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{"id":5324,"date":"2021-08-31T19:05:58","date_gmt":"2021-09-01T00:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/deep-riffing-in-hazel-meyers-non-archival-archive\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T12:57:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T17:57:27","slug":"deep-riffing-in-hazel-meyers-non-archival-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/deep-riffing-in-hazel-meyers-non-archival-archive\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Riffing in Hazel Meyer\u2019s Non-archival Archive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Like Meyer\u2019s collecting process, my writing method is guided by my own queer sensibilities, my familiarity with Meyer\u2019s larger art practice, and my amateur interest in critical sports scholarship \u2014 a field in which I have no formal training beyond an alien curiosity.<\/em> In the text that follows, I attempt to channel Meyer\u2019s attentive care by devoting time and focus to three images from Non-archival Archive<\/em>. Inspired by Wayne Koestenbaum\u2019s column in Cabinet magazine, I engage each image via a method of \u201cdeep riffing,\u201d taking each as a prompt for part-theoretical, part-academic, and part-creative musings on the visual cultures of sport, the representation of athletes\u2019 bodies in the media, and the histories and affects that haunt athletic spaces and archives.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Wayne Koestenbaum\u2019s column \u201cLegend,\u201d<\/em> appeared in several issues of Cabinet <\/em>magazine between 2010 and 2015, accessible online.<\/span> Using the image\u2019s imposed parameters, \u201cdeep riffing\u201d aims to spark imagination through limitation by encouraging ideas to bounce around like a ball in a squash court, their frenetic energies amplified through focus and restraint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hazel Meyer<\/strong>
Non-archival Archive (Muscle Panic)<\/em>, installation views, Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, 2020.
Photos : Don Hall, courtesy of Dunlop Art Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Surya Bonaly at the 1998 Nagano Olympics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n


In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others<\/em>, Sara Ahmed draws on the work of political philosopher Frantz Fanon to argue that \u201cracism \u2018stops\u2019 black bodies inhabiting space by [les emp\u00eachant] extending through objects and others; the familiarity of \u2018the white world,\u2019 as a world we know implicitly, \u2018disorients\u2019 black bodies such that they cease to know where to find things.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Sarah Ahmed,Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 111.<\/span>In one image from Meyer\u2019s Non- Archival Archive<\/em>, French figure skater Surya Bonaly performs a backflip as part of her 1998 Nagano Olympic program despite the move being banned since 1976, at least in-part due to its two-foot landing. In this particular iteration of the flip, however, Bonaly landed on only one foot, constituting a kind of technical\/legal grey zone. Notwithstanding, Bonaly was heavily penalized and finished in a dismal tenth place. The disorientation that Ahmed theorizes is made literal in Bonaly\u2019s backflip, in which the skater propelled her body entirely upside-down, landed in a manner arguably more challenging than \u201cthe ideal,\u201d and was still denied a place in \u201cthe white world\u201d of figure skating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The Olympic rings behind Bonaly are notably incomplete, cut off by the photograph\u2019s edge. Introduced in 1913, the rings were created as a symbol of international \u201cunity and togetherness,\u201d an ideal that the Olympics themselves have found it hard to live up to. However, like the interrupted logo, individual athletes such as Bonaly, and Jesse Owens and Ibolya Cs\u00e1k (who held podium positions in 1936, when the National Socialist Party attempted to use the Games to \u201cprove\u201d Aryan superiority), and Tommie Smith and John Carlos (both gave the Black Power salute on the podium in 1968) expose \u201cunity and togetherness\u201d \u2014 as an Olympic dictum and a liberal discourse \u2014 as a dangerous fiction. These athletes forge what Ahmed calls \u201clines of deviation,\u201d resisting the \u201cinvisible and unmarked\u2026 center\u201d of whiteness and creating a productive disorientation that the feminist scholar refers to as \u201ca queer effect.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology<\/em>, 121, 135.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hazel Meyer<\/strong>
Non-archival Archive (Muscle Panic),<\/em> details, 2018-2021.
Photos : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Diana Taurasi and Seimone Augustus in the 2013 WNBA Western Conference Finals<\/h2>\n\n\n\n


