* (restored)

Yaaaaay!
Yaaaaay!

‘DeAundra Peek (Rosser Shymanski) was the first of a long line of singing sisters featured regularly on Atlanta public access television to break apart from her kin and garner her own exclusive public television show. Produced by FUNTONE USA (producers of RuPauls earliest film and music ventures), the character of DeAundra is a perpetual sixteen-year-old musical prodigy and teenage southern belle broadcasting weekly from the community room at Odums All-Doublewide Mobile Homes Court in Palmetto, Georgia and featuring DeAundra’s favorite songs, original music videos, fashion tips, community news and recipes, and providing a broadcasting platform for the eras queer entertainers.

The Singing Peek Sisters Christmas Album Infomercial

‘Beginning broadcast in 1988, the DeAundra Peeks Teenage Music Club show would come to see several different permutations and name changes over the years, until it ended broadcast in 2004, but not before seeing a stage show, a string of musical singles, two commercially released music video compilation tapes, and a feature in the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her commercially available music video greatest hits tape (entitled “Meet Me At Odum’s,” is available, a course, at Rango Fain’s Snack Shedd & Gift Shoppe). Her latest single, a cover version of Celine Dion’s “Titanic” theme with dyno-mighty band Monkey One and backing vocals by her sisters Starla and Baby Jean, has rendered audiences practically speechless…

DeAundra Peek sings ‘What Is Love? by Delete’

‘Hey y’all, this here’s DeAundra Peek welcomin’ you! Down at Odum’s All Double-Wide Mobile Homes Court where we live, just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, stuff is happenin’ like crazy!

‘Lately I has been performin’ with the hottest band around, Monkey One, an’ has we had a great time showin’ out for people! Colonel Lonnie Fain, the leader of the band, has done got together some real professionals layin’ down songs to beat the band! There ain’t nothin’ like havin’ a live band on stage to sing with, ‘specially when they sound as good as Monkey One! Anyway, my sisters Starla and little Baby Jean has been comin’ out an’ performin’ with me a bunch lately, so much so that Baby Jean even has her second big hit single out already! Y’all may remember her big hit “PeePaw’s Dead” she done wrote after the unexpected an’ untimely death of our dear vibratious 97 year-old PeePaw. This new song has done come about on account a ’cause Miss Syngsyme done made all the kids in homeroom do reports on agriculture, an’ since Baby Jean’s chosen form of expression is singin’, she done writ her song “Corn”, what we call the new anthem for the American Grain. Darlister Epps done told me he never heard a child sing about eatin’ somethin’ like that before.

Richard Bicknell with Nana Odum sing “When the Sun Shines”

‘Y’all, our real good friend Richard Bicknell has just done come out with his second CD called “Mayflower” an’ Baby Jean & me was lucky enough to open for him at his big ole CD release party recently! The celebration was at Smith’s Old Bar (even though we’s both underage Baby Jean & me got in ’cause we was performin’) an’ was full a well-wishers an’ all kinds a recordin’ industry big-wigs (an’ I ain’t talkin’ about RuPaul neither!) chompin’ at the bit to get ahold a that polyvinyl musical tableau. If you look real close in the special thanks section on the CD cover y’all can see how much he loves the band Monkey One!

Duffy Odum & RuLa Octobrina ” Doot Doot – You’re Kinda Cute””

‘Team Odum’s continues to be the champion of the South Fulton County Regional Kickball Playoffs. Team Captain Duffy Odum can only explain the team’s success on a winning combination of big sneakers, sayin’ “We has got three players with size 12 or bigger shoes they done borrowed from they’s MeeMaws, GeeGaws or PeePaws, so we put them on the front line every game.”

‘Here’s my seasonal surprise recipe just for y’all!

‘MeeMaw’s Vienner Pot Pie In-Minutes

2 cans Hy-Grade Vienner Sausages
8 slices plain white bread
1 cup diced canned cooked potatoes
1 cup diced canned cooked carrots
2 tablespoons dried onion bits
2 tablespoons corn starch
4 small aluminum pot pie pans

‘Cut crust off of all your bread slices an’ set aside crusts. Press 1 slice of bread into each pot pie pan an’ allow to set. Press remaining bread slices into flat round shapes an’ set aside. In a bowl, mix up the vienners, (keeping the juice to add later) potatoes, carrots an’ onion bits. Add cornstarch an’ mix thoroughly, adding vienner juice to desired thickness. Quickly add broken up bread crusts an’ pour mixture in equal amounts into pot pie pans, then press on bread rounds to create top. You can use a fork to make pretty edge patterns on the crust (optional). Heat on hi in hot toaster oven for 5 minutes or until bubbly. Serve in pot pie pans on plates.

