Sports deconstructed

I’ve never been big on sports, but my wife is. She looks forward to each year’s Twins game with the Red Sox like a good kid looks forward to Christmas (a lazy simile, but I'm tired). She wears a Red Sox jersey, hoodie, hat and scarf. She forces me into a Red Sox sweater and I wander around the game with anxiety that some drunk fan will start accosting me about a team I support vicariously through my wife. But I enjoy the games in my own way.

It was in support that I accompanied the wife to the Sports Show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. We walked around the icons, past sports legends and gods. In some distant room, we could hear a crowd chanting, to the point that it was getting obnoxious.

We neared Paul Pfeiffer’s installation, “The Saints.” The noise was coming from speakers hanging high around the perimeter of a large, nearly empty room. “The Saints Go Marching In” was chanted by what I assumed was a soccer crowd. The sound was overwhelming. Near the middle of the back wall, there was a tiny screen, the size of a couple postage stamps. On it, a lone soccer player ran around a field. The other players and the ball had been erased from the video. So it was just one guy, and every few seconds, the screen would change to another part of the field, but the guy stayed in the same position on the screen as he ran, as if the field behind him were a giant green screen.

(note: first section of the video of the stadium was not at this exhibit)

Through some sliding doors was a dark room with two videos playing silent footage. One in color of a modern soccer crowd of Filipinos. The other was footage from the 1966 soccer final between England and West Germany. More than 400 million people watched this game.

This game, England’s equivalent of our Miracle on Ice game with the Soviet Union, has been divided into its constituent parts. A deconstructed match that mixes in audio from an entirely new crowd of fans from another country altogether.

The effect was disconcerting for my wife, who enjoys immersion into the sports she loves. She gets lost in a game in a way I never can. And because of that, I found this piece fascinating. Sports are so often deconstructed down to numbers – at bats, runs, games won, bases stolen, time left in the game. Here the visual and aural experience has been separated out so that all that’s left is a lone guy running aimlessly around a field. When I’m at a game, I, too, start deconstructing things. I separate out the morning DJ quality of the announcer’s voice, the next food purchase, the sounds of the people around me, the guy standing out in right field who comes into play only a few times a game. I wonder how he doesn’t get bored out there.

It’s this installation that sticks with me days later as we decide which Twins game to go to later in the season.