During the World Cup this summer, in the midst of a sort of respite from the the dumpster fire that is the the state of the world, it felt like there was this moment where sports and the very best of each nation’s culture seemed to shine. Koreans were hanging out with the Mexico fans, the Algerian team was endearing themselves to the residents of Lawrence, Kansas, and the Scottish were, well, drinking Boston dry. It’s been a month, and once you sort of forced yourself to look beyond the corruption at the top of FIFA and pretty much every single organization involved in the Cup, there was something beautiful to watch. I mean, “Wonderwall” at the end of the English wins? Count me in.
But what it also brought up is the importance of art and protest in the midst of these world events that tend to be the most unified in sport. I walked into Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at PAMM last week sort of expecting to be underwhelmed and in fact was overwhelmed by the wide breadth of work, but also by just how many contemporary artists have put the symbolism of sport into their work. The show originated at SFMOMA and moved to PAMM in Miami just in time for the World Cup, and though it just came down, it brought up some really interesting points, but mostly that sports can be art and art can be a unique and defining way to understand art. The symbiosis is fascinating to explore.
For Get in the Game, Hank Willis Thomas's Guernica — a wall-sized retelling of Picasso's antiwar painting, stitched entirely out of decommissioned NBA jerseys, felt like the showstopper. No paint, just mesh and polyester and the ghost of every player who ever wore that number. Picasso built his original after a bombing raid on a Basque town; Thomas rebuilds it out of the uniforms we cheer for on say, a Tuesday night, and somewhere in that translation is basically the whole argument of the show: war and sport borrow the same vocabulary of sacrifice, and that an artist noticed first.
One of the works that I often think about when I think about this conversation between art and sport is Kota Ezawa's National Anthem, a hand-drawn, rotoscoped loop of Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, over and over, stripped of the commentary and the think-pieces and the outrage cycle, until all that's left is the gesture itself, a body choosing stillness in a stadium built for motion. You forget, watching it, that this was ever a controversy. It just looks like what it actually was: a man praying in public.
And then, because the show landed in Miami, because Miami is where Ali trained before he was fully Ali, sparring at the 5th Street Gym under Angelo Dundee, running the sand at dawn because the segregated hotels on the beach wouldn't let him near the pool, it got me thinking about the photograph I keep coming back to, the one everybody keeps coming back to: Neil Leifer's shot of Ali standing over Liston in Lewiston, arm cocked, mouth open, daring a man on the canvas to get up. Leifer wasn't in this show. He probably wasn't thinking of himself as an artist that night either, he was a 23-year-old photographer with two rolls of film and better positioning than anyone else in the room. But sixty years later that image hangs in museums, gets taught in photography seminars, sells for six figures at auction, because at some point the line between documentation and art just erodes. The punch is a fact. What we still feel looking at it is not.
Which is maybe the whole thing I'm trying to say. Sport, left alone, gives us box scores and highlight reels and, in the case of the World Cup, a trophy handed to a different country every four years. It’s thrilling, but victory is fleeting; forgets itself almost immediately. Art is the thing that stops a moment from just being a moment. It's the mechanism by which a knee on a sideline, or a fist over a fallen body, or a jersey turned into a painting about a bombing, gets to mean something longer than the ninety minutes or twelve rounds it took to happen. Sport doesn't need art to happen. But it needs art to be remembered as something more than a score. That's the symbiosis — competition gives art a body to think with, and art gives competition a soul to survive on after the final whistle. And I think I’m ready to take this conversation more seriously now. —Evan Pricco
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