DeAundra Peek’s Delicious Vienner Stroganoff Recipe

DeAundra Peek’s Imitation Pizza Pie Recipe

DeAundra Peek’s Hi Class Vienner Sausage Dessert Recipe

DeAundra Peek’s Fancy Vienner Dip Recipe

‘DeAundra Peek’s 5 Ways To Know If Your Trailer Is Haunted

5. The rats is all playing bingo.
4. When you lick all the grease off your Vienner, the Vienner gets all greasy again.
3. The underpinning turns yellow-green.
2. The sliding doors don’t never get stuck.
1. Your trailer gets pulled off by 18-wheeler truck and ain’t nobody driving the truck.

DeAundra Peek’s tribute to Madonna: “Deeper & Deeper”

DeAundra Peek sings REM

DeAundra Peek “I Eat Out Of Cans”

‘Ya’ll, DeAundra loves to get fan mail and requests and dedications for her fabulous tv show. Make sure you drop her a line in care of Rango’s Rural Delivery Service and make sure you follow the rules about sending in your dedications and requests separate.

‘DeAundra & RuPaul Y’all

‘Hey ya’ll, here’s me and that superstar RuPaul on the set of The American Music Show. And right below is a teaser for a fabulous practically life size jpeg photo of me and RuPaul at the World Premiere of Voyeur at the fabulous Club Rio in Atlanta on October 23rd. If you haven’t been there yet, the Odum’s Chapter of the RuPaul Fan Club is a fun place to visit to learn a thing or two about Ru and see some fabulous photos of him in and around Odum’s.

DeAundra Peek, RuPaul & Lahoma at the New Music Seminar NC 1988

‘Teen-Age Superstar DeAundra Peek Goes to The Vault

‘Atlanta’s 16-year-old celebrity sensation is invited to the dark and nefarious New York sex club by her out-of-town hostess, Miss Brandy Wine.

‘Message from the Manager

‘MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THESE EXCITING EVENTS COMING SOON TO ODUM’S ALL-DOUBLEWIDE TRAILER COURT

*February 2nd: Mee Maw Peek’s Annual Groundhog’s Day Memorial Vienner Roast
*Valentine’s Day: Complimentary Hershey’s Kisses with every Potted Meat Melt Sandwich bought at Rango Fain’s Snack Shed
*March 2-3rd: Odum’s Old Men’s Club presents Peter Pan starring Duffy Odum and the Little Lost Boys of the Del Vista Rey Mar at 7 pm in the Community Room
*March 23rd: Nana Odum’s 108th Birthday Party (time to be announced)
*April 1st-7th: Impetigo Awareness Week at Odum’s’ — collaged

DeAundra Peek’s performance at Lady Bunny’s Wigstock 1993

WIGSTOCK 2001 NYC WITH DEAUNDRA PEEK

DeAundra Peek Interviewed by the legendary Jarboe of Swans!

Jarboe: At what point in your life did you become interested in performance?

Rosser: My Mom says that I’ve been performing all my life. Perhaps it started the time I got ahold of her “Really Red” lipstick when I was 4 years old and smeared it over my entire face. Today’s cast of characters began because I was asked to dress up in early 1987 as a part of “The American Music Show”, the longest running public access show in America, which I’m still very involved with.

J: Who are some of the earliest performers you saw that you feel made an impression upon you – and for what reasons?

R: The first record I ever bought was Lily Tomlin’s “And That’s The Truth”, she floored me with the many characters she was doing. I was fascinated with one person’s ability to become so many different people. Most anything from “Laugh In” got me because all those people played so many different funny characters. Elton John was another big influence, his wild image changing from one season to the next had me cutting articles about him out of everything I could find. Later on, RuPaul’s influence fundamentally affected me ever since we met and became friends on the set of “The American Music Show” in 1983 (it’s where he got his start too!). Over the years Ru has reinvented himself more times than Madonna!

DeAundra Peek sings Stacey Q’s “2 of Hearts”

J: How does one measure fame?

R: Well, that’s all relative to your particular place in the world I think. Somebody might think that being mentioned in the church bulletin means fame. Somebody else might think real fame eludes them even though they’re in the papers every day. I’m a mixed bag really, when I go to my watering hole here in Atlanta I feel hugely famous because nearly everyone there knows me, but if I go somewhere else it’s a different story. Oprah once said that she always knew from childhood that she was going to be famous, she just didn’t know exactly how she would get there. It’s been the same for me, I’ve always known that I stuck out and I’ve learned how to channel that knowledge into something positive. I remember feeling most famous the day after I appeared on “The American Music Show” for the very first time in 1983, a clerk in a bookstore looked right at me and said, “I saw you on TV last night!” I was hooked.

Back in college my drag name was Drucilla Emeraude. All my friends called me “Dru”. Our gay group occasionally would do drag shows at one of the bars in town to raise money for various things and I’d do lip synched songs for tips. I didn’t actually become a total character and sing live for anything until DeAundra Peek was born in 1987, and that was mainly due to the fact that DeAundra was never expected to sing on key, ever! I am really good at singing off key.

