The Art of the Game: Benjamin Reed
On June 24, 2009, the U.S. men’s soccer team shocked the sports world by winning 2:0 over Spain’s national team. Soccer, a sport that usually does not garner the brightest spotlight in the U.S. media, suddenly rose to headline status on front pages; winning will do that, especially in a country whose competitive culture hardly misses a chance to emphasize the importance of finishing in first place. As a game, soccer allows for considerable creativity on the players’ part in a rule-bound environment, yet, like most team sports, soccer is also big business, a product marketed to millions of eager fans. The combination of cleverly controlled marketing, mass cultural and ideological appeal, and individual players’ strategic creativity, becomes a complex trope for power, manipulation, and control in Benjamin Reed’s current body of work, Strategy Through Creativity.
The very philosophy of sport is rooted in the challenge to overcome a set obstacle or opponent, to solve, through athleticism and strategy, the problem presented by the imperative to win. The artist, understood as a creative problem solver, meets challenges as well but is less subjected to proscriptive methods and rules. While both athletic and creative practices cycle through periods of lull, build up, and plateau, the various disciplines of sports adhProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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e to a clear goal. Such clarity of purpose and vision plays a less pivotal role in art, where challenges and goals tend to be more idiosyncratic. Reed’s work suggests more than a passing resemblance between creative and athletic practice.
Drawing on his extensive experience as an athlete is nothing new to Reed’s work. The rhythms of training recur in his creative practice. In the video loop Spinning Spheres (2007), for instance, Reed abstractly recreates patterns of accelerating and decelerating performance, creating the illusion of endlessly spinning, gravity defying spheres. The loop itself, lacking any definitive start and end points, metaphorically recreates athletic practice and, more materially, the shape of sports arenas. In contrast to his preoccupation with loops, Reed is equally fascinated by decisive moments that can make or break athletic success. The fascination with such moments of utmost physical discipline —the split second before the pole vaulter leaps, before the sprinter takes off, before the diver breaks the water’s surface—carries over into Reed’s current body of work, where pivotal moments from the history of soccer are diagramed and staged on white model fields and a piece of black slate.
The austere palette of mostly black and white lends an unexpected elegance to the soccer models and the figures of the managers, plotting strategies at the blackboard with a military air. The allusion is intended: the soccer tables invoke war boards where strategies and plans of attack are simulated prior to an actual engagement managers’ size, slightly larger than life, adds to the semblance of overbearing power and control. In comparison, the player figures appear tiny, mere pawns in a game run by titans of mass cultural entertainment. As we lean over the tables, Reed positions us next to the managers and invites us to recognize ourselves in their strategic roles. Yet the invitation is deceptive: perhaps, rather than being in charge, we are running, hearts beating hard and fast, trying to anticipate the next move, the next chance, the next play to bring us closer to that ever elusive goal—winning?
It bears remembering, that the world of sports is no more about sports than the art world is about art, as Dave Hickey astutely observes (204). Instead, Hickey writes, “the sports world conducts an ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete. The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things—or it would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out” (204). What Hickey suggests here is that art could benefit from the same analysis we bring to sports. But where Hickey sees a democratic referendum in action, Reed sees a carefully plotted and managed war board, where the generals of commercialism are busy trying to manipulate market forces.
Both arts and sports offer the illusion of a world apart, whether it is the raucous world of sports arenas or the contemplative, white-walled world of art museums. The soccer stadium serves as a postmodern carnivalesque space, where the rules of everyday proper behavior are temporarily suspended: face paint, chanting, and intense identification with a team allow for an emotional outlet that ultimately is supposed to ensure a docile return to the status quo, once the game is over. Not surprisingly, as a space designed to contain unruly behavior, the arena is a heavily guarded and policed environment, where even national rivalries and animosities can be negotiated in symbolically mediated form and consumed as spectacular entertainment.
Recognizing the political utility of entertainment has a long history. In ancient Rome, emperors provided “Panem et Circenses,” bread and games, as a political pacifier for the masses. While much of popular culture today readily offers such social distraction, where does the world of art fit? Is it just another circus, another game? A world apart that promises an idealist outlet, a respite from the ravages of capitalist commercialism, an alternative space where we can replenish our faith in the higher power that is the goodness of art? Do we, thus restored, dutifully return to reality? This particular loop isn’t one that Reed is willing to accept.
The true art of the game, whether soccer or art, lies in harnessing the potential for inspiring a nameless longing—for cooperation off the field, for those moments of heightened awareness and single-minded attention, for being touched and infuriated and inspired in ways that transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. This experience can serve as an antidote to the soporific rites of a controlled, administered culture and serve as a catalyst for transformation. To paraphrase Hickey, Strategy Through Creativity is no more and no less about soccer than it is about art itself.
Bibliography
Bakhtin, Michael. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Tran.s Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Brottmann, Mika. “Joyful Mayhem: Bakhtin and Football Fans.” High Theory/Low
Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 21—34.
Hickey, Dave. “Frivolity and Unction.” Air Guitar. Los Angeles: Art issues. Press, 1997. 199—209.
Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Routledge, 1971.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
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