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Lynda Nead on Violence and Sports Photography

October 24, 2013 by
Ali throws a right hook against Brian London

Ali throws a right hook against Brian London (1966)

Lynda Nead is a feminist art historian – The Female Nude (1992) and Myths of Sexuality (1988) are pathfinding works. Turns out Nead is a boxer, and has recently turned her attention to representations of boxing. Her 2001 essay “Stilling the Punch” offers an outstanding intervention regarding the ways that people tend think look at sports photography. One thing I really appreciate about this essay is the ease with which she parries the observation that sports is “just” war in the form of play. Yes, she says – but the things shared across representations of war and representations of sports are far, far more interesting than people tend to think. Two paragraphs from the opening pages of the essay:

War cannot be withstood and it is the stuff of pictures – it has within it something pictorial, but so has sport. I am fascinated by this offhand connection between the visual appeal of war and sport and not just in the obvious way that international sport may be seen as an enactment of patriotic interests and national conflicts. Is there not a deeper connection between the idealization and desecration of the body in warfare and in sport that makes this pairing intriguing and provocative? If we shift our attention from war photography to sports photography might we understand something different about violence, pain and representation and the havoc that violence wreaks on the human body?

Sports photography has been completely overlooked in the history of photography. It is unclear why this has been the case, but perhaps it is to do with its everyday nature and its association with the world of leisure; its place on the back pages rather than the front pages of news reporting. If sports photographs are the subjects of exhibitions, as, for example, in the exhibition of photographs of boxer Muhammad Ali in London in 2010, it is usually because of the identity of their subjects, in which the nature of the image changes from sports photograph to portrait. To concentrate discussions of violence and photography on images of war is to limit our understanding of the nature of the visual representation of violence and of how it enters into the language of other areas of social and cultural discourse. –  Lynda Nead, “Stilling the Punch: Boxing, Violence and the Photographic Image” in The Journal of Visual Culture 10: 305 (2011)

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The Fist

October 22, 2013 by
Wu Tsang, The Fist Is Stil Up, 2010, Neon, acrylic on wood panel, 40 x 70 x 10 inches

Wu Tsang, The Fist Is Still Up, 2010, Neon, acrylic on wood panel, 40 x 70 x 10 inches

 

Is it? Is the fist still up? I love this work – which I’m taking out of context here. The raised fist – what does it signify outside the context of the ’68 Olympics? That question has had me looking for raised fists in contemporary art – or, as is the case here – invocations of the fist.

 

Filed Under: Art, Olympics, Queer Sport Spectacles

The Feminism of MMA?

October 10, 2013 by

Is MMA ahead of every other sport when it comes to the unambivalent, take-no-prisoners presentation of women’s athleticism?

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Becoming an Image: In the Ring with Cassils

October 6, 2013 by

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Last night I got to see Heather Cassils perform Becoming an Image. In this performance, Cassils boxes a plinth-like column of clay to the ground. This is done in the dark: the audience enters the room, stands in a ring around the clay sculpture which is lit from above. The room goes black and the artist and photographer are led into the circle. Cassils then attacks the clay – at first you can’t imagine that Cassils will be able to beat it down before “gassing out.”

The photographer (last night it was Manuel Vason) circles Cassils, taking photographs every now and again. The flash illuminates the action – but you of course don’t see action. You only see a flash image, frozen for a second into the retina. It took me a while to conceptually separate my experience of those images from the images captured by Vason’s camera – the image the audience member sees feel distinctly photographic.

For the duration of the approximately 20 minute performance, you hear Cassils breath and grunt like a fighter in the ring. Or a fighter working the bag. It’s gym noise.

I am sure this performance feels very different for people who have boxing or a martial arts practice. Your body knows what is happening to the artist’s body – people train and fight in three-minute rounds for a reason. Punching and kicking is exhausting; these are a technically and physically demanding actions. The more you tire, the harder it is to keep your concentration and hold your form – and if you don’t do the latter, not only will you tire even faster, you’ll hurt yourself. Even if you are fighting a lump of clay. Especially if you are fighting a lump of clay.

Training on a bag is very very hard – and a bag gives to impact. So, if you have some familiarity with the sport this work cites, you know that it is intensely durational. You can hear it in the artist’s breathing – weezing, gasping. A solid block of clay not only doesn’t give – after the performance the artist told me that it seems to push back. It has its own resilience.

Becoming an Image is an engagement with the idea of the object, but it is also a very intense workout with the idea of the athlete, and with the image of the artist. What this performance does to gender – that’s not only another blog post, that’s a whole book.

 

 

Filed Under: Art, Queer Sport Spectacles Tagged With: ,

Gym Music

October 3, 2013 by

One of the artists I’m hoping to write about in my next book helped choreograph this ad for Gillette.

That artist is Heather Cassils. Cassils is performing this weekend in Birmingham, UK.

Filed Under: Art, Media, Uncategorized