DeAundra Peek’s Tribute to The Pet Shop Boys

J: Who and/or what influenced this?

R: DeAundra Peek was the first of my current character cadre, coming about because I’d been a guest just as myself on “The American Music Show” for some years, talking about my artwork and crazy antics around town. I’d idolized a group of girls on the show called The Singing Peek Sisters, girls who absolutely could not sing on key but tongue-in-cheekishly said they were driven to the stage by their “God given talent”. The group broke up, but in late 1986 one of the sisters, Wanda Peek, wanted to reform the group, so they asked me to be the first boy to play one of the Peek sisters. I thought it’d be a lark and would mean doing it one or two times, but here I am today not only being DeAundra but also about 10 other characters as well. Today the Peeks are yet another combination of sisters, with one of the original Peeks, Starla, and our little sister, Baby Jean, taking it to the stage and screen.

DeAundra Peek sings Mariah Carey

J: How much of yourself is in your characters?

R: There’s kinda a part of me in every character I play, most of them have some sort of crazy edge to them. I think I get to burn to a crisp things from behind the facade of a character that maybe I keep to a simmer as myself. DeAundra’s a really sweet trailer park ingeneu but terribly naive. Boompah Bailey is a horny old man after anything at all (he’s got so little time left you know). Nurse Macworld is always trying to give out some kind of “medication” to ease the pain. Ryanne Cannon (“I’m not just Dyan Cannon’s younger stepsister!”) is a deluded Hollywood wannabe. Your Aunt Roz tries to be commonsensical between the cocktails and coffee. Ashley Briquette Goulet is a strange child with behavioral problems. Dr. Peedeen Hunkapillar wants to be a good veterinarian but he’s almost too busy working on his announcing career to effectively check your cat for a urinary tract infection.

DeAundra Peek – “Desiderata for Teens”

J: What in your view contributes to some people’s need to become an entertainer with multiple personas/characters?

R: Billions of people live in this world with us, each of them is a different character. That’s practically an unlimited field of being, a wealth of inspiration for somebody like me. You see somebody on the train and you say, “Wow, now that’s an interesting person, I wonder what they’re like.” It’s a challenge and a joy to come up with a new personality, somebody that the audience actually begins to believe and interact with as a real person. It takes me outside of myself so I can be lots of different people as well as just me, and I think it increases my view of what reality is to other people. I also have an insatiable lust for making people laugh, and luckily I seem to be able to do that.

J: What message do you try and send out through your performances? I see so much more than entertainment or zany spoof. To me, your work is very “David Lynch-ian” ART. I would love to see your characters fully realized in a David Lynch film. OR -Am I completely off-track here ?

R: I like David Lynch and am especially glad that he’s made a place for himself out there. His films are pretty crazy and of course I’d love to work with somebody who’d let me go nuts on film. That’s basically what I have now, a great support system of friends who essentially tell me to “go for the gusto” all the time. We sometimes say about DeAundra that “they’s a whole lot of ways of bein’ smart”, and I think maybe that’s what I try to express somewhat in all of my characters. Everybody’s got something they’re good at, and all of my characters specialize in some kind of craziness that makes them different. The bottom line is best expressed in the FUNTONE, USA motto, “If it’s not fun, don’t do it”.

J: How much does Vaudeville factor into your aesthetic?

R: I don’t think it’s so much my surface familiarity with Vaudeville as it is the influence Vaudeville has had on the people around me. Our natural tendency when we began doing things together was to mix the music and the comedy into one big thing so that you couldn’t separate the two. The songs we do enhance the comedy, and with our band Monkey One these days we’ve been able to really make that hit home since the effect of a great live band on stage is always compelling. Combine that with a bunch of laughs and you’ve got the perfect brew for a great evening.

DeAundra Peek “Justified and Ancient”

J: What is something you see as a source of inspiration?

R: The fans are my most precious inspiration, and I’m telling the truth! When we connect, when the audience sees me on stage and gets the joke–or at least laughs at it–that’s the ultimate. It makes you want to get up there and do it over and over again. Sometimes I run into people at the grocery store, they’re looking at me funny and then suddenly recognize me and light up. Hearing people say, “You have got my Aunt Helen down to a tee!” or “God, I had a scary grandfather who was just like that guy” turns me on so much. It’s an affirmation of a communion between us and makes them feel something they might not have felt in years, or maybe ever before for that matter.

J: What are 3 things in your life you embrace as truths?

R: Three things I embrace as truths, jeez!
1) Laughter IS the best medicine.
2) Talent is in the eye of the beholder.
3) You gotta be true to yourself to really be happy. Discovering and then admitting what you really want out of life can open doors you never knew existed. Be free enough to go for your gusto!

