On October 10, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will host a public conversation between Collier Schorr (Season 2) and curator Christopher Bedford in conjunction with the exhibition Contemporary Projects 11: Hard Targets-Masculinity and Sport. The public program begins at 7pm.
The premise of the exhibition, which opens on October 9, is artists who revise the archetype of the male athlete as an aggressive, overtly heterosexual, hyper-competitive, and emotionally remote subject. Hard Targets includes works by Schorr, Mark Bradford (Season 4), Harun Farocki, Brian Jungen, Shaun Leonardo, and Joe Sola. “Each examines the way masculinity is characterized and performed in a sporting context, and each suggests the existence of complex systems of desire and identification that accompany the way we view and consume athletes and sporting events.”
Bradford’s 2003 video Practice is included in the exhibition. In 2006, an article in LA Times Magazine quoted Bradford:
“Practice was a personal piece. At its core it was about negotiation and desire. I set up a proposition, a metaphor, in which I really simply wanted to play basketball. That’s it. But I had constructed this huge structure that was going to encumber me. I couldn’t control it, and doing what I wanted to do was a struggle. In some ways, that’s sort of how my life can be. I also knew that by taking the Lakers uniform and making it into a dress, that’s iconoclastic. I’m always interested in dismantling or questioning our icons. I want to make them problematic, awkward and uncomfortable.”
Watch a clip from Bradford’s Art:21 segment in which he discusses Practice:
Hard Targets is on view through January 18, 2009.
