![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO4-IMG7-IM_Pham_Meyer_Muscle-panic_10_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Muscle Panic<\/em>, performance with Gee Okonkwo, Art League Houston, Houston, 2019
Photos : Alex Barber, courtesy of Art League Houston<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO4-IMG6-IM_Pham_Meyer_Muscle-panic_05_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Muscle Panic<\/em>, installation view, Ferme du buisson, Noisiel, 2019.
Photos : \u00c9mile Ouroumov, 2021, courtesy of Ferme du Buisson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The heavy codification of bodies and gendered performativity in sport can be revealed in the persistent resistance to embracing \u201cfemininity\u201d and queerness, perhaps to protect the idea of \u201cmasculinity.\u201d In other words, the gender binary is a social construct wherein modern males struggle to define their own identity. As Meyer\u2019s work shows, queer bodies have always existed in sports, however marginally. Prior to the recent male identity crisis, athleticism celebrated body positivity in all shapes and forms. Playing together, rubbing bodies together, creates a tactile friction that seeks to cultivate a collective understanding. Baltimore photographer Ben McNutt explores how traditions celebrate community by bringing together its members\u2019 bodies in the practice of wrestling. McNutt approaches the sport broadly, with subjects ranging from a specific individual in Daniel The Wrestler<\/em> (2013 \u2013 ongoing), to the historical Greek wrestling form in Pankratiasts<\/em> (2012 \u2013 13). These works present McNutt\u2019s personal investigation into the construction of heteronormativity in American culture and how it has constantly been affirmed through bodily contact. As one of the original competitions in the ancient Olympic Games, wrestling is one of the oldest sports in human history. Reliefs on murals, paintings, vases, and plates from antiquity illustrate naked male bodies grappling, locking, and tackling each other. These images of male bodies in close contact \u2014 which has historically been seen as a celebration of athleticism \u2014 can simultaneously carry homoerotic connotations in the eyes of contemporary Americans. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In these works, McNutt virtually applies his queer perspective to the sport as a way to raise questions about varying degrees of acceptance for different types of physical contact between same-sex bodies. In challenging the boundaries of heteronormativity in contemporary sports and understanding the aversion against homoerotic references, McNutt looks to how wrestling is understood in places with a richer history of the activity. In a series titled The Uffizi Wrestlers<\/em> (2014 \u2013 ongoing), McNutt\u2019s lens focuses on the intimacy of the interaction between two male bodies in a Renaissance sculpture housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. His remarks about these sculptures emphasize the importance of socio-political context: \u201cSociety dictates that you\u2019re supposed to think, \u2018it can\u2019t be gay\u2019 because it\u2019s in a specific context, like a museum athletics.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Matthew Leifheit, \u201c\u2018MATTE\u2019 Magazine Presents Ben McNutt,\u201d VICE, October 23, 2014, accessible online.<\/span> Hence, an insertion of the \u201cgay\u201d narrative into these masculine spaces, such as the creation of the Gay Games, is often received violently by the residents. McNutt personally experienced the aggression when he suggested the irony in the sport\u2019s perception of masculinity and how its activity appears \u201cqueerly\u201d to him.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Lisa Elmaleh, \u201cBen McNutt: Oil Wr\u00adestling,\u201d Lenscratch, October 8, 2017, accessible online.<\/span> His comment was met with hostile reactions \u2014 death-threats among the various invocations of violence \u2014 from self-identified wrestlers and others. His commitment to gaining greater knowledge of the tradition resulted in the series Turkish Oil Wrestlers<\/em> (2017 \u2013 ongoing). To better understand the strong reactions that he had received, McNutt employed a self-reflexive and immersive approach when doing research for this project. He learned the sport, visited Turkey, attended the matches, got to know the wrestlers, and tried to understand the dynamic between them. By focusing solely on the interaction between bodies, the artist hopes to move away from categorizations in sport that are dictated by gender and sexual orientation. Masculinity often enforces a hyper-gendered focus on the practice of sport in order to mark its territory, and queer artists who seek to challenge this hegemony can also easily fall into the trap of sexualizing an activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The need for nuance and resistance against a dialectical hetero\/homo framework is brought forth in the work of Chicago-based artist Derrick Woods-Morrow. His 2015 works Standing Before Grace (as Grace Jones)<\/em>, Color Photograph<\/em>, and Untitled (Kim Kardashian)<\/em>, After the Paper Magazine Cover<\/em> coalesce three domains: queer desire, pop culture, and athleticism \u2014 different combinations of which are explored in Meyer\u2019s and McNutt\u2019s practices as well. Woods-Morrow brings another layer to the intersection: race. In his photographs, a Black male body \u2014 almost nude \u2014 restages poses after pictures of Grace Jones and Kim Kardashian that \u201cbroke the Internet.