A number of the poses and compositions, while natural and intrinsic to boxing, were also inspired or informed by various art historical sources.

In the image 'Right Cross', for example, the victim's face is withheld, defaced, while the aggressor's hand is emphasized as threatening. (This echoes Rembrandt's composition).

Right Cross

Knock out

In 'Knock Out', the postures of both the defeated and victorious boxers allude to crucifixions; the tie is particularly strong to Chagall's depiction of The Sacrifice of Isaac and Matthais Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. The biblical allusions made by the victorious figure include {but are not limited to} Christ, Ishmael, Sampson, and Moses.

Chagall

Grunewald

In 'Wall', the pose communicates a more interior aspect of struggle, rather than the moment of action. It also echoes the poses of Cain & Able on Ghiberti's Doors of Paradise in Florence. This coupling of Abraham with Cain suggests the severity of the crime the sacrifice could be: Cain is the first blood-traitor, betraying his brother to death. Abraham would betray his own son to death in a chilling parallel.

Ghiberti

Wall

For better or worse, ritual bloody sacrifice is not a part of the contemporary American cultural experience. To understand and re-enter the story of Isaac therefore requires a new metaphor, one that has visceral strength.

The story is one of pain, of injury, of aggression, but it is not one of murder. It is one where the father's primary pain was what he felt on behalf of another. Boxing has a uniquely well equipped vocabulary to address these themes:

• Athletes are ideal. They are bound by a largely tacit ethical code, and a huge portion of the physical fight is also a mental struggle.


• The Trainer. The trainer/fighter relationship mirrors a father/son. When the fighter fights, he fights alone while the trainer looks on from the sidelines, unable to fight for him, but certainly not disinterested or malicious. The trainer's sacrifice is having to care about the fighter, see him injured, and be unable to assist.


• Injury without malice. Because we see the impact of the blows on a very human, very corporeal body, boxing provides a visceral image of pain and injury, but inflicted without malice. Rarely in a fight does an opponent actually want to destroy the other man… he fights to win, not to kill.


• The Referee. Every boxing match begins with the Ref saying "Obey my Commands." The match then begins, following imposed and somewhat absurd rules articulated by the ref. The ref watches over the whole fight. He has the power to end the match at any time, won't until the suffering of one or both parties is complete, but will before anyone dies. To end a match, the ref will bodily through himself between the two contestants, or force the arms of the aggressor down.


• The Audience. The audience at a boxing match is widely varied:some come for bloodlust, some to see the finessed movement of the boxers. Some bet on the match, some look to it as inspiration to get through their own mundane lives. It seems we relate in many of the same ways to the sacrifice, so positioning us as the audience draws an intriguing metaphor.

This show has two main sources: Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and Rembrandt's oil painting The Sacrifice of Isaac.

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard lingers on the story of the sacrifice, pulls it apart, and grapples with the absurdities it forces us to accept. Three ideas hit me with particular force:

1--The story reads as a double paternal betrayal. God first gives Abraham the promised son, then commands that he kill him; Abraham is Isaac's father, but makes an attempt to kill his own son.

2--Abraham is in a high-stakes, epistemically vulnerable position. He is unable to articulate his warrants for apparently irrational--even wrong--action to anyone else. If he is mistaken in either the identity of the voice commanding sacrifice or its meaning, he is acting not only tragically but damnably, sacrificing the firstborn of God's people to (potentially) a foreign god. It is in the immense shadow of these doubts that Abraham makes the three day journey to the mountain, builds the altar, binds his son, and lifts the knife.

3--The sacrifice is a death to self, performed by both Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is literally sacrificing his hopes for redemption and legacy; Isaac lays down his own life and future, despite having the physical ability to protect himself. At the time of the event, Abraham is described in Hebrews as "as good as dead", while scholars place Isaac's age somewhere in the 13-33 range. In a way that strongly parallels Christ's submission to the crucifixion, Isaac submits to his father's commands and willingly choses not to exercise his ability to defend himself. In this case, the strong is passive, the weak, violent.

Rembrandt

Rembrandt's painting is the only depiction of the sacrifice that seemed to adequately express the trauma of the event. Abraham's posture--arms outstretched, a move of simultaneous surrender (in the right hand) and aggression in the left. That left hand is arresting: the violence of covering Isaac's face, pulling it back, exposing the vulnerable neck and torso. The hand, which in covering his face, defaces him. That hand, which holds together all other gestures in the painting: the covering without which Abraham would be unable to surrender his beloved son. This seems a necessary defacing, a defacing without which the sacrifice is impossible.

"I saw a woman once, fighting with a man. It was late, cold, and she was drunk. At first I thought I should intervene, save her; then I realized that is what he was trying to do. To save her from herself, to keep her from walking away from him- to a dark alley, alone, utterly vulnerable."

The speaker was not me, but was wise.
I, too, have seen this, though they are rarely drunk on alcohol.

Boxers confront us with the fundamental struggle of man against himself, will against body, self against the Other, incarnated, made physical and tangible.

Wrestle with these images. Meditate on them. Read them literally and symbolically. They have spiritual meanings-- seek them out-- but they are not merely spiritual meanings- do not reduce them.

Encounter them as objects, as treatises, as experiences. Do not neglect their physicality. Do not ignore the absurdity of the scenes and settings they present.

Do this, and you will encounter the images as I hoped you would.