J: I’ve got to ask…..Do you think DeAundra would ever consider singing with ME?

R: Lord YES!

Ask DeAundra Peek

An Evening with Teen Sensation DeAundra Peek on The American Music Show

The Best of DeAundra Peek, Back-to-Back

 

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Peter Brook.  ** David Spiher, Hi. Thanks for the add. Everyone, David Spiher suggests this worthy addition to the Sport post: ‘No Matthew Barney? Athletics with a popsicle up the butt surely goes here…’ here.  ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yes, the Chapman bros split. Almost a trend what with the Coen brother parting ways too. Thanks for the beef up. Everyone, _Black_Acrylic has a late addition for you too: ‘Douglas Gordon’s film of the great footballer Zinedine Zidane is online here on YouTube.’ Thank you, buddy boy. ** Robert, Hi! Excellent. Everyone, and Robert too: ‘Reminds me of this. My brothers and I used to always get in trouble when we were kids because we’d try to climb on the exhibit like a playground.’ ** David Ehrenstein, I wonder if there’s a relationship between fetching and ‘fetch’ as in asking a dog to retrieve a ball. I’m happy that I barely know anything about Jordan Peterson other than that he’s a bad guy. ** Billy, Thanks, Bill. ‘Berg’ the novel is killer. I didn’t know there was a film of it. Hm, that title change alone gives me pause. You good? ** Justin, Hi, Justin. Welcome. I don’t know the Victor Solomon work, but I’ll hunt it down. And, yes, for absolutely sure about Hammons. The only reason he wasn’t there is because I did a post about him recently. Thanks a lot. What’s up with you and yours? ** The bic, Thanks very much The bic. Nice name. Like the pen? ** DANGUSFLAZE (toot), Toot following fart, I see a trend. That is a nice coincidence. I wish there’d been a time machine so I could have preemptively slotted your show in there. Well, you definitely have to video your gig. Something we/I need to see. Happy and productive preparing, etc! I’d mosey into a bubble tea backroom, you bet. xo. ** Dominik, Hi!!!! Welcome back! I’ve missed you! Yay, so happy the festivals and trip in general gave you the appropriate buzz. Not cool about the sick-part obviously. Things are okay here. Quiet, seen some old friends, working on stuff. Barreling to try to get the funds by the August 1st deadline, and it’s a little scary, for sure, but trying our best. Thanks for the reading list. ‘Rohypnol’ is the one I don’t know but will. Ha ha, I do recall thinking that youmakemehatethishit’s bod seemed suspiciously pristine. Love staging a Russian coup and replacing Putin with DeAundra Peek, G. ** Suzy, Hey, Suzy. Thank you for the ‘excellent’. Ooh, now that’s an add if I ever saw one. Everyone, And Suzy has scored this most excellent Sport add-on for y’all: Werner Herzog interviewed by a skater magazine. I can’t remember the last time an art opening was anything other than stressfully genteel on the surface. I did a post here some years ago about people who make terrariums. Maybe it will help somehow? It’s here, if so. Your self-amusement project sounds amusing externally as well if I count. Me? Mostly, yeah, trying to raise the last funds needed for Zac Farley’s and my film. It’s a nightmare. Luckily nightmares end happily if reality counts as happy, so hopefully ours will follow suit. Otherwise, I’m working on the text for my collaborator Gisele Vienne’s new theater piece, which hasn’t been especially fun so far, and fiddling with some short fiction pieces and thinking about a possible book of them, and course that’s fun because, you know, writing = many things including fun. Great luck with your week ahead. ** Steve Erickson, I agree. Yeah, I didn’t find any snowboarding-related art, now that you mention it. Huh. I think Joel told me that the place where he shoots the wresting photos is in this small arena that has … what do they call it, scaffolding, aerial walkways used by workers attaching the lights and stuff, and that he went up there, giving him a bird’s eye view. Is the culling proving to be easy? In the vinyl days you could’ve used the discards as B-sides. Well, I guess it’s still the vinyl days, but you know what I mean. ** Misanthrope, Nearly always the case, I think. I loved the Jurassic World movie. It’s a fucking ride, man, give it some slack and join the escapist fun seekers. Oops, sorry about that evil gelato. Well, evil implies sentience, but … ** Brian, Hi. Which one was Peake’s … oh, right. The only sports figures I can remember ever having lust crushes on were the Russian gymnast Alexi Nemov, a footballer on the Dutch team Ajax in the mid-80s named Jonny Bosman, and the young Rafa Nadal. But I’m probably forgetting. See, spending the 4th with Dario Argento and his work’s body fireworks seems a fine way to celebrate, especially under the current circumstances over there in the US of A. What does your week portend, do you reckon? ** Okay. I only just remembered that it’s the 4th of July over in my abandoned homeland, and yet it seems like  an appropriate day to have restored today’s post-encompassed paean to the legendary DeAundra Peek. Celebrate accordingly, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Robert Indiana The MECCA Floor, 1977
‘Considered the largest pop art painting ever, The MECCA (Milwaukee Exposition Convention Center & Arena) floor is an iconic piece of Milwaukee sports history. Painted by artist, Robert Indiana, the floor featured bold primary colors and geometric designs. Both the Milwaukee Bucks and Marquette University played on the iconic floor before it was retired in 1997.’

