"Breaking the Huddle" in Mixed Signals

“Breaking the Huddle,” a lecture on the opening of a new gallery at the Middlebury College Art Museum, existed in my mind as something very stereotypical. The new gallery, Mixed Signals, seeks to discuss “popular notions of masculinity and sport.” As perhaps the least athletic person you could ever meet, I expected to see solely images of sculpted, poised men exploding with bravado and narcissism. As it turned out, there was a lot of that. But when Christopher Bedford, the curator of the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, dove into the intent of artists who generated these images, it all seemed much more deep and beautiful.

“Breaking the Huddle,” according to Bedford, “began as a concept [while working] at the Los Angeles County Art Museum. The gallery exists on a threshold that hasn’t been crossed very much.”

Bedford then gave a preamble on another place in his life where the concept of this exhibit was being formed in his mind: as a member of the infamously sub-par Oberlin football team. At this time, Bedford “was turning [his] attention to contemporary art” and “the conception of gender in sports. There was a lack of conversation on this subject.”

As a football player, Bedford was interested in how we conceive our own gender. The lecture covered three main themes that surrounded sport-themed art, and it examined the works of many artists in and out of the collection.
The first major focus of the exhibition was attire and self-presentation of athletes. The first big artist for this subject, and Bedford’s entire concept, was Matthew Barney, whose Cremaster Cycle of Films and 2002 Retrospective Gallery at the Guggenheim thrust him into the public eye. Bedford gave an example of one of the opening works at 2002 Retrospective, “a bench press made of Vaseline,” which conjures traditional stereotypes of a bench press and sexual connotations of Vaseline.

The pure aesthetic side of self-presentation in sports was demonstrated by many artists in the exhibition. Renowned photographer Catherine Opie took a series of photographers themed on high school athletes. According to Bedford, Opie took the photographs “within 10 to 15 seconds” of meeting the athletes in order to capture how they wanted to be seen as athletes. Other artists include Mark Bradford, a homosexual LA-based black artist whose major work focused on him playing basketball in downtown LA wearing a ball gown in LA Lakers colors. Another example lay in renowned British artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s photo of two boxing heavyweights post-match.

The next major focus of this presentation was on the commerce of sport. One of the most iconic images in the presentation was a piece by Hank Willis Thomas depicting the chest of a black athlete “scarred” with the Nike symbol across his chest. Perhaps my favorite piece in the presentation was by Brian Jungen, a Canadian artist with Native American roots. His sculpture collection, Prototype for a New Understanding, consisted of a series of Native American war masks constructed out of Air Jordan basketball shoes.

But the most provocative theme of the presentation was how much we focus on athletes. One of the prime examples was of Douglas Gordan’s Zidane, a film focusing entirely on soccer great Zinedine Zidane. Bedford describes the experience as “incredibly claustrophobic.” Paul Pfeiffer’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse depicted basketball players by themselves on courts with all advertisements stripped away, to show how focused the crowd was on the players above anything else. Taylor-Wood’s iconic David Robert Joseph Beckham, depicting David Beckham pretending to sleep, often elicits viewer responses about his “sexual appeal.”

In the intro to his lecture, Bedford stated that he didn’t want this lecture to be “a seminar” or some kind of intellectual one-sided discourse where he would be talking down to the people. Perhaps this is addressed by the nature of his presentation. The audience was exposed to only images. And perhaps with this presentation, the sheer diversity of the collection would show through and allow everyone to take away something that they like and form their own intelligent opinions. In an audience Q&A, he was asked what he would like an athlete, as a stereotypical non-museum-goer, to feel after seeing this exhibition. Bedford said he would like the gallery to give such groups “the incentive to be more inclusive and express themselves more freely.”