the beautiful game: art and sport in the work of humberto vélez

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THE BEAUTIFUL GAME: ART AND SPORT
IN THE WORK OF HUMBERTO VÉLEZ
by Elizabeth Matheson and Emelie Chhangur
C105 Spring 2010
A
rt and sport: the two do not sit easily
together. Rather, it’s the opposite: they
suggest either a non-relationship—meaning
the terms have simply nothing to do with
each other—or they suggest an incongruous
1 Sonia Hughes, Humberto Vélez 8th
Residency Project at Persistence Works
Studios http://www.artspace.org.uk/
documents/SoniaHugesonHumberto
Velez.pdf. May, 2007
Humberto Vélez,
Dreambody (Mister
Regenta), 2008, Centro
Atlántico de Arte
Moderno, Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria, Spain
photo: len grant
pairing—they point in different or opposite
directions. Yet, art has long been present in
sport, and many artworks have been inspired
by, or at least allude to, sporting matters.
In the early 20th century, organized sport
made an attempt at cultural inclusion, known
as “athletic Ruskinism,” which was seen as
important by Pierre de Coubertin, the figure
generally acknowledged as the founder of
modern Olympicism. A disciple of the British
public school cult of athleticism, de Coubertin
avoided the philistinism of the creed, opting
for projects in which sport and arts formed a
holistic partnership. Some examples of this woolly
Utopianism were featured in the 1912 Stockholm
Olympics, which included competitions for music,
literature, painting, sculpture and architecture
alongside athletic demonstrations. However, the
intersections between organized sports and the
arts in the Americas have a deeper history.
A millennium before the advent of the Greek
Olympics, Meso-American ballgames, their
architectural court spaces and their depiction
in painting, sculpture and ceramics were part
of major centres from Paraguay through the
Caribbean to the upper reaches of Mexico.
Historically, poetry, songs and literature glorified
the talents of athletes but there is also a tradition
of not simply depicting sport as a spectacle but
as a means to represent social and psychological
conflict. One just needs to think of the boxing
plays of Eduardo Pavlovsky, Vicente Leñero and
the novels of Isaac Goldemberg on soccer and
José Agustín’s writings on baseball. In addition,
Latin American contemporary artists have been
recuperating and revindicating sporting forms
such as cricket, soccer and other ball games to use
them to address social and political issues from
authoritarianism and censorship to sexuality.
Humberto Vélez is one such artist.
Since 1995, Vélez has been creating projects
collaboratively with social groups, often turning
particular areas of cities into artistic territories
by regenerating urban spaces and social relations.
Far from being another relational turn, Vélez’s
aesthetic approach extends from a cultural
modernity that is particularly Latin American and
Caribbean. These deeply rooted cultural traditions
eclipse the recent relational aesthetics theorized
in Europe, as evidenced by earlier 20th-century
projects. Such projects include Cuba’s Revista de
Avance group (which looked to Hispanic literary
culture to re-enchant the modern aesthetic
experience with beauty and inventiveness);
post-war Brazilian artistic avant-garde artists
such as Lygia Clark, Hèlio Oiticica and Lygia
Pape (who in the late 1950s rejected the extreme
rationalism of abstraction to create more sensorial,
participatory work that appealed not only to the
mind but also to the body); and the following
generation of Latin American artists who came
of age in the 1960s and 1970s (including Renè
Francisco [Cuba], Cildo Meireles [Brazil] and the
many others whose politically engaged works were
based on principles of de-centering mirroring the
extreme political situation in Latin America).
As an inheritor of this rich multiple legacy,
Vélez uses aesthetics as a means of expression
for sensation that generates self-awareness and
critical thinking, which come together to form
a meaningful present experience. As British
Caribbean spoken word artist and playwright
Sonia Hughes puts it, “When he engages with
his collaborators in his participative works, he
walks alongside them and largely they accept him
as they are rarely of the majority or with power
due to their race and/or class and recognize
that he is also an avies rarres [strange animal].
He feels they have something to say, he also has
something to say, he’d like to know how each of
them could strengthen each other’s statements.”1
In The Welcoming (2006), Vélez orchestrated
a performance at the Liverpool docks with a
group of young refugees and asylum seekers from
Chinese and African communities, along with
Irish migrants, and for MultipleCity (2003), Vélez
worked with a brass and marching band known
as the Banda del Hogar, which paraded at the
“wrong” place and time in Panama City.
