OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

OtherPeoples Pixels: Tell us about the work in Past Time, your most recent solo show at Packer-Schopf Gallery in Chicago.

Geoffry Smalley: For several years I've been exploring social and political issues related to American sports, and Past Time is the latest body of work. In my daily dealings as an art conservator, I think about the works I treat, their place in American art history and the nature of authenticity. I have to hide my hand when treating an art work, and because of that I began to think of ways I could use historical images for my own purposes. At the time, I was also reading about the rise of sports during the Industrial Revolution, which reflected America's progression into the modern age.

OPP: I'm especially interested in the sports vistas, in which you insert contemporary arenas and stadiums into romantic landscape paintings. 

GS: The vistas are reproductions of Hudson River School paintings onto which I have painted images of various sports arenas. Painters like Thomas Cole and Asher Durand held cautiously optimistic views of society's progress. They believed in the sublime, the closer-to-God power of untamed nature. They captured these unspoiled vistas at the very moment our country steamrolled west and grew into the industrial superpower it is now. Sports flourished in the same way. At a time when workers first began to have leisure time, baseball emerged from rural America. It was played at what was then considered a rapid pace, under the sun, during the growing season, affected by the elements. Football is industrial manufacturing plus military readiness: taking land by force, specialized individual moving parts choreographed to achieve a singular, larger goal. Basketball picked up football’s individualized machinations but added a more free-form individualism to the mix. As Americans left the rural landscape to congregate in cities, immigrants, settlers and native-born people tried to assimilate their variegated histories into an homogenous American identity. Sport offered a common site and a common language where that diversity could be bridged.

OPP: Team names and mascots are a jumping off point in many of your drawings on found images, as in Chief and Cowboy from 2014, as well as Seahawks, Orioles and Eagles from 2011. It seems like most professional sports team names are either history or animal references. Is this the case? Why do you think that is? Can you think of any exceptions?

GS: I believe team names are derived from the tradition of using animal totems as a way to harness the mythic powers, internalize the traits and externalize the characteristics of certain creatures. In football you have the Eagles, Lions, Panthers, Bears—all predatory, strong animals. Baseball gives you Cubs, Orioles, Cardinals and Blue Jays—not really striking fear into an opponent with those names. But there are also historical and social references—49ers, Cowboys, Brewers and Steelers—which reflect each team’s hometown industry/identity and blue collar fans. Of course you have the tradition of “honoring” Native Americans by making them mascots. From Chief Wahoo to Chief Noc-A-Homa to the tomahawk chop, there are racist slurs appropriated with great popularity across all sports. The traditional Thanksgiving NFL matchup of the Cowboys vs. Redskins is also indicative of historically entrenched nationalism and racism that still bubbles beneath the surface. Team names are meant to carry with them meaning and identity, and do so quite powerfully, sometimes with unintended consequences. There just a couple exceptions to the animal/historical references, where a team name actually invokes either more etherial or benign powers. The Heat, the Thunder, The Sox from Chicago and Boston. . . hard to take umbrage with the fact that Miami is hot or that Chicagoans wear socks.

OPP: Could you talk generally about the strategy of the cut-out in your work? You've used it in collage, drawing and sculpture, and it appears to be both a aesthetic and conceptual strategy.

GS: I have used the cut-out for about 15 years, originally as a way to isolate all or part of a specific image from the collage-like paintings I used to make. It began as an attempt to understand why I used a particular image, how re-contextualizing an image changed or added to its meaning. That isolation evolved to be more of a strategy of simultaneously concealing and revealing, taking images past straight representation and into a more mysterious place. The cut-out also acts as an interruption, a pause or glitch in the image a viewer is trying to decipher. Not being given the whole story at once allows for a slower absorption of information and keeps the question alive longer. It's always more interesting when you don't know the answer. On a base level, cutting and collaging is an extension of my drawing practice, a way to regroup and quickly realize thoughts.

OPP: I'm seeing a lot of forms that evoke the Fleur-de-lis and other coat-of-arms designs. Some examples include the graphite helmet designs in Starbury (2011), the decorative flourishes in Antique Sorrow (2008) and the cut-out gold foil in Dale Earnhardt Portrait Cartouche (2007). What do these flourishes mean to you? How has your use of them changed over time?

GS: Those forms mostly come from the Rococo. I was picking on NASCAR, talking about the spectacular, florid, over-the-top displays of eye candy that NASCAR embodies. The Rococo is often discounted as a movement entrenched in frivolity and poor taste, one of shallow and selfishly playful intent. Just beauty. I used the forms to create what I called “portrait cartouches” of NASCAR drivers, comprised of all the sponsors’ logos on their fire suits. As with the cut-out, decorative forms serve dual purposes. As aesthetic forms, they bring shape and content to an image. In Starbury and similar images from Past Time, I conflated athletic and military display, imagining athletes “in the trenches” or as modern-day gladiators and warriors. I began to think about contemporary athletes’ tattoos as parade armor worn by Medieval and Renaissance kings. That armor was never worn in battle. It was a narrative display of power.