The YouTube screenshot freezes another \u201cqueer effect\u201d: the precise moment of the infamous kiss between Phoenix Mercury guard Diana Taurasi and Minnesota Lynx guard Seimone Augustus during the 2013 WNBA Western Conference Finals. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that these professional basketball players had been friends for years, their interactions in this playoff game grew heated. After Taurasi pushed Augustus the two bumped chests, and then Taurasi cheekily and briskly kissed Augustus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The phrase \u201cplants a kiss\u201d in the YouTube video\u2019s title feels both old-fashioned and fitting. In basketball, \u201cplanting\u201d means \u201cholding your ground in one position, usually in a position of advantage.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - \u201cBasketball Glossary,\u201d My Basketball Teacher: Basketball Development, Coaching and Teaching for Players, Coaches, Teachers and Fans<\/em> (website), accessible online.<\/span> At the time of the kiss, Taurasi\u2019s team was losing by 26 points, so the kiss really was Taurasi holding her ground \u2014 not giving up when facing defeat. It was also an instance of Taurasi holding her ground insofar as she was holding onto the advantageous position of camaraderie, of closeness, that often lies at the heart of competition and rivalry.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).<\/span> The referee issued both players a technical foul for the kiss, penalizing them for \u201ca violation of conduct.\u201d But this violation arguably extends beyond the game. The code of conduct violated here not only applies to the rules of basketball but to the heteronormative ideology that governs our worlds as well. Both on and off the court, women are able to be close and touch one another freely \u2014 but kissing one another is in excess of what is considered permissible behaviour. A kiss belies passion; a kiss is political. At one of the staged \u201ckiss-in\u201d protests organized by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), activists distributed xeroxed fliers titled \u201cWhy We Kiss,\u201d with a list of reasons that included the following: \u201cWE KISS in an aggressive demonstration of affection. We kiss to protest the cruel and painful bigotry that affects the lives of lesbian and gay men. We kiss so that all who see us will be forced to confront their own homophobia. We kiss to challenge repressive conventions that prohibit displays of love between persons of the same sex. We kiss as an affirmation of our feelings, or desire, ourselves.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Read My Lips: Why We Kiss (New York: ACT UP\/ACT NOW, 1988), The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https:\/\/digitalcollections.nypl.org\/items\/510d47e3-4dba-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99<\/a>.<\/span> After the game, Taurasi provocatively told reporters, \u201cWe were just trying to make sweet love.\u201d Augustus responded, \u201cThe tango dance that we had, I always say she just wanted some of my deliciousness.\u201d Their playful and public kiss transgressed the boundaries of their sport, and was publicly called a(s) \u201cfoul.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The Dunbar Poets Circa 1982<\/h2>\n\n\n\n


Recognized as one of the first influential African American poets in the United States, Paul Laurence Dunbar confirms the power of a kiss in the first verse of his poem \u201cIF\u201d:<\/em> IF life were but a dream, my Love, And death the waking time; If day had not a beam, my Love, And night had not a rhyme, \u2014 A barren, barren world were this Without one saving gleam; I\u2019d only ask that with a kiss You\u2019d wake me from the dream.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Paul Laurence Dunbar, \u201cIF,\u201d The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar<\/em> (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1913).<\/span>
A civil rights activist whose poetry mixed African American English of the Antebellum South, the Midwestern regional dialect of James Whitcomb Riley, and Standard American English, Dunbar considered his \u201cdialect poems\u201d to be \u201ca particular poetic genre\u201d characterized by sentimentalism, charm, and \u201clyrical\u201d effects.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Michael Cohen, \u201cPaul Laurence Dunbar and the Genres of Dialect,\u201d African American Review<\/em> 41, no. 2 (2007): 247.<\/span> This linguistic \u201cpivoting,\u201d a tactic referred to as code-switching, was \u2014 and continues to be \u2014 a strategy of survival for Black people in a world that values white supremacist markers of \u201cintelligence,\u201d \u201cpropriety,\u201d and \u201ccivility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n


