the culture fields / blog

I went to a Northern Michigan University hockey game last night, my first live sporting event in about…fifteen years? Having spent the first eight or nine years of life in Detroit, I was trained to be a Detroit Red Wings fan (I even recall naming some of our dog’s puppies after them, albeit cutsie versions of the actual names: Yzie, Probie, etc. etc.). Even so, tonight was a strange experience – it felt very foreign to be there and I was fighting my usual sarcastic internal dialogue much of the evening. There are some extremely sincere people going to these games and watching the rise and fall of their emotions as they watch the game was pushing the irony buttons in me.

Being at a live sporting event is a little overwhelming for me – the constant movement, the lighting, the noise – and is very very different from my typical museum surroundings. I even closed my eyes here and there and just took in the sounds – “c’mon Cats”, “let’s go Cats!”, cheering, clapping (from hands both real and fake – red plastic hand-shaped noise makers abound), skates on ice, sticks on ice, horns, marching bands, yelling. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the 500 or so people there had set foot in the museum on campus – not in a critical way, just curious. Then I wondered if they hadn’t and then did, if their experience in the museum would be similar to the one I was having in the arena.

When I finally stopped fixating on the audience and the psychology of how people spend leisure time, I started thinking about the few artists that I’m familiar with who incorporate sports into their work (o.k., this was during some slow times in the game, I admit it). Paul Pfeiffer immediately came to mind:

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (17), 2004, Fujiflex Digital C-print, 60 x 48 inches, Ed. of 6

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (24), 2006, Fujiflex Digital C-print, 60 x 48 inches, Ed. of 6

I really really enjoy Pfeiffer’s work – his exhibition at the MCA in Chicago was one of the best I’ve seen there. His Horsemen series uses a process of reductivism to play with the way we see stills taken from sports scenes. As the audience at sporting events, we follow the movement of the ball or puck or whatever, or we focus on a specific player. By removing specific elements from the scene the figures left are decontextualized from the “action” and the focus often shifts to the spectators or the audience.

The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle), 2001

Pfieffer uses the same process with video loops, also taken from sporting events and again removing the figures central to the action leaves the audience behind simultaneously looking essentially at nothing. The viewer of the video gazes upon the viewers of the sporting events and vice versa – Pfeiffer is attempting to make the spectators the spectated.

Other videos by Pfieffer also play with the typical emotions of sporting events by capturing a few intense seconds of different moments in a game and looping them in forward and then reverse, forward then reverse and so on. Again, by decontextualizing the moment, the emotions portrayed in the loop are blurred, leaving those involved caught in a moment between overjoyed bliss and horrendous pain. To top it off, the titles of the works often reference biblical or historical events (John 3:16, Race Riot, etc.) to imbue the works with a subtle social commentary of the hierarchies we create with popular culture and sporting events.

Another sports-related artwork I’ve heard about is Ingrid Calame’s new installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Titled Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Calame used the victory lap that 2005 Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon made to create a large wall painting. Ten volunteer assistants helped Calame trace the tire marks from the pavement, then transfer that onto Mylar and finally transferred the drawings onto the wall with oil-based enamel.

Conceptually I like this as a pairing of extremes. One could approach it from the extreme act of racing compared to a sometimes opposite extreme act of an artist painting quietly. From the limited photos I’ve seen I’m not sure how successful they are visually though. There is a Pollock-esque feel to them, and the latent feminist in me wants to enjoy the thought of a female mimicking a style and action that’s been canonized as a machismo act of aggression. Again, that’s conceptual though.

Matt Dupont, who I went to SAIC with, uses his given name to work under the label of Dupont Sports. His MFA exhibition consisted of paintings he made from dipping tennis balls in paint and hitting them against the canvas:

The canvases were broken up by thick black lines – resembling a court and also perhaps referencing Mondrian? He’s used the “D” logo on all of the works I’ve seen him produce – branding his art and blurring the lines between that of artistic practice and licensing deal. Dupont Sports also had a piece at Hyde Park’s Experimental Station last spring:

(Dupont Sports is in the top right corner. It was basically a ramp with the hole at the top of the curve. Yours truly scored a hole in one on it.)

Experimental Station and a group called Material Exchange held a competition for anyone to design a putt putt hole using leftover Astroturf from a Martin Kippenberger show at the Renaissance Society (art + design + recycling + sports? Who knew?). While this is something completely different from what Calame or Pfieffer are doing, I find it perhaps the most interesting and accessible mixture of sports and art if only for the interactive component.

Back to the game. Lucky for me, the game ended up being pretty exciting with “The Cats” winning with 7 seconds left in overtime. On the way out my hockey-going companion suggested I start inviting Wildcat Willy to the art receptions and have him toss free t-shirts into the crowd…then I might be ensured a good turnout for the receptions.