OPP: How do you decompress after a solo show or the completion of a big project? Do you need a break before returning to the studio?


GS: I definitely need to take a break. I usually spend a little time away from the studio after a show, until my feet get too itchy to keep me away. I see an exhibition as an opportunity to get some perspective on where I am with my work in general. It’s good to see all the pieces out of the studio, having a dialogue together. I take that back to the studio with me. After cleaning and rearranging, I research, make drawings and listen to a lot of baseball on the radio to prepare for the next thing. 

OPP: And what's your next thing?

GS: While making work for Past Time, I had thoughts and ideas bouncing around that didn't fit with that show, so they got put on the back burner. But as I stated above, feet get itchy. I have been thinking about how the landscape/stadium idea relates to religion. Certain stadia and arenas are considered pilgrimage sites for fans. Naturally, inside those sites are relics, items imbued with the history and iconography of the residents housed within the building. I’m working on ideas for sculptural forms that play with sports reliquaries and trophies. . . nothing fully-formed yet. But I’m excited to get back to work.

To see more of Geoffry's work, please visit geoffrysmalley.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an instructor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (2013) at Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan) and Everything You Need is Already Here (2014) at Heaven Gallery in Chicago. Stacia recently created a site-responsive collage installation in her hometown. NEXT: Emerging Virginia Artists runs until October 12, 2014 at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News, VA. Here|Now, a two-person exhibition curated by MK Meador and also featuring the work of Jason Uriah White, is on view at Design Cloud in Chicago from July 25 - October, 24, 2014.

Artist, sports fan and educator NORM PARIS explores the allegories of decline present in western narratives of heroism. His sculptures and drawings frame the bodies of professional athletes like Michael Jordon and historical figures like George Washington as architectural ruins and fossils thus rethinking the myths surrounding monumentality. Norm received his BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in Drawing, and his MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he was core faculty from 2003-2008. He is represented by The Proposition Gallery (New York) and his work is included in the West Collection. Norm lives in Brooklyn, New York.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What exactly is Forton MG? It seems to be your favorite material, and you stretch its capabilities in a lot of directions. What does it offer that other sculpture materials can't?

Norm Paris: Forton MG is a casting mixture made of resin and gypsum, so it's part plastic, part plaster. There is something modern about the material’s synthetic nature; its plastic underbelly is “pop,” while its plaster-like appearance is classical. Forton is a shape-shifter, a chameleon. It is an aqueous solution that can be poured into any kind of mold, but it can also take on the properties of various metals and pigments. Lately I have been adding brass, iron and bronze powders to the mixture, which allows the cast to mimic metal. It can receive a patina just like metal can. The cast does contain metal, but the majority of the material, the binder, is something else. In that sense, it is both real and fake. Increasingly, I am using Forton in conjunction with other found materials and moving between different modes of sculpture and drawing. I want to avoid that point where material exploration becomes habit and expand the formal purview of the work.

OPP: The figure of Michael Jordan is a repeated motif in your work, appearing first in your 2005 sculpture installation Michael Jordan, Save The World.  I'm not sure if you are a Michael Jordan fan, but I suspect your interest in basketball—or baseball or football—isn't purely artistic, aesthetic or critical. Do you identify as a sports fan?

NP: I loathed Michael Jordan when I was growing up in Cleveland, but he was unavoidable. He was the first sports figure to become a global brand. Just watch some highlights, maybe the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest, and you will find that Jordan is a Hellenistic sculptor and a performance artist. He uses the aesthetics of Michelangelo to sell himself as a god within the Arena. But at the time I was just angry that Ron Harper (guard, Cleveland Cavaliers) was nixed from the Dunk contest because of some stupid injury.

MJ’s sudden fragility by the 2002-2003 season opened the door for a lot of that work from 2005-2009. He had physically declined in a way that made sports fans uncomfortable. Jordan couldn’t follow his own script. What caught my attention at the time—besides an unexpected fit of intense nostalgia—was how the discrepancy between the ideal and the real highlighted the faulty nature of the myth surrounding MJ. While I was working on the MJ installation in my Philadelphia basement studio in 2004, it struck me that I was making these sculptures of an athlete-as-hero while the country was at war, while the Weapons of Mass Destruction crisis was in full swing. My engagement seemed out of step with what was happening. I think Michael Jordan, Save The World was an awkward attempt to come to terms with an array of public, private and political concerns. My work has changed a lot since that piece, but ultimately I am still interested in the strange fragility of these monumental figures.

So yes, I am a sports fan. But while I’m personally invested in pro sports, I’ve also become fascinated by the unstable allegories that underscore a game or a season, looking at the phenomenon the way that Roland Barthes looked at wrestling. Since the action in a game is in real time, stories are constantly created and then torn apart. Spectators—myself included—imbue players with heroic meanings only to find that this affect is obsolete a moment later. Someone dropped a ball, or missed a shot, or tore an ACL, or retired. Athletic allegories are inevitably temporary because of bodily limitations, changing circumstances and shifting opinion over time. Gravity brings us all down. Robert Smithson’s ideas about entropy don’t only apply to the earth and the ground, but also to the figure.