In 1918, twelve years after Dunbar\u2019s death from tuberculosis, a high school opened in Baltimore, Maryland, bearing the poet\u2019s name: Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. At the time, segregation laws meant that it was an all-Black school, and as the twentieth century went on, Dunbar High School came to be situated at the intersections of five housing projects in the city\u2019s east side. Shortly after developing its K-12 curriculum in 1940, the school established a basketball team dubbed the \u201cPoets.\u201d Like the school\u2019s namesake, these Poets were skilled in \u201cpivoting\u201d \u2014 as well as in dribbling, passing, and shooting. In both their 1981 \u2013 82 and 1982 \u2013 83 seasons, the Dunbar Poets went 59\u20130, with eleven players going on to Division I play in college. They continue to be revered as the greatest high school basketball team in U.S. history.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Chad Carlson, \u201cThe Greatest High School Basketball Team Ever: The Dunbar Poets, 1981 \u2014 1982 and 1982 \u2014 1983,\u201d in Baltimore Sports: Stories from Charm City<\/em>, ed. Daniel A. Nathan (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hazel Meyer<\/strong>
Non-archival Archive (Muscle Panic)<\/em>, installation view, Ferme du buisson, Noisiel, 2019.
Photo : \u00c9mile Ouroumov, 2021, courtesy of Ferme du Buisson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Though they may seem like unlikely bedfellows, basketball and poetry share a surprising amount in common. In both poetry and basketball, natural rhythms and flows are interrupted for stylistic purposes. In poetry, this happens through enjambment, the physical breakage of syntax through line breaks; in basketball, it happens through the staccato squeaks of shoes on the court, the quickfire passes from one player to another. William Wordsworth\u2019s (1798) poetic theory, in which poems are said to arise from an \u201coverflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility,11<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u201d 11 <\/a> - William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London: J. & A. Arch, 1798).<\/span>is echoed in Todd Davis and J. D. Scrimgeour\u2019s description of basketball as \u201ca game with patterns that can feel elemental, yet distinguished by improbable improvisations, full of the energy of the city and the stillness (ever taken a foul shot?) of the prairie.”12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Todd Davis and J. D. Scrimgeour, \u201cBasketball, Poetry, and All Things Beautiful,\u201d in Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball<\/em>, ed. Todd Davis (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 3.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This fluctuation of movement and rest, of fury and calm, occurs in Meyer\u2019s Muscle Panic<\/em> too. On a typical gallery visit, one is likely to encounter the exhibition as a quiet installation of sculptures, scaffolding, jerseys, and banners, but most iterations also include a lively performance in which a team of queer<\/em> misfits comes together to practise drills, braid one another\u2019s hair, and engage in other tender rituals of sport. This performance animates Meyer\u2019s sculptural works and renders their function as \u201crepositories of feelings and emotions\u201d palpable. Like the ebb and flow of basketball, or poetry, or a muscle, or a kiss, Muscle Panic exists through energy and stillness, action and resistance, pressure and release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the 2014 iteration of Muscle Panic, Meyer collaborated with Cait McKinney to create the Muscle Panic Handbook<\/em>, an artist book that combines theory, scholarship, and popular writing on sport to consider the emotional richness of athletic practice. In the book, McKinney describes athletes as \u201cvolatile creatures whose bodies hold together all kinds of tensions, the extremes of \u2018pleasure and pain, discipline and its undoing.\u2019\u201d13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Jennifer Doyle, \u201cIntroduction: Dirt Off Her Shoulders,\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19, no. 4 (2013): 426, quoted in Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, Muscle Panic Handbook<\/em>, self-published with Mercer Union, 2014.<\/span> If Non-archival Archive<\/em> is primarily an \u201carchive of feelings,\u201d I hope that my \u201cdeep riffs\u201d have illuminated some of the contradictory and entangled feelings that it archives. Desire, frustration, refusal, anger, triumph, determination, passion: these emotions are the scaffolding of sport upon which the rules, the calls, and the game itself balance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n

Hazel Meyer, Robin Alex McDonald<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hazel Meyer\u2019s Non-archival Archive (Muscle Panic)<\/em> (2018\u201321) presents a photographic collection of \u201cnoteworthy moments in sporting cultures,\u201d and meticulously displays the images by clipping them to green metal scaffolding. Often shown in the ever-evolving installation Muscle Panic<\/em> (2014 \u2013 ongoing), alongside an assembled scaffold that holds pennants, jerseys, pom poms, and mesh bags filled with oranges, Non-archival Archive<\/em> constitutes both an architecture of display and an \u201carchive of feelings.\u201d Ann Cvetkovich defines an archive of feelings as an \u201cexploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and [NOTE count=1]emotions\u201d[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)[\/REF] \u2014 an apt description for the tenderness, delight, and curiosity with which Meyer selects the athletes, teams, events, and moments represented in her work. With no particular collecting mandate or archival strategy guiding the selection process, the images and moments that make up Non-archival Archive<\/em> have been chosen through a methodology of desiring, in which Meyer\u2019s own interests in queerness, protest, aesthetics, intimacy, and emotion come to the fore.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5168,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[438],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[979],"artistes":[1795],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-5324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-103-sportification","auteurs-robin-alex-mcdonald-en","artistes-hazel-meyer-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5324"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271512,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5324\/revisions\/271512"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=5324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}