\u201d Although the original photograph of Jones is viewed as a celebration of the Black queer body, and the original Kardashian\u2019s image is considered an example of the capitalization and exoticization of the Black body, both photographs point to the fetishization of Black bodies and their perceived hyper-realism. Woods-Morrow\u2019s lens locates moments where queer desire intersects with American mainstream masculinity, and he also draws out the abject effects of race, class, and gender on the expected performativity of a body. He shows how the process of hyperbolizing \u2014 whether in the form of hyper-athleticism in sports or of hyper-sexualization in media \u2014 further abstracts Black bodies, denying them access to the place of repose granted to bodies that conform to the dominant culture\u2019s expectations of performativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To better understand the historical effect of this social abstraction, one can look to Woods-Morrow\u2019s series Black Alchemy + Restoration Toile<\/em> (2019 \u2013 ongoing), in which he seeks to find this space for Black bodies in American history. Comprising photographs by Woods-Morrow and images from the New Orleans Recreation Department\u2019s 1947 \u2013 48 archive, the series features moments of Black bodies in recreational spaces: children in a playground, boys at a community pool, and baseball players in mid-action. In this series Woods-Morrow transforms the archival images into toile patterns and prints them on linen to serve as backgrounds upon which his photographs and sculptures are mounted. In his photographs for the series, Black bodies in swimsuits are recurring images. In contrast to the archival images from the New Orleans Recreation Department, which show historical moments of Black bodies in pools,5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Finlo Rohrer, \u201cWhy don\u2019t black Americans swim?\u201d BBC News, September 3, 2010, accessible online.<\/span> Woods-Morrow\u2019s positioning of Black people on sandy beaches reaches further back to the long-ago moment when their ancestors first set foot on the shores of North America, and all the agonies that have taken place since then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the 2019 EXPO CHICAGO Art After Hours<\/em> Gallery Night, Woods-Morrow\u2019s installation-performance Acts of Boyhood Divination.Southern Seas<\/em> (2019) materialized this complex racial-social-historical dynamic by creating a queer space where the hetero\/homo dialectic ceases to exist. In the centre of the gallery, a square pit is filled with sand; custom ropes hook onto four corner posts and two middle posts, constructing a structure resembling a wrestling ring. Two performers wearing bathing suits perform a series of choreographies, pressing their bodies against the cold white walls of the gallery before eventually entering the ring. According to Woods-Morrow, the characters were inspired by Oceanic mythology and his childhood imagination growing up in the American South.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. 6 <\/a> - Derrick Woods-Morrow, \u201cActs of Boyhood Divination: Southern Seas,\u201d artist\u2019s website. <\/span> Once inside the pit, the performers start to interact with each other and with various objects and pieces of furniture made by Woods-Morrow, Norman Teague, and Agnieszka Kulon. The fabric used to make the arena ropes, the pillow coverings, and the swimsuits bear the toile patterns that Woods-Morrow created in Restoration Toile<\/em>. He describes these objects in the sandy arena as \u201ca tool for both labor smithing and leisure bringing as the performers exert themselves sexually, each desiring to use the objects beyond its utilitarian function, doing so in order to bring forth \u2018An Age of Rest\u2019; a moment of pause, a refrain from the labor induced mediocracy [o\u00f9 baigne] of the American public.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> He uses a strategy similar to Meyer\u2019s: both artists stage architectural interventions inside normatively coded spaces such as white-cube galleries, portrait salons, and municipal parks. Inside both artists\u2019 spaces, performers who stand in for queer bodies freely express their desire and sexuality while taking respite from the constraints and regulations of prevalent heteronormative society. In Acts of Boyhood Divination<\/em>, Woods-Morrow allows Black queer bodies to rest, recharge, and be healed, because outside of his ring, these bodies will have to fight continuously for recognition and acceptance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Viewed together, the projects selected from Meyer\u2019s, McNutt\u2019s, and Woods-Morrow\u2019s bodies of work reveal a diffusion of inherent queerness in sports. Contemporary athleticism is an exhibition of masculinity \u2014 a characteristic that contemporary societies have deemed necessary in order to sustain economic growth and social stability. Were queer bodies a threat to the reconstruction efforts in the West following the devastating world wars and other ongoing neo-liberal conflicts elsewhere in the world? I cannot help but recall a story about the end of the Second World War: following the Allied victory, all prisoners from concentration camps returned to society except those who wore pink triangles on their uniforms.