 

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Scott Redford Introducing Reinhardt Dammn, 2010
‘In June 2010, the Sydney gallery Breenspace opened Scott Redford: Introducing Reinhardt Dammn, a solo exhibition by Scott Redford. As dramatic as the works were, the objects in the show were not quite as surprising—or significant—as the conceit that Redford wrapped around them. Redford explained that viewers were to approach the show not as his work, but as the work of fictional artist Reinhardt Dammn. Redford described Dammn as: ‘a twenty-two-year-old who surfs, makes art, and sings in a band. Reinhardt is cocky and always the showman, but his bravado masks vulnerability. Spurned by the official art world because of his youth, Reinhardt is also rejected because he refuses to ignore the obvious: a canvas painted one colour is not a “monochrome signalling art’s autonomy”, it is a one-colour canvas; a soup tin is a soup tin; an installation is just objects placed in a room. Daring to speak with the innocence of a wild child, Reinhardt challenges the complacency of art’s powers-that-be.’ The Dammn story sounds familiar. Dammn may be a critic of the establishment, but he already has the aura of an art star, awaiting his own glossy-magazine personality profile. His very name suggests a Faustian pact with the devil.

‘Dammn was not only Redford’s invention; he was also his own invention. As Redford has explained: ‘Reinhardt Dammn is not his real name. He changed it by deed poll when he turned eighteen. His name is part-Dickens, part-punk. He renamed himself in the manner of Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten and Billy Idol, conflating the name of American painter Ad Reinhardt and the word “damn”.’3 For Redford, it was all about a movie he wanted to make: ‘I’m working on the proposed film of Reinhardt’s life as a scriptwriter and set designer, maybe also as co-director if it comes off … I make new art works for him, often based on styles of my work from the 1980s.’

 

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Greg Barth Trajectories 2, 2015
‘Using my trajectories technique that consists of freezing a series of actions in time physically before animating each object sequentially through projection mapping, opposing players dialogue through a series of racket exchanges that intensifies to the point of no return.’

 

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Laura Millard Power Play, 2019
video

 

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Shaun Gladwell Skateboarders vs. Minimalism, 2016
‘The skate­board­ers Jesus Este­ban, Hillary Thomp­son and Rod­ney Mullen come up against the likes of Don­ald Judd, Carl Andre, Tony Smith and Ellsworth Kel­ly. The project looked at the dynam­ic between artists and skate­board­ers, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the forms in which skate­board­ers use. Often the work from the late 60s with­in the school of min­i­mal­ism has a strik­ing resem­blance to objects that are used for skate­board­ing in skateparks. The skatepark objects are usu­al­ly gener­ic, sim­pli­fied and abbre­vi­at­ed forms with­in the urban land­scape, so the skate­board­ers would be very well trained even before get­ting into the project, in which they skate­board on repli­ca min­i­mal­ist artworks.’

 

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Alison Saar Bat Boyz, 2001
baseball bats and pitch

 

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Nelson Leirner Maracana, 2003
Plaster, plastic, ceramic, wood

 

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Richard Fauguet Untitled, 2000-2005
‘The work is a history, because it tells the story of just a few strokes of imaginary table tennis, of which you have so little consciousness that you’re more consumed with the rules or the thought of who’s winning. But here, the phenomenology of the tock-tick ti-ti-ti is grotesquely monumentalised, leaving no room in the space for any other moment.’

 

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Elmgreen & Dragset Short Story, 2021
‘Elmgreen & Dragset’s Short Story is like a film-still that captures a charged moment after a tennis match – but it is up to the audience to complete the abrupt narratives frozen before them in time and space. In Short Story we are left looking for answers or explanations. Three characters stand before you, but subtle and contextualizing narratives remain elusive. Instead, we enter a space that invites reflection on topics such as competition, individualism, inclusion and exclusion.’

 

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Eddie Peake Touch, 2012
‘Eddie Peake first turned heads staging a naked five-a-side football match in Burlington Gardens back in 2012, while still a postgraduate student at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. It had “a brash energy, a wit and beautiful absurdity” and was “discussed at length across all departments”, according to Peake’s Senior Tutor Brian Griffiths. Peake’s work is an often-energetic spectacle in which the absurd and the erotic each find a place, and in which the artist plays a central role.’

