Despite all that has changed since sexual and social identity became a hot-button topic in art production and discourse throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, one American stereotype still remains particularly entrenched: that of the male athlete. Mixed Signals focuses on artists from the mid-1990s to the present who question the notion of the male athlete as the last bastion of uncomplicated, authentic identity in American culture during the preceding decades. The works presented here, made by artists who have appropriated, riffed on, complicated, and variously re-presented athletic imagery, demonstrate that the male athlete is a far more ambiguous, polyvalent figure in our collective cultural imagination than ever before.

Photographer Collier Schorr has said, “I want to show the whole temperature of masculinity because—and I can only approach it as a woman—from the outside, masculinity has been depicted in very black-and-white terms.” Accordingly, the artists selected for this exhibition reject such comfortable “black-and-white” imagery. Catherine Opie focuses on the dramatic spectacle of high school football, zeroing in on a tense moment of anticipation just as the players are ready to spring into action, while Brian Jungen sets up a meditative stack of boxes repeating the mesmerizing stare of legendary basketball star, Michael Jordan. Hank Willis Thomas’s photographs deconstruct the ways in which race and sexuality are exploited to brand and market male athletes; and Joe Sola’s video works assume an outsider’s perspective on football, addressing the social exclusivity of competitive athletics through humor and farce. Matthew Barney’s early sculptural work with Vaseline and weight-training equipment, as well as his body-based performance practice, stress the sexual, sometimes abject dimension of athletic training.

Several artists and theorists have argued convincingly that social identities—including race, gender, and sexuality—are performed, coded, and contingent. However, the male athlete has been overlooked by artists, art historians and curators until fairly recently, because it is only in the past decade that a critical mass of art addressing this subject has grown large enough to allow for such an exploration.

Mixed Signals is an expanded version of Contemporary Projects 11: Hard Targets: Masculinity and American Sports, an exhibition organized by Christopher Bedford for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in fall 2008. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with texts by Bedford, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Judith Butler.

Brian Jungen, Michael, 2003

Exhibition Itinerary

Cranbrook Art Museum
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
February 1, 2009 – March 29, 2009

Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture
Baltimore, Maryland
October 8 – December 12, 2009

Wexner Center for the Arts
Columbus, Ohio
January 29 – April 11, 2010

Art Gallery of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
April 30 – September 4, 2010

AVAILABLE
October 2010 - January 2011