Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA
Mark Bradford, Practice (2003). Digital-video projection with sound
‘Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport’ sets out to investigate constructions of masculinity as they appear in mainstream athletic culture, through the work of artists Mark Bradford, Harun Farocki, Brian Jungen, Shaun El C. Leonardo, Collier Schorr and Joe Sola. Curator Christopher Bedford is concerned with representation: he wants to reform an archetype, a symbolic figure – the ‘masculine’ subject as it is presented through the rituals of sport. Such archetypes certainly populate the broader discursive field that surrounds athletic practice: they are consistently reiterated in the press, by sport fans, and in the cinema. As legible stereotypes they are easy enough to ‘unmask’, and Jungen and Bradford do so with some wit. Other works resist this particular framework. Schorr and Leonardo, for example, point to how individual athletes develop their identities on the playing field, where standards of physical capability act as a foil to – and in some cases transcend – a gendered vision of identity.
For his series ‘Prototypes for New Understanding’ (1998-2005), Jungen stitched Nike Air Jordan sneakers into sculptures that resemble the masks, sticks and ceremonial accessories produced by the First Nations of the Northwest Coast. Jungen’s work begins and ends with the objects themselves. He positions his ‘prototypes’ as a critique of athletic branding and capitalist consumerism in general, expressing deep skepticism towards the idea that identity of any sort can be bought and sold. Although he does not directly intervene in, or appropriate from, the realm of advertising, Bradford riffs on the mainstream media’s perpetuation of a specialized iconography linking sport and masculinity. In his video Practice (2003), the artist – a tall, young black man – casts himself in the legible stereotype of an American basketball player. A close-up video shows the artist as he feints, bounces a ball and throws hoops: his uniform, in the Los Angeles Lakers’ iconic purple and yellow, is a cumbersome billowing skirt. Bradford’s athlete is positioned in antagonistic opposition to his uniform, a signifier which reduces the individual to gender, team and number, and which Bradford literalizes as an encumbrance.
Leonardo and Schorr focus on athletic practice itself. They position the body as an abstract entity whose ability to perform within sport’s matrix of physical demand and temporal immediacy dominates individual players’ ongoing efforts to establish and maintain athletic identity. Sport’s defining standards are shown to routinely push questions of gender aside.
Schorr’s photographs of half-naked adolescent wrestlers present singular moments of intense mental concentration and physical strain. 152 lbs (H.T.) (2003) shows a young man’s head and torso as he hangs from an unseen support outside the image’s frame. Covered in a sheen of sweat, his downturned face grimaces at the approaching pain, muscles straining against a counter-force which, it appears, may out-do him. Rather than ‘freezing’ a moment or ‘stopping’ time, Schorr’s record of lived bodily experience becomes an index of the perpetually ongoing, moment-to-moment mental engagement of athletes. Leonardo’s sculpture Bull in the Ring (2008) emphasizes a very similar point. A large ring of ominous black football helmets hang from the ceiling, facing inwards toward a final helmet which hangs alone – replicating a football drill in which individual players are trained to prepare for attack from all sides. Leonardo’s helmets are stand-ins for individual bodies, hollow shells which make a presence out of absence and evoke a sort of ghostly physicality. As supplements to a set of invisible bodies, Leonardo’s symbolic prosthetics suggest that athletes are fundamentally defined by their ability to perpetually push their own physical limits.
‘Hard Targets’ neglects to distinguish between a broader ‘culture of sport’ and actual sporting practice. Such a distinction would perhaps lay the ground for a more explicit investigation of their overlap – their conflicts and complicities – and would greatly illuminate the works selected. Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007) is characteristic of this. The 12-screen film shows how sport provides a formal site for the construction of identity through conforming to (or resisting) a set of over-drawn ‘masculine’ ideals construed in terms of emotion, of physical prowess, and of pain. The work is a hypnotic rendering of the 2006 World Cup championship between France and Italy. Alongside (and atop) documentary evidence the artist presents multiple, real-time schematized views of the game. Players challenge each other, butting chests. They insult one another; they engage in utterly transparent histrionics. And yet the presence of Farocki’s digitized moving schemas on top of real-time television coverage shows this all to be an ongoing sham. The trajectories of players’ movements, each traced as a coloured line, eventually accumulate into an abstracted knot – we cannot tell where choreographed movement ends, and where players depart from the ‘masculinized’ theatrical script, to exert their own will to act. This is a knot which athletes themselves cannot unravel.
Sarah-Neel Smith
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