 

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Herbie Fletcher Wrecktangles, 2013
‘Herbie Fletcher began surfing in Huntington Beach when he was just 10, but later moved to Hawaii and became a professional surfer and the owner of several surf and snowboard lines. Also an artist, Fletcher shapes and paints boards to create fine art. His latest project, Wrecktangles, is an installation made up of broken and recycled surfboards. To create the dynamic artpieces, Fletcher sourced ravaged boards from surfers on Oahu and shipped them to NYC. Fletcher pieced together the boards into tangled wall sculptures that are a juxtaposition of sponsor logos, traction pads, custom-made shapes and the personal expressions of each surfer.’

 

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Harun Farocki Deep Play, 2007
‘Harun Farocki’s work Deep Play is made up of various perspectives on the final of the 2006 World Cup. We see the ‘clean feed’, the television networks’ raw material. We see individual players on both teams, but also abstract computer-generated representations of the flow of play. The intelligent network of relationships among players who are kicking, passing, receiving the ball and running – a network that absorbs spontaneous individual decisions as well as tactical ideas and habits rooted in the culture of the game – is endlessly complex given the size of the field. This roughly corresponds to the range of possible constellations offered by a group of guppies in a mid-sized aquarium. This may be sublime, but it also makes us sad. However the game is not only classified, assessed and transferred to other systems, for example by trusted experts who analyse and evaluate all quantifiable events. We also experience the majestic calm of a summer’s day as it draws to a close above the Olympic Stadium. We hear many soundtracks, from the police radio to the words of TV production teams from all over the world, alternating between commanding, consequential speech and contemplative reflections on events. Above all, what we experience is how the laboratory of football is able to exhibit the most advanced technology in the production and presentation of moving images. All fans and followers of simulation and documentation, movies, TV and computer games start running a little warmer as they watch. We see how eerily close the wishes of the consumers, the trainers and the police really are to each other. Just as they are in real life.’

 

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Ana Soler Causa-Efecto, 2012
‘Spanish artist Ana Soler, in her most recent work entitled Causa-Efecto (Cause & Effect), hung 2,000 tennis balls across the Mustang Art Gallery in Alicante, Spain. The balls are carefully aligned in suspended trajectories that appear to bounce off walls, floors, and other surfaces providing an uncanny sense of motion similar to a photograph taken with a strobe light.’

 

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Paul Pfeiffer Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 2001
‘Basketball heroes are erased from their courts in the digital film Three Studies of Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. In his photographs and video installations, which often have religious titles, Pfeiffer utilizes new technology to destabilize the experience of viewing, whether through the erasure of the central athlete in sports spectacles or by splicing scenes so as to trap figures in endless repetition.’

 

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Sylvie Blocher Are you a Masterpiece?, 1999
‘ARE YOU A MASTERPIECE? was filmed with the Tigers football team at Princeton. I had managed to be in touch with the team manager with the help of Barbara London at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. My questions were about art, beauty, the sublime, proportions, taste, gods, power and money. The players selected by the manager went in front of the camera wearing their helmets and team uniforms. It was summer and it was terribly hot in the basement of the stadium, and the players sweated profusely in front of the spots, but they never budged. They were like so many brave soldiers, because the president had asked them to do this to become artworks. After each session, I had to help them take off those tight plastic guards they wore on their torsos under their close- fitting T-shirts. It was a weird thing to do. They nearly all talked about the pain when they had to take the guards off, after their matches, when their bodies were bruised all over.’

 

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Xu Zhen The path to appearance is always accessible and traveled but one can go around it, 2010
baseball bat and golf ball

 

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Marco Fusinato Constellations, 2015
‘A 40-metre wall with a 1.5‑metre gap at each end is built to bisect the gallery. Hid­den inside the wall are a series of micro­phones con­nect­ed to a PA sys­tem. The entrance side of the gallery is emp­ty. On the oth­er side of the gallery, com­ing out from the bisect­ing wall a base­ball bat is attached to a steel chain. The audi­ence is invit­ed to strike the wall. Their action is ampli­fied at 120db.’

 

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Duane Hanson Surfer, 1987
‘The work takes as its subject a boy, dressed in his sunset-colored swimming trunks as he holds his fiery board in one hand, the other nonchalantly on his hip. He gazes out into the distance, avoiding the eye of the viewer, searching for the perfect wave. Created during a time of worldwide obsession with sportswear, body image and exercise trends, Surfer, 1987, vividly highlights the artist’s captivation with consumer culture while also holding personal significance as the sculpture was modeled after Hanson’s son.’

