"Sport" at Socrates Sculpture Park
James Westcott
The exhibition "Sport" at the charmingly ramshackle Socrates Sculpture Park on the water in Queens reached a perplexing, almost dada (anti) climax this Saturday. On another boiling hot day, a dozen or so snowboarder dudes hung out, mostly shirtless, around Nicholas Arbasky’s "social sculpture" of several short snowboard ramps, apparently modeled on real ones–it’s called, exhaustingly, Terrain Park Featuring Backside 180 at Heavenly and Switch Boardshack at Salt Lake Winter Olympiad. After much chillaxing in the sun, and then faffing around with boots, laces, and snowboard straps, the boarders eventually climbed to the top of the ramp and strapped themselves in.
Then came another waiting period, in which an assistant would sprinkle some viscous fake plastic snow onto a rail below, for lubrication, and the rider psyched himself up and photographers got themselves ready. Eventually, the rider would launch himself down the ramp, do a tiny, heaving jump and slide along the rail, before slamming down on the hard grass below. The whole journey down lasted about a nano-second. It hardly seemed worth all the effort. But the absurdity was an interesting side effect of the piece, and we did at least get to observe the riders’ highly performative and elaborately casual preparation techniques.
Alix Lambert?s brutal concrete and steel boxing ring nearby was by far the best piece, appearing like a vision in a retired, traumatized boxer?s mangled mind. Peter Simensky’s Eyes On The Prize –two sets of bleacher seats set face to face–is a neat and very postmodern literalization of fans’ increasing self-love, ultimately cheering their own performance. But the piece is exactly the same conceptually, and almost identical in execution, as Bruce Nauman’s piece at Dia: Beacon. It was rather embarrassing to see it again here.
The roaring crowd sounds emanating from speakers next to Satch Hoyt’s transparent soccer goal gave people the chance to bathe in artificial adulation, providing another short comment about sport and vanity. In Lee Walton’s piece, there’s the corollary to vanity: self-flagellation. He’s gradually lugging 35-pound weights over to Queens from Manhattan to build his piece.
The huge orange rubber balls caught in trees here display a nice–and rare–sense of surrealism and humor, and, best of all, they lead you to the fenced-off scrapyard at the back, where old sculptures go to die–the most haunting part of the park.
For the most part, the works here, which seemed subdued in their critiques and a little prissy in comparison to the raw power of their subject matter, showed that sport is perhaps uniquely untranslatable into art. Sport already has all the beauty, exhilaration, and performativity you could want, and has a simplistic sincerity that art cannot touch, and has no need to. It felt very strange to catch (on the fourth attempt) a football–spat out from one of those throwing machines–and be photographed as a participant in an artwork.
The atmosphere of Socrates Sculpture Park doesn?t lend itself to grave monumentality, and since the public is going to climb all over the works anyway, it was a smart move to make the pieces explicitly interactive. Still, if it was fun the curators were gong for, how about building an enormous elaborate assault course, with ropes, ditches, walls, tunnels, nets… that would be wild, and the curators could justify it by calling it an installation that "examines issues of endurance" or something. But seeing as I had to sign a waiver before catching the football, promising I wouldn’t sue if the ball stung my hands, perhaps this kind of strenuous, genuine participation isn’t legally feasible. Is this what art does to sport–convert a familiar and fun physical ritual into something apparently dangerous, aesthetic, and ultimately distant? Maybe better off going to the gym.
Image gallery
Nicholas Arbasky, Terrain Park Featuring Backside 180 at Heavenly and Switch Boardshack at Salt Lake Olympiad, 2005
Peter Simensky, Eyes on the Prize, 2005