While Vélez’s performances are often sprawling
public affairs, his first project dealing with
athleticism, Dreambody (Mister Regenta 2008),
appeared much more intimate: a series of male
and female bodybuilders performed poses in a
mannered ritual on a stage inside the Centro
Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria, Spain. The extraordinary physiques
of the bodybuilders—hairless and oiled, with
curvaceous pectorals, flaring thighs and slim
waists—were paraded before an art audience
traditionally exposed to the sanguine poses of
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2 Unless otherwise indicated, Humberto
Vélez’s words have been taken from
an interview with Emelie Chhangur,
(December 3, 2009)
3 Doug Akoi quoted in Leslie Haywood’s
“Bodymakers: a cultural anatomy of
women’s bodybuilding” (New Brunswick,
New Jersey: Rutger’s University Press,
1998), p. 163.
4 Giovanna Miralles, The Last Builder
http://www.bienalpanama.org/index1_I.
html, 2008.
5 Octavio Paz, “Conjunctions and
Disjunctions”(New York: Arcade
Publishing, 1985), pp.138-139.
top, bottom
Humberto Vélez,
The Fight, 2007, Tate
Modern, London
photo: len grant
next spread
Humberto Vélez,
The Welcoming, 2006,
Liverpool
image © david williams
classical nudes rather than the hardened, striated
classed and racialized bodies of athletes. Vélez is
acutely aware that athletic beauty is a matter of
selecting codes, and that some of these codes have
meanings that are already beginning to slip. “The
body is like gravity, it is like Archimedes, the body
is totally present with the audience and ultimately
the viewers asked themselves: Do I like it? Do I
not like it? What the hell is beauty?”2
Bodybuilding has never failed to catch attention.
Its aesthetic—the first appearance of spectacular
masculinity in early 20th-century media—comes
from two main sources: the strong men from the
turn of the 20th century, and the ancient Greek
kouroi. The active construction of the body
invoked within this muscular mythology offers the
kinds of possibilities that magazine advertisements
use to appeal to the recreation of self. Vélez makes
a coherent case for this promise in his performance
embodying the aspirations and dreams of youth
in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, but you can take
it further. What bodybuilders have done, and
continue to do, is flex what defines and delimits
beauty. It’s all here: the willing feminization of
the male body; the masculinization of the sexed
female form; the self-created form constantly
worked over and redefined. Bodybuilding is often
met with enthusiasm, but also with repulsion,
especially female bodybuilders’ appearance. As
cultural critic Doug Akoi has persuasively argued,
“Mainstream response to the body building body
reveals the widespread prejudices and bigotries
that found supposedly “individual” decisions
about what is feminine or masculine or attractive
or unattractive…The challenge that female body
building presents to existing and limiting notions
of sex and gender…[makes it] a truly revolutionary
enterprise.”3
Ironically, in the sporting world itself,
bodybuilding is marginalized. Modelled on the
skills of 19th-century wrestlers and their heroic
muscle display performances, bodybuilding has
never been included as an event in the Olympic
Games, despite its early status as a “sports
extravaganza.” Vélez’s recent film The Last
Builder (2008) revives some of the early 20thcentury wonderment of this event, presenting
it, if not as a principled discipline, then at least
as an allegorical one. Despite having trained at
the International School of Cinema, Video, and
Television in Cuba, which is renowned for its
full-featured productions, Vélez chose to work
with black-and-white 8mm film, a medium where
the mechanics of illusion can be both coaxed out
and concealed. As such, Vélez puts a great deal
of attention on what is to become visible, and
his work has consistently been preoccupied with
establishing the distance of critical reflexivity.