OPP: Michael Jordan: Disasters of War (2006-2009), your drawings and etchings which reference Goya's famed series of the same name, feature Michael Jordan as ALL the figures. Could you talk about this choice?

NP: I am interested in the foggy and spastic relationships in the Disasters etchings because there is no chance to settle the dilemma. The lack of closure becomes the point. I wanted to construct narratives that were not necessarily linear. And so I substituted every figure from Goya’s original compositions with Jordan; this basic rule sets the stage for a Freudian sense of conflict—he saves and maims and kills himself. I thought a lot about dark humor when I was making these prints. The gratuitous nature of them and the ridiculousness of the situation was alternately funny, inappropriate and sad. Like in Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, overwhelming and ironic violence is the embodiment of a complex and uncomfortable emotional space. In that film, like in these etchings, instincts of victimhood and aggression are in flux.

I tend to find icons and to replace them whenever necessary. This happens in sports but is even more pronounced in the combustible narratives of politics. Goya’s original prints were protest etchings against the Peninsular War, and the inappropriate superimposition of Jordan calls a lot into question. I was looking at a fracture or conflation between this deflated leisure myth and a larger sense of real violence. 

OPP: There is a shift away from the figure. It's not absolute, but it is noticeable. Afterwards there are more sculptures of precarious structures, which may or may not be ruins of buildings that once functioned, but definitely don't now. Can you talk about this intersection of architecture and mythic heroes, which was drawn out in your solo show The Wall Still Stands (2011) at The Proposition in New York?

NP: As I finished the Disasters etchings I became more interested in the space around the action rather than the figure itself. I made the sculpture Rubble Fragment I (Mezuzah), and I realized that a piece of concrete could become the heroic figure instead of a literal classical body. I used the same substitution rule that guided the Jordan prints in the Reconstruction drawings, but architectural structures like two-by-fours and cinder blocks were the stand-in for human presence. Some of the drawings become defunct altars or shrines; others are failed utopian building projects.

I wanted to allow for a wider array of subject matter rather than harping on one obvious signifier. The architectural structures from the drawings are based on figures from sports clippings I've received from my father over the years and screen shots from old footage of baseball games, but they are heavily camouflaged. Bridge/Fortress/Hillis  began as a sculpture of the former Cleveland Browns running back Payton Hillis. Holding It Together (Pistol Pete) is based on Zurbaran's Saint Serapion. I was interested in the fragility of the structure, and its simultaneous sense of building and decay. This work explores some of the same terrain as the more overt sculptures and prints; but now I am encoding, encasing and cutting apart the source. Human form is roughly translated to architecture or rock formation. I’ve been looking at old sports writers like Henry Grantland Rice, who had a tendency to rename the heroes of the day as immovable rocks or some other monumental vision; the 1936 Fordham Rams for example, were coined the “Fordham Wall” and their offensive line was “The Seven Blocks of Granite.” This type of metaphor can be found in all sorts of places, from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias to Pink Floyd's The Wall.

OPP: What do George Washington and Caesar have in common with Pistol Pete, Michael Jordan, Vince Lombardi, Jim Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger?

NP: I witnessed all these figures through the lens of reproduction as a primary source of aura. Growing up, the distance of the photograph, print or video, and now the internet, allowed me to fill these vessels with my own meanings. There are countless posters of Michael Jordan stuck in mid-air as if he could levitate forever. Even the painting George Washington Crossing The Delaware is a fabrication which is only loosely based on historical fact, and yet this vision is as real as it gets. These people have been worshipped, albeit in vastly different times and places. While there are qualitative differences that separate them—George Washington actually did effect the world more than Pistol Pete—I am more interested in these icons as the embodiment of an internal response to popular American mythologies. They are mostly boyhood visions of manhood, all of which are more complicated than they initially appeared.

OPP: If you absolutely had to pick—pretend the world will end if you don't—would you rather go to an art opening or a sporting event?

NP: That’s like picking a favorite child. The question presents a false choice. I can have my cake and eat it too. I was drawing on my apartment floor as I watched game 7 of the 1997 World Series. 

And besides, sporting events can be art. Robert Smithson always talked about how the movies that were the most important to him and his peers were the B-movies, the sci-fi movies rather than the art flicks. These cultural artifacts were the platform on which he built his work. He was also immensely well-read and informed about art history, and he was certainly a part of the art world. He was intimately invested in all of his obsessions, and he reveled in the fact that he did not have to choose. I feel the same way.

A live basketball game is a singularity. It happens in real time and only exists in that moment. I suppose the artwork is at face value more static (unless it is performative or interactive), but certainly the experience of the work is also singular since it is specific to that time and place.

While I love the community aspect of the art opening, the support for the work of friends and peers, the reality is that there is more flexibility in seeing an art show—and art openings are often the absolute worst time to view the work. The sporting event is often the ideal venue to view the spectacle. And so, from a situational and phenomenological point of view, I choose the game.

To see more of Norm's work, please visit normparis.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago).