It’s big! It’s 365, 24/7. It’s the Sports Show.
And yet. Not as many people tuned in as we might have expected. Lots of pondering, head scratching, here’s what I woulda dones.
My guess? Sports folks were shy of the show because it was in an art museum and art folks were shy of the show because it had sports as the advertised content. Anyone in either group who didn’t make it to the museum to see it missed out on a wonderful, challenging story about media and sport.
This was a great year for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts with Edo Pop leading the way, an imaginative and beautiful showcasing of the museum’s collection of ukiyo-e art and its afterlife in contemporary Japan. The Sports Show was the second MIA exhibition of the year, this time showcasing the thoughtful curator of photography, David Little.
When first chosen to tour this show, all I had to go on was the title: The Sports Show. I imagined, well, I can’t recall quite what I imagined, but it wasn’t a positive imagine. Sports and the MIA? I couldn’t make the connection.
Well, I can now. This show, apparently about sports, in fact takes the measure of media as it interacts with a specific segment of culture, a segment uniquely suited to its strengths. Media can stop action, make it go faster, slower, allow us to see again, and again if we want, a moment of unusual grace, controversy or excitement.
David Little’s choices lead us through the gradual evolution of the special relationship between the functional advantages of media, capturing events that often happen faster than we see or in places we can’t get to, or from angles to which we don’t have access even if we are present in person. This relationship, headed toward the full blown marital moment of the Sports Show, the spectacle that is today’s always on access to sports, has not only a purely technical story, but a cultural story as well.
When the cameras began to flash, like in the early days of basketball shown in Frances Benjamin Watson’s cyanotype of women learning the game in 1896, and as the images produced got fed into the ever hungry mouths of printing presses grinding out newspapers and magazines, the images and the moments they documented became part of the historical record.
That record included Roger Bannister breaking the tape and the four-minute mile, Y.A. Tittle’s very public moment of private despair, Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics, amazing technical advances by two servants of the 20th century’s most radical political ideologies, fascism and communism and the eerie moment, at the end of the 1966 Soccer World Cup, when the victorious British crowd sang When the Saints Come Marching In to be answered by the German crowd’s rendition of the 1st verse of the German National Anthem, the so-called Hitler verse. (note that this was not photography or videography but recorded sound)
The record also included fall after fall after fall after fall of boxers, anonymous and unconscious in the moments before they hit the canvas, underscoring Joyce Carol Oates wonderful line from the exhibition catalog, “You play basketball, you play baseball, but nobody plays boxing.”
While great photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Avedon produced iconic images of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lew Alcindor, highlighting the mythmaking possibilities in the special relationship, other artists recorded images whose valence changed through time, exposing attitudes toward race. The 1977 video work focused on OJ Simpson could not be seen without first passing through the later experience of his trial.
This show limns a love story, featuring a long courtship with many twists and turns, but one ending in a final spectacular wedding of photography, video, media distribution and the never-ending, literally now never-ending, story of sports throughout the world.
Thanks, David. It was an honor to represent your vision to MIA visitors.