Boxing & art – who’s in the ring

I like Tyler Green’s three-part
look at the Wexner Center for the Arts‘ Hard Targets, especially Green’s take on David Hammons’ Champ from 1983.

David Hammons’ 1989 Champ is impeccable and clever, beautiful and sad. The materials are simple: inner tube, (silver) duct tape, and boxing gloves (with laces hanging down). Hammons smartly mixes a deflated sport with deflated materials to examine the role of the prize fighter in American culture, especially black culture. Before the NBA was a dreamed-of escape-valve for urban youth, boxing offered the bruising, difficult way up. Fighters such as Jack Johnson and Joe Louis were heroes to black America, fighters who crossed-over and had success in mainstream society. But with success came tragedy: Louis died broke, his funeral paid for by German rival Max Schmeling. The tragedy went beyond individual figures: Countless young black men hoped boxing would provide a way up but instead were merely pummeled, used as entertainment or in match-fixing schemes, as disposable cogs in brutal entertainment.

Two Seattle artists who belong in the ring are Laura C. Wright and Randy Hayes.

Wright’s Momma Said Knock You Out
(wool jacket and leather
30 x 24.5 x 5.25 inches
2008) is a tribute to Hammons with a feminist, up-and-at-’em twist.

Hayes began his career in early 1980s, painting figures who deliberately draw the hard light of public scrutiny: strippers, boxers and prostitutes. Light splatters their bodies like oil hitting a hot griddle.

As John Yau pointed out in his monograph on Hayes from 2000, titled, Randy Hayes, The World Reveiled, Hayes uses photography to destabilize whatever reality his brush manages to suggest to push his scenes into the unreliable realm of hallucination.