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Amodern 3: Sport and Visual Culture

AMODERN 3: SPORT AND VISUAL


CULTURE
Jonathan Finn

Much of our knowledge of and experience with sport comes to us in mediated form.
Newspapers, television broadcasts, film, sports magazines and other sports-related
media present us with an unceasing flow of visual, textual and oral information
related to sport. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras and user-driven devices like GPS
watches and Go-Pro cameras enable athletes and fans alike to produce, disseminate
and analyze their own sports content. The result is a seemingly limitless flow of sport
media on everything from Tim-Bits hockey to the FIFA World Cup.

Within the aggregate field of mediated sport, this special issue of Amodern is
concerned with the visual, and more specifically with the image. Sports and images
intersect in myriad ways: images are used as pedagogical tools in sport as they are
produced, circulated and read by coaches, athletes, trainers and sports medicine
professionals; they are used as juridical tools that either replace or augment the
human eye in sporting events; they serve commercial purposes as in television and
print advertising; they are used as entertainment in television, film and on-line; and
they form an essential part of visual culture as they are manifest in visual art, pop
culture and other forms of visual culture production. Importantly, whether
pedagogical, juridical, commercial, aesthetic or otherwise, images of sport are
constituent components of culture: they are bound to cultural conceptions of class,
race, nation and gender and are enmeshed in the fundamental economic and
institutional infrastructures of society.

Despite the centrality and importance of the visual in sport, treatment of the topic
has remained relatively sporadic and isolated. The visual in sport has been taken up
by scholars in fields ranging from the history, philosophy, and/or sociology of sport,
to visual culture studies and communication studies; however, when the visual is
addressed, it is often treated in only a nominal sense. To date, the only rigorous,
comprehensive account of sport and the visual is Mike Huggins’ and Mike
O’Mahony’s 2011 special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport as
well as their subsequent edited book, The Visual in Sport (Routledge 2011). Thus the
rationale for this special issue of Amodern is to continue the still nascent
investigation of sport and the visual in hopes of contributing to this developing field
of inquiry.

This special issue began as panel on Sport and Visual Culture for the 2013 Cultural
Studies Association annual conference. Not all of the panelists are represented here
and not all of the projects and papers here were part of the panel. The material
included here interrogates the visual in sport as it is tied to politics, economics,
identity and embodiment and in so doing brings new questions to sport studies,
visual culture studies and related fields. The works offer a range of theoretical and
methodological perspectives but all problematize the relationship between sport and
its images.

The issue opens with a feature interview with the (Art) Historian and Philosopher and
Historian of Science, Ludmilla Jordanova. The interview took the form of a
conversation based on Jordanova’s most recent book, The Look of the Past: Visual
and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge, 2012). Although the book,
and Jordanova’s work more broadly, does not take sport as its subject of study, the
author’s emphasis on a careful, rigorous analysis of and engagement with the visual
as part of doing research is as relevant to the study of sport as it is to history, which
is the primary subject of the book. Jordanova’s insightful, honest and sometimes
provocative comments in the interview will prompt readers and researchers to be
more cognizant and self-reflexive in their own use of visual material.

Richard Gruneau’s essay follows the interview and offers an historical overview of
the ‘politics of representation’ at work in the development of modern sport in
England. Borrowing ideas initially outlined by Pierre Bourdieu, Gruneau sets out to
explore the processes whereby sport came to be understood as its own autonomous
‘object’ in English culture. Where sport was increasingly found in artistic, literary
th th
and philosophical representations during the 16 and 17 centuries, he argues that
th
it wasn’t until the 18 century that sport began to emerge as a central object of both
artistic and textual representations. Gruneau ties this emergence to a changing socio-
economic context that had distinct political and aesthetic dimensions. In the former,
Gruneau situates the visual culture of sport as participating in the then developing
tension between the gentry of the English countryside and the more working-class
populations of its urban centres. In the latter, the author notes that the visual culture
of sport in England was increasingly shaped by a ‘bourgeois will to refinement’ and
regulation. In this way, the making of modern sport was harmonized with a broader
project of modernity. An important part of this project was the invention of ‘sport’ as
a seemingly autonomous and timeless cultural form with its own essential qualities.
However, Gruneau notes how the newly imagined conception of sport borrowed
strongly from Classical ideals of beauty and symmetry to project the idealized body
as one with distinctly athletic features. This necessarily worked in conjunction with
both the politics of nineteenth century British capitalism and Empire as well as with
a larger Foucauldian project of discipline and regulation. Images of modern sport in
England then, didn’t just represent the modernization of the nation and its sport but
helped to shape each through powers of visual communication.