 

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Links Invitational: 9 holes of playable art golf, 2010
‘As an artist, I always resent these stupid theme shows. Only one step removed from those plastic cows that “artists” decorate for charity, or the inane competitions on workof FAart on TV. Mini Golf, in particular, is a recurring curatorial copout. At least when the artists make centerpieces for the benefit auction, you get a few free hors deouvres. What do you get at a mini golf show- A Bucket of Balls? Why is it only visual artists get subjected to these idiotic themes, these “fun ideas”? How come famous poets arent asked to all write poems about Cupcakes for an anthology? Everybody likes Cupcakes, right? Choreographers arent all asked to reinterpret the drive thru window experience at McDonalds. Composers arent told that they must write a piece about Snowboarding. Good art does not come at the request of a curator to fit into a “fun” category that everyone can relate to. Sure, once in a while some of these show produce interesting, or at least amusing, shadows of what the artist could really do if left unmolested. But by and large, they are an example of intellectual lazyness on the part of exhibiting spaces and curators, and pandering to the lowest common denominator.’

 

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Marcin Maciejowski Misiek (FC Wisła Kraków supporter), 2004
‘Misiek (FC Wisła Kraków supporter) appears to memorialize an infamous hooligan who threw a knife at Italian footballer Dino Baggio during a championship match. Misiek (nickname for Pawel Michalski) was sent to prison for that and other offenses. Maciejowski’s painting is a record of, a comment on how Misiek is revered by fans.’

 

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Pelle Cass Various, 2019
‘The anarchic jumble of athletes in motion in the sports photography of Pelle Cass is real. It is not staged. But it isn’t the same reality we see when we’re watching a game, a competition, or a meet. That’s because in Cass’ pictures, everything is happening at the same time, in the same place. In the staged photographs of artists like Gregory Crewdson or Alex Prager, people are marshaled like movie extras into compositions that are like a single film frame—a special, fortuitous frame that perfectly represents a film that does not exist. In Cass’ photos, all the frames are on top of each other, all at once. Everything exists. All the events that could possibly happen in one scene are happening simultaneously, out of order. No singular moment presides. Instead, there is a spray of out-of-sequence instants, detached from a linear timeline.’

 

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Olaf Nicolai Big Sneaker [The Nineties], 2001
‘Olaf Nicolai’s inflatable sculpture Big Sneaker [The Nineties] is a proportionally exact enlargement of Nike’s ‘Air Max.’ It can be displayed either standing, or lying on its side. In the horizontal variation, a seating facility is offered in the form of an oversized sofa on which the visitor can sit down. Ironically monumental, in spite of its size, the sculpture is so light that it can easily be moved across the floor.’

 

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Lí Wei Once upon a time, 2020
‘An installation of six meticulously detailed life-size mannequins of 7-year-olds created by the artist. They sit in toy cars equipped with temperature sensors, which allow them to navigate around obstacles. At first, the drivers were cautious, observing the other mannequins at a distance. But very soon, wariness turned into chasing, teasing, battling and confrontation.’

 

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John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres Carlos BBall, 2016
‘John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres first met at the Fashion Moda alternative space in the Bronx in 1979, where Ahearn was doing live castings of people in front of the storefront window, and hanging the painted portraits as an exhibit. Torres, then 18, had a keen understanding of what Ahearn was doing, having grown up working in his uncle’s religious statuary factory.’

 

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Stephen Dean VOLTA, 2018
‘VOLTA turns away from the soccer game to show only its raucous spectators. A composite of nearly a dozen Brazilian championship matches, it captures rhythms of disappointment and euphoria at a massive scale. Smoke bombs explode, banners roll across thousands of spectators, chants erupt: out of this chaos people are revealed as pixels of skin color forming a fanatic choreography.’

 

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Louka Anargyros Leather Boys, 2018
‘Leatherboys are ceramic sculptures, depicting what seems like male bodies entangled in close embraces. All are dressed in motorbike racing outfits, helmets, gloves, and boots. The char- acteristic sponsor logos on the sports outfits have been replaced by an array of homophobic and derogatory insults that were hurtled at the artist himself and that he collected.’

 

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Wim Delvoye Mid Size Ace 1250 , 1989
stained glass window, lead and tennis racket

 

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Yong Ping Huang A football match of June 14th, 2002 , 2002
‘A host of stuffed bats hanging from a huge fibreglass block overlook a football field more than four metres long. Like a suspended asteroid, it poses a cataclysmic threat. As viewers approach the field, they notice that the opposing teams are made up of figurines of veiled women and American soldiers.’

 

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Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen Golf/Typhoon, 1996
Acrylic urethane enamel on bronze and aluminum

 

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Lutz Bacher What Are You Thinking, 2011
‘Bay Area artist Lutz Bacher was given the entire 4th floor at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She released hundreds of beautifully beat-up baseballs and let them lie where they landed on the stone floor. It means baseballs on a floor.’

