cinematography. Like NFL films. Do you know NFL films? NFL films are a real big influence of mine. It’s all 35mm material shot on all the NFL teams. It’s a fleet of cinematographers that follow the different teams and then I believe that footage is sold to the different teams. Highlight tapes are made and, as a kid, we always had to watch these highlight tapes around lunch time at football camps and stuff. We’d go to different football camps at different universities and things, and there was always a sort of film hour or something like that which would be sometime around a meal. And you’d sit there with a bunch of football players and we’d watch highlight films from different NFL teams. But it’s great… it’s really great camera work. All that stuff.

ART:21: So many of your interests are all-American in nature. How does this fit into your work?

BARNEY: Well, I think a lot of the references I make to American traditions—whether it’s athletics or a kind of car culture—I think those are things that I’ve certainly grown up with and understand. It makes those things very available to me to use, and I consider them as kinds of vessels. I don’t think that by the time they’ve been hashed through the project they’re representative of what they necessarily are in everyday life. They’re used as carriers, which is one of the reasons why the vehicles, in general, keep reappearing in the pieces in that they are carriers, literally. The concept of a vehicle draws a line between locations, such as the Isle of Mann and Budapest. If there was a structure that was greater than the “CREMASTER” structure, it would have to be something like UPS—something that’s fleet oriented, that would have air transport and a kind of local transport to really finish that line. You have a kind of consistent color in the way that UPS is brown and the logo is gold. I think that I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. So, in other words, that’s the way I would say I have a relationship to car culture. It isn’t really about loving cars. It’s sort of about needing them.

ART:21: You also make a lot of references to ancient myths.

BARNEY: Yes. Sometimes I take on stories quite directly, like with “DRAWING RESTRAINT 7.” That referred to Marsyas and Apollo. But it’s also about taking on a mythological structure and then imposing an internal logic on it. Like if you were inside the stomach and esophagus, you’d probably say that same thing about somebody throwing up. You’d say, “Wow, the stomach is heroic for getting that mutant material out.” In other words, it is about taking a structure that’s mythological and putting it into a frame that’s more about something doing what it’s compelled to do, there to do. So a lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn’t have an ego when it’s wanting to throw up. It just does it. But it could also be looked at from a heroic, mythological angle for sure.

Excerpt from an interview with ART21

More Cremaster

More Drawing Restraint