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - \u201cAs the Allies swept through Europe to victory over the Nazi regime in early 1945, hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were liberated. The Allied Military Government of Germany repealed countless laws and decrees. Left unchanged, however, was the 1935 Nazi revision of Paragraph 175. [sur \u00ab\u2009l\u2019ind\u00e9cence\u2009\u00bb dans les relations entre hommes]Under the Allied occupation, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment regardless of time served in the concentration camps. The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 [on \u201cindecency\u201d in male relations] remained on the books of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) until the law was re-vised in 1969 to decriminalize homosexual relations between men over the age of 21.\u201d \u201cNazi Persecution of Homosexual 1933-1945,\u201d Section 12, \u201cAftermath,\u201d United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org\/exhibition\/persecution-of-homosexuals<\/a><\/span> The attention to queer bodies and queer desire in the practices of Meyer, McNutt, and Woods-Morrow, as well as organized public events such as the Gay Games highlight a legacy of resistance, generations of struggles against the presumed integrity of heteronormativity. The ongoing violence against queer bodies is an attempt to protect this social hegemony. In the real world, queer bodies are not yet allowed to rest, to appear strong, or to be both sexual and asexual, but inside the spaces created by Meyer, McNutt, and Woods-Morrow, at least we can see them trying to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n
In 2017, as part of Nuit Blanche Toronto<\/em> curated by Barbara Fischer, Meyer erected a forty-five-foot-tall tower of scaffolding in Queen\u2019s Park against the backdrop of the Ontario Legislative Building. This temporary structure was similar to the one present in all iterations of Muscle Panic. Throughout the course of the evening, six performers periodically unrolled a series of texts printed on large banners that hung on all sides of the \u201cOlympic\u201d tower. There were twenty-four banners in total, and together they formed a poem that Meyer developed from archival documents and oral histories from the City of Toronto and The ArQuives: Canada\u2019s LGBTQ2+ Archives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay<\/em> Archives).2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Hazel Meyer, \u201cWhere Once Stood a Bandstand for Cruising & Shelter,\u201d artist\u2019s website.<\/span> With phrases such as \u201cwhere once stood a bandstand for cruising & shelter,\u201d which is also the name of the installation, and \u201ca wide world of wholes & the final push through,\u201d Meyer\u2019s poem embodies controversial histories, protests, cruising, and contentious monuments to which this factious park has been host. After the unfurling, the performers untied the harnesses to drop the banners to the clearing below. The banners, the scaffolding, and the temporality of Nuit Blanche<\/em> as a twelve-hour event enunciated the process of erasure to which queer bodies and their desire have been subjected. Meyer\u2019s work materialized the struggles that events such as the Gay Games must reconcile in order to gain visibility in mainstream narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO4-IMG1-IM_Pham_Meyer_Where-Once-Stand_15_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Where Once Stood a Bandstand for Cruising & Shelter, <\/em>Nuit Blanche Toronto, 2017.
Photo : Henry Chan, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO4-IMG2-IM_Pham_McNutt_Daniel-Roll-20_CMYK-e1631655840345-scaled.jpeg\")
Daniel As A Kind Of David <\/em>(self portrait), 2016.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Daniel Bitton<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO4-IMG5-IM_Pham_Woods-Morrow-01_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Standing Before Grace (As Grace Jones)<\/em>, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO4-IMG8-IM_Pham_Woods-Morrow-04_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Color Photograph<\/em>, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO4-IMG4-IM_Pham_Woods-Morrow-06_CMYK-C2-FLAT-e1631223567966.jpeg\")
Frederick on Lake Pontchartrain | After Lincoln Beach<\/em>, 2018-2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO4-IMG9-IM_Pham_Woods-Morrow_ABD-07_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Acts of Boyhood Divination: Southern Seas,<\/em> performance, Aspect Ratio Gallery, Chicago, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n