 

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Catherine Opie High School Football, 2007 – 2009
‘In “High School Football”, Opie bears witness to a community in transition, recognizing the vulnerability of the players at this moment between youth and adulthood. A stylized, masculine armature overlays the young players’ fragility, showing them as both warrior-like and boyish; they embody and elude the cliché of the fierce athlete. Likewise in the landscape photographs, as the locales in the distance vary from Hawaii’s mountains to Ohio’s parking lots, the rigid geometry of the fields creates a universal iconography particular to this American sport.’

 

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Dana Hoey Ladies Muay Thai Fight Night, 2019
‘As part of her exhibition Dana Hoey Presents, artist Dana Hoey organized a live Ladies Muay Thai Fight Night featuring 5 amateur fights, emceed by JoAnn Falanga, which took place on Friday night in the 20’ x 20’ boxing ring installed inside Petzel Gallery. Dana Hoey Presents challenges and confronts preconceived ideas and realities of feminism, combat, violence, self defense and the martial arts.’

Watch it here

 

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Gabriel Orozco The Long Ball, 1993
steel, paint

 

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Raymond Pettibon Untitled, 1994
drawing

 

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Tyrrell Winston Skewers, 2020
‘The Skewers works are assemblages featuring linearly placed discarded basketballs, linked in predetermined compositions. Winston collects the basketballs and preserves the disfigured shapes in which he finds them. Once gathered together, the morphed spherical shapes take on a choral nature, collaboratively bringing forth stories of their past—embedded histories that have since become abstracted.’

 

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Joel Westendorf Various (Untitled), 2015 – 2018
photographs

 

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Robert Longo Study for Race Car Crash, 2012
ink and charcoal on vellum

 

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Shaun Gladwell Interceptor Surf Sequence, 2009
‘The stereo projection of Interceptor Surf Sequence shows two identical cars travelling down a dusty outback road; one under sunny skies, the other towards a lowering mass of dark thunderclouds. A helmeted figure slowly emerges from each moving car, like a cicada sliding out of its shell. Shot in extreme slow motion, the figure climbs gracefully and purposefully to the top of the car, to stand still yet move through space – like a surfer riding a board. This solitary figure contemplates a vast and barren landscape, split by a corrugated road, that could be in any arid subcontinent – Africa or India. But the presence of the muscle car and helmeted rider mark this environment as Australian – as ‘the Outback’ mythologised in films like Walkabout (1971), Wake in Fright (1971) Mad Max (1979) and Razorback (1984).’

 

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Jake & Dinos Chapman Chess set, 2003
32 bronze chess figures, painted, with glass, hair and fur on lead crystal plinths. Board and box made of ebony and rosewood with inlaid skull veneer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Brandon, Hi, Brandon. Big congrats on the successful tattoo acquisition. I vaguely remember some movie where the main character always had a couple of dice in his hand to play with so he wouldn’t punch other people in the face or something, so maybe the would work with the urge to itch? The Strickland is on my agenda. Thanks for the fair warning. Working at a bookstore! Noble profession. Is a store in Glendale? Is it an interesting store? Fingers strangling crossed that that they offer you the gig. I’m good enough, thanks, busy with stuff. It’s still not too hot out. Have a freakazoid weekend, pal. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, that one was a bit of a stretch, David. ** Misanthrope, I’m trying to think of a situation where lighter and quicker wouldn’t be a good approach, and I can’t. The Jurassic movie followed by a bonfire: the USA at its best. Rigby’s going to NZ? That’s a hell of a trip. I guess he doesn’t know Josiah. He’s the only person I know there that I know of. Happy pre-4th! ** _Black_Acrylic, Excellent, dude! A mere few weeks even. I look forward to a jpeg-based tour of your new pad once you’ve marked the turf. ** ANGAYRAZE (FART), Hey. Farting, or rather being farted on, is a very popular fetish among the slaves guys right now, I have no clue as to why. ‘The himbo muscle jock worm is wriggling into my brain’: Be careful, dude. Oh, wait am I saying. There are worse worms. But then again, what does ‘worse’ even mean. Anyway, blah blah, congrats on being so gay and so old school porn movie scene-like. Link worked. You are getting buff. Be careful, dude. Ha ha, just kidding. Hunks rule the world. They do, think about it. ** Billy, Hi, Billy. Seriously awesome that you too like ‘Malady of Death’ so much. Excellent description/comparison. I know the name Elizabeth Jane Howard, but I haven’t read her. I actually have kind of a big thing or fondness for sneaky genteel prose as practiced by UK female authors — Compton-Burnett, Quin, Spark, etc. So I’m game. Wow, theoretically, Fran Leibowitz should be blast. I can’t really imagine her getting stuck on one topic for that long. And she always tries to be a little off key, so, at the very least, she surely won’t state the obvious  at length. Have big fun. ** Okay. To the best of my memory I have never devoted a blog post to sports before, but this weekend all of that changes. Sort of. See you on Monday.