Now that I have been making chalk drawings for a little over a year, I feel better able to articulate why I make them, and how one ought to approach art in this form.

My motivations are varied, but can be summarized as follows:

1. Surprising Beauty

Few, if any, expect their sidewalks to be decorated with images intended for their enjoyment. A sidewalk typically is little more than a necessary, pragmatic structure supporting our movements. It slides naturally to the subconscious, noticed only by the OCD types who won't step on cracks. When I make chalk drawings, I like to linger for a little while to watch people stumble across the unexpectedly enjoyable splash of color or line. In short, people smile or are glad to see the drawings, which in turn makes me happy. The effect is similar to that of discovering a bird's nest: it brightens your day, at least momentarily.

2. Inattentional Blindness

Why sidewalks? Because we expect them to be ugly. Because, by considering them to be spaces unworthy of observation, we have actually lost the ability to see them. I wrote a little about this phenomenon, inattentional blindness, when I first began the project. Placing the beautiful object in a space ignored on account of its expected ugliness heightens the surprise of discovery, and hence the enjoyment for the viewer.

3. Transience

Does the short life of the chalk drawing frustrate me? At times. Some pieces (like this one) fade unnaturally quickly, and I am frustrated by that. However, the transience of chalk is one of its attractions: the fact that the drawing will fade add an urgency to the viewer's appreciation of the image--it is here now, will not stay long, and will never return.

This urgency underscores a value to the drawing that is not monetized at all: without paying admission, without relying on critics and cultural evaluations, a casual 'non-art' viewer pauses for a moment to look at the drawing as a drawing, appreciate it as such, and nothing more. An entire art movement went to great lengths to achieve this effect in the 1950s-1980s Yves Klein went so far as to sell Zones of Immaterial Space for gold, and burn the certificate of sale, leaving the buyer with the memory of the event but with no object. This movement failed on the whole to achieve its aims: art remained monetized, object-oriented and economic.

Chalk drawings, on the other hand, cannot be sold, framed, put in a museum, or meaningfully preserved. They are worn away by weather, passing feet, sprinklers, and even by wind. They are beautiful, then age, decay, and are no more, all in the course of a few days. What better way to communicate that their value is just in the momentary, subtle perspective shift they work in the viewer?

4. Humility

Above all, a chalk drawing is humble. Sidewalk chalk is a mundane medium. Barbecue charcoal even more so. These things can be cleverly combined on a slab of concrete to create a new image, but it never pretends to be more than that. A chalk drawing lacks the untouchable 'halo' effect surrounding a framed painting. It is not a thing to be worshiped, reverenced, or held apart in anyway; it is made to be appreciated as it is trampled underfoot.

A chalk drawing speaks to the dignity of the mundane as a mundane thing; it does not pretend to elevate the mundane or invoke transcendence. It thereby advocates an ethic of basic respect and dignity, quietly insisting that a thing need not be made noble in order to have dignity.


Related posts:

• Chalk Again
• Inattentional Blindness

The moon still governed the sky when I set out this morning. It was not yet time for me to leave for work, but it was nevertheless time for me to leave. I raced through the park, the wind adding an insistent base line to my Simon & Garfunkel morning. I raced the sun -- we arrived at my studio in a dead heat.

I am Icarus on a Bicycle.

Here I rest and read, reflect, become yet another surface bearing the sun's reflections.
I raced the sun and won because I drew the finish line at dawn.

I thought these lines while biking to work this morning. I repeated them mantra-like until I arrived and wrote them down. They were still on my mind at sunset when I knelt to make a chalk drawing, so they are what came out.

If you are unfamiliar with the story of Icarus, you should remedy that:

• Read Ovid's account of the story
  
• Peruse the wikipedia entry.
• See a brief overview of treatments of the subject in art history. My advice: let the page load, then just scroll through. Some of the images are just breathtaking.

'The Dead Icarus', Paul Ambroise Slotdtz	'Mourning for Icarus', Herbert James Draper	'The Fall of Icarus', Marc Chagall

I have once again begun making chalk drawings on campus. I do this for several reasons:

1. I enjoy drawing, and a chalk drawing is transient enough that there is no pressure for it to be excellent. As a result, I can just draw and be content.
   


2. Sidewalk Chalk is a challenging medium. When using chalk, one must think in terms of colors, overlays, and interlacing opaque tones that will not blend into each other. Since I typically think in terms of line and value, this is the complete opposite of my habit, and thus a good way for me to improve as an artist.


3. This is actually the biggest reason--it makes people happy. No one really expects a chalk drawing; stumbling across one is like finding a dollar. It isn't much, but because you weren't expecting it, it makes you happy. I love seeing people smile as they walk past one of my drawings.

Automat, Hopper	l'Absinthe, Degas

This week's drawing is an homage to Hopper's 'Automat', a lonely, melancholic image of a woman drinking coffee. I picked it primarily for the colors and power, but since I was drawing at night it seemed appropriate in its melancholy as well. The image reminds me of Degas' l'Absinthe--a warmer, friendlier painting of a colder, more haunting subject.

You haven't really had a summer until you've picked up a few new injuries. Nothing too serious-- you need not even break a bone-- but there should be scuff marks on your body, signs of your close acquaintance with effort and limitation.

If they scar, so much the better. You will forever remember 'that one time', when you were so very alive.