Like Gruneau’s, Robin Veder’s essay is concerned with the modernist period;
however, Veder’s essay is more specifically focused on turn of the century American
avant-garde art. The author opens with the provocative claim that the founding of the
American Posture League in 1913 should be seen as of equal importance to the
famous Armory Show of the same year. What follows is an examination of the
parallels and connections between American Modernist art and the contemporaneous
development of physical culture and physical education in the United States. Using
the metaphor of the skeleton, Veder argues that both of these fields – art and
physical education – were concerned with visualizing form and structure and with
cultivating a kinesthetically empathetic response. She notes a growing connection
between physical education and the arts and asserts that the era gave rise to “a
period eye and a period body.” In doing so Veder makes a compelling case for the
bond between art and sport in the development of a modernist aesthetic.
Where the traditional visual arts are the subject of the first two essays, the third, by
Russell Field, addresses contemporary Canadian film. Specifically, Field examines
two recent Canadian sport films – Score: A Hockey Musical and Breakaway to
address the myth of hockey as a signifier of Canadian national identity. Field finds
promise in both films to critique or interrogate this myth, particularly its gendered
and racialized components. The musical format of Score and the main character’s
emphasis on skill over violence offer possible disruptions to the traditional view of
the game. And in Breakaway Field notes that the focus on the immigrant experience
– in this particular case a Sikh-Canadian hockey team – opens up a potential critique
of the racialized nature of ‘Canada’s game.’ However, in both cases Field argues that
the films come up short, ultimately preaching assimilation rather than resistance or
critique with the result that hockey’s gendered and racialized characteristics remain
in tact.

The final two essays of the special issue take up the relationship between sport,
images and embodiment. Anu M. Vaittinen’s essay addresses the role of the visual in
shaping coaches’ and athletes’ knowledge in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Vaittinen
combines participant observation research with interviews in two North East
England MMA gyms to address the visual in ‘ways of knowing MMA.’ She examines
television, print media and the Internet (including social media) as key sites through
which transnational information flows are utilized in building discrete, local
knowledges of the sport. The author stresses the need for ethnographic approaches
in addressing the visual and sport as a way to move beyond the more typical
treatment of images as texts. As she shows, MMA fighters and coaches are not
passive consumers of visual content but actively critique, debate, produce and
disseminate visual material as they build their own embodied knowledge of the sport.

Like Vaittinen’s, Lianne McTavish’s and Patrick J. Reed’s project employs


ethnographic research; however, in this case it is an auto-ethnography of McTavish’s
transformation into a figure girl competitor. The piece included here is part of
McTavish’s larger project of the Feminist Figure Girl in which she documented and
wrote about her experience training to be a figure girl competitor. The photographer,
Patrick J. Reed, worked alongside McTavish documenting the often mundane and
banal realities of body-building and figure competition from nutrition and training to
costume design and the application of spray-tan. The result is a ‘photo-dialogue’ that
does more than present a behind-the-scenes view of figure girl competitions; instead,
the images and McTavish’s and Reed’s commentary offer up reflections on biopower,
aesthetics, feminism, and body politics. As a result the project further underlies the
productive potential for creative, ethnographic approaches in addressing sport and
the visual.

This special issue has very much been a labour of love and I want to thank Ludmilla,
Rick, Robin, Russell, Anu, Lianne, and Patrick for their contributions and
conversations. Thanks to Scott Pound and Darren Wershler for their initial support of
the project and to Michael Nardone for making it all happen.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

“Looking into the Past,” An Interview with Ludmilla Jordanova, by Jonathan Finn

Richard Gruneau, “Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation: The Making of


Modern English Sport”

Robin Veder, “Seeing the Skeleton and Feeling the Form”

Russell Field, “Toques and Turbans, Sticks and Show Tunes: Incorporating the
‘Other’ in Canadian Hockey Films”

Anu Vaittinen, “Intersections: Ways of Knowing Mixed Martial Arts and Visual
Culture”

Lianne McTavish and Patrick J. Reed, “Feminist Figure Girl: A Photographic


Dialogue” 

Article: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Image: from Animal Locomotion


Eadweard Muybridge
http://www.muybridge.org

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