The Last Builder is accompanied by a
commissioned classically composed soundtrack
so one can simply reflect on the body and the
aesthetic relations between each movement in one
body. In this way, it echoes the opening scenes of
Thomas Edison’s Sandow the Modern Hercules
(1894), in which light and shadow play on the
well-toned limbs and rippling torso of the first
builder: strong man Eugene Sandow. Oscillating
between stasis and movement, Vélez’s “last
builder” produces a succession of frozen, sensual
poses that emphasize his body as a record or
testament to a classical athletic achievement that
reaches back to the ancient Greek valorization
of muscularity as evidence of human agency and
willpower. Giovanna Miralles’ accompanying
text for the Last Builder, presented at the
last edition of the Panama Biennial, hints at a
possible psychic shell for the last builder: “We
called him Jose, for no reason, although his name
was Dionisio Herrera Gonzalez; one of the many
unexplained things in a life full of secrets. He was
seventy years old when he was captured in this
film. A pioneer of bodybuilding as a way of life,
he had sculpted his body, defying time. Time,
on the other hand, had not allowed itself to be
completely thwarted, keeping his face for itself.”4
Vélez’s septuagenarian character, worldly-wise and
aged, is a role model who can be both admired
and rejected, and between this dichotomy plays
out our own shifting of generational attitudes
towards ageing, when longevity is seen as a social
problem, not as a gift.
Underlying Vélez’s understanding of beauty is
a complicated psychology, perhaps given voice
most profoundly by the poet and philosopher
Octavio Paz. In questioning how to understand
the accelerated state of history, Paz asked, “How
can we reach it? How can we touch it? How can
we penetrate into its transparent heart? I don’t
know. I don’t think anybody does. But perhaps the
alliance of poetry and rebellion will give us a glimpse
of it.” In the end, he concludes that, “one can be
revolutionary and perhaps even change the ideas of
beauty in their own time.”5 Like Paz, Vélez seems to
suggest that we are surrounded by aged categories,
and some of his performances, such as Dreambody
and The Last Builder, might well be seen as provocations against the stagnation of the intellect rather
than as paeons to a self-fashioned Apollonistic
physique. In fact, if Vélez exalts anything, it is
provocation and the fruition of finding out for
oneself through the doing as well as the pleasure
of losing oneself in the possibility of meanings.
Despite their “content,” both works suggest that
the pleasure of “beauty” and the capacity to
momentarily lose sight of the self are paramount.
Vélez’s most recent project in the UK, The Fight
(2007), presented at the Tate Modern in London,
presented a symbiotic relationship between
boxers, musicians, dancers and performance.
Structured as an aspirational call to the historic
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C105 Spring 2010
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6 Vélez’s The Fight generated considerable interest including a record
number of attendees
at the Tate Modern for
a performance and a
subsequent full photo
spread in Parabol magazine accompanied by an
article written by writer, curator and magazine editor and creator
Cay Sophie Rabinowitz (“the you-as-me”
issue, Spring, 2008)
C105 Spring 2010
boxing clubs of South London to come fight
inside the walls of the iconic Tate Modern led to
the participation of one hundred amateur boxers.
Not surprisingly, the event attracted a great deal
of attention.6 The industrial nature of the Tate
Modern’s Turbine Hall, a sublime example of the
mass societal changes of the early 20th century,
was the setting for the performance. This was
an ideal setting, as boxing had historically been
the preferred way for the British lower working
classes, particularly those living in South London,
to work out conflict. The five rounds of The Fight
was perhaps the most extended action yet of
Vélez’s own artistic process and what he describes
as “pure art—” elements of boxing orchestrated
with music and dance—as a way to “bring people
into a difficult subject.”
Although The Fight was the most explicitly
narrative of any of Vélez’s performances, it is in the
frequent asides that the layers of ingenious subplots and subliminal interests revealed themselves.
As well as the to-and-fro sparring and competitions
between the individual boxers and group training
scenes, surprising moments of significance
frequently occur. Throughout the documentary
film, made specifically for the participants, the
preparatory activities for the boxers appear as
essential as the boxing matches themselves—just
as the process of preparation and realization is as
important for Vélez as the finished performance.
At the beginning and end of the film, we learn that
the performance was marked by a procession to
the gallery by land and water accompanied by a
Scottish bagpiper and Central African drummers.
“I think that it is important to show the different
kind of language in art that we have now, that
didn’t only come from the Western tradition but
especially from other continents, new language
traditions that are as valid in this actually very
mixed and complex work and complex city that is
London,” Vélez said. However, his work does not
make any didactic statements about gender, though
it is significant that one of the lead characters
here is a woman, portrayed not as a victim but as
a fighter, and she competes in the same ring as the
men. Given that the ring tends to be a traditional
male space—and gallery spaces themselves are
historically male-centred—it may come as no
surprise that the entry of a woman fighter into
this space successfully played off the stereotypical
notions of who is allowed into the ring, and also
into the gallery space itself.
If Vélez uses a “different kind of language”
as material for making art with boxers, Le
contingency, collaboration and communal action.
Whatever their political efficacy (and it can be
very little), these aesthetics at least could succeed
in occupying space in Paris, imprinting themselves
on the city. Which is, of course, what art and sport
both claim to do. ◆
Elizabeth Matheson would like to acknowledge
the contribution of Emelie Chhangur in writing
this text. This article is in part based on a
conversation between Humberto Vélez and
Emelie Chhangur, held during December of 2009.
left
Humberto Vélez,
The Fight, 2007, Tate
Modern, London
photo: len grant
above
Humberto Vélez, La
Banda de Mi Hogar,
a series of public
performances included
in "ciudadmultiplecity",
an international urban
art event held in
Panama City in 2003.
photo: fernando
bocanegra
Saut (Paris Plunge, 2010), another of Vélez’s
collaborations with athletes, will do much the
same with swimmers crossing the English Channel.
In the midst of collaborating and researching a
performance for his upcoming project for the
Art Gallery of York University (agyu), Toronto,
Vélez was invited to create a performance for Paris’
renowned Pompidou Centre, and the artist has
proposed to shake up the staid programs of this
modern gallery by presenting a performance on the
Seine River. The performers will be teams of young
competitive swimmers and divers, water polo
players, and synchronized swimmers. The project
has also mobilized a group of performers—
hip-hop dancers, French slam poets and
musicians—from different backgrounds, with
an insistence on their common bonds as youth
who “swim” against a conservative French society
in which the acceptance of the ethnic Other
has become contingent on erasing all realities
of difference. It is a sophisticated idea, a hybrid
oppositional cultural action, bridging over
the often less interesting notion of relational
aesthetics as a social service for the darker side of
Paris’ unemployment, drugs and police violence.
However, a project that situates sport at the centre
of contemporary debates remains sticky in France.
The assumption is that art and sport are often in a
Manichaean struggle in cities like Paris: corporate
sport built structures and mass mediation versus
art’s utopian abolition of different spheres of
life. Perhaps, though, such Utopianism goes part
and parcel with Vélez’s point. Looking at the
performance area on the Seine that will act as the
stage for the project, and witnessing the cohesion
and consciousness of young divers, swimmers and
performers practising together, one is immediately
reminded of the earnest aesthetics of sport: the
multiplication of perspectives and the embrace of
• Elizabeth Matheson's writings have been
translated into numerous languages and have
appeared in Art Nexus, Ciel Variable, Prefix
Photo, and Studium, Brazil's leading electronic
arts magazine. As part of her curatorial practice,
Elizabeth has worked with and written about
renowned Latin American artists including
Betsabeé Romero, Rosângela Rennó and Oscar
Muńoz, and Academy Award nominee filmmaker
Lourdes Portillo. She is currently researching
a two-part exhibition on consumption and
resurrection in the global age, developing
an exhibition on contested spaces, with a
forthcoming essay entitled Somoza's Teeth, and
is co-curating a project with the artist Humberto
Vélez at the agyu.
• Emelie Chhangur is a Toronto-based artist,
cultural worker, and curator. Maintaining
a process-based, collaborative approach to
working with artists, her recent curatorial
research and practice finds its relevant context
in Latin America. As an artist, her position as
Assistant Director, Curator at the Art Gallery
of York University (agyu) is instrumental in
transforming the nature of the contemporary
art institution and the social function of the
university art gallery in relation to its academic
context and the arts community. Her single
channel videos have been shown nationally and
internationally and her sculpture/installation
work was most recently shown in Dyed Roots:
The new Emergence of Culture at the Museum
of Contemporary Canadian Art (mocca),
Toronto and upcoming at the Koffler (2010) and
Art Gallery of Peterborough (2011).
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