Essay on boxing match

14 Counted Out, 1921. Lithograph, 153/8 x 11/2 in. (image). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr.

who is defeated becomes the cas- trated male. He is passive and pow- erless. The loser is symbolically emasculated-the winner pulver- izes his head, there is a public dec- laration of loss, and he is pro- nounced the defeated.

The implications of the defeat are depicted in Bellows's litho- graphs, A Knock Out and Counted Out (figs. 13, 14). In each, the prize- fighter, overpowered by his oppo- nent, collapses in defeat after giv- ing it his all; his face is covered in shame and pain. In A Knock Out the victor continues combat with the referee, and in Counted Out

the victor is standing with his face exposed as he looks down on the battered man.

Not all of boxing is forceful or violent. There are moments of pause and rest when two boxers, exhausted or seeking protection, lean on and embrace each other in support.18 In boxing, these mo- ments of touch and intimacy are countered by regained energy and more powerful blows.

For the boxer and the boxing fan, the obsession with violence and with the success of violent acts engages the symbol of the su- preme, potent male. But boxing

13 Smithsonian Studies in American Art

This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sat, 09 Aug 2014 06:41:18 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

represents a commingling of de- sires, a deliberate confusion of bru- tality and sexuality in which the former hides the latter. The para- dox of boxing is that while the whole environment centers around anxiety of masculine adequacy and demonstration of male potency, the homoeroticism that boxing at- tempts to escape is inescapably built into the action. Men are in combat and contact. Men also pose, posture, and punch for the pleasure and thrill of other men. However, in boxing, as Stag at Sharkey's poignantly insists, ad- miration and affection never stand alone.

Boxing is a ritual act whose ulti- mate purpose is the display of de- sire and then desire's destruction. From this perspective, boxing is homoerotic desire displaced, en- acted, and re-repressed.19 Any long- ing for intimacy is obstructed and destroyed by the relentless drive to "punish" and damage the body. Two well-developed men alternate courting and whipping each other.

Notes A version of this essay was presented at the Tenth Annual Whitney Symposium on Ameri- can Art, 27 April 1987. At the University of Michigan, I have greatly benefited from the thought and guidance of Thomas Crow. Diane Kirkpatrick has provided me with many important suggestions. I also am grate- ful to the Department of the History of Art for research assistance. Finally, I wish to thank friends who responded to all or parts of this essay: Janice Simon, Richard Rand, and especially Helen Wechsler.

For biographical information on George Bellows, see: Charles H. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York: Reynal & Co., 1965); Donald Braider, George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971); E. A. Carmean, John Wilmerding, Linda Ayres, and Deborah Chotner, Bellows: The Boxing Pictures (Washington, D.C.: Na- tional Gallery of Art, 1982); and Lauris Mason, The Lithographs of George Bellows (New York: KTO Press, 1977). Although Morgan's book has served as the primary

Boxing, as exposed and powerfully accentuated as it is in Stag at Sharkey's, is male to male masochis- tic foreplay, craved and detested, on public display.

The force of Stag at Sharkey's lies not only in the artist's rigor- ous and remarkable manipulation of paint and his magnification of boxing's eroticism and brutality, but also in Bellows's treatment of an athletic event that struggled to maintain itself despite its illegal sta- tus. The desire for fighting events, which served a ritual function, was greater than the strength of the law. In the early part of the twen- tieth century, boxing provided many men with a forum for under- standing and reinforcing a concep- tion of masculinity that was con- structed out of conflicting methods and desires: individual authority and control were gained by resist- ing public authority, sensuality and intimacy were intertwined with vio- lence, and physical perfection and admiration were countered by destruction.

biographical source for studies on Bellows, it is not well-documented and thus its reli- ability remains tentative.

1 See Donald J. Mrozek, Sport and Ameri- can Mentality: 1880-1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), p. 207.

2 Quoted in Mason, Lithographs, p. 61.

3 Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt-An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan Co., 1913), p. 49.

4 Letter from Bellows dated 10June 1922 to William Milliken, then director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Now in the archives of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

5 See "Boxing Flourishing Here," New York Times, 16 November 1905, p. 12.

6 For an account of the Dempsey and Firpo fight, see Jack Dempsey, Dempsey (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

14 Spring 1988

This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sat, 09 Aug 2014 06:41:18 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

7 For an excellent study of boxing in America in the late eighteenth and nine- teenth century, see ElliotJ. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

8 The positive nature of boxing, as dis- tinguished from prizefighting, and the paradox of such a distinction, was stated in a New York Times editorial of 7 April 1909 entitled "Prizefighting Not Easy to Suppress." On this day, prizefighting was called "unquestion- ably a great evil"-the evil element be- ing money.

Roosevelt said in 1890 that "The prize fighters [are]... the very worst foes with whom the cause of general athletic development has to contend." Quoted in Gorn, Manly Art, p. 196. As president, however, Roosevelt invited former champion John L. Sullivan, one of the rowdiest of fighters, to the White House. See Roy R Dibble,John L. Sullivan (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1925), pp. 176-79.

9 See Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), p. 236.

10 Quoted in Carmean et al., Boxing Pic- tures, p. 51.

11 "In Defense of Pugilism," American Magazine, August 1909, pp. 414-16.

12 Letter dated 10 June 1922 in the ar- chives of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

13 Ellen Handy, of the Department of Prints and Photographs at the Metro- politan Museum of Art, has pointed out to me that this photograph, often'attrib- uted to Eakins directly, is actually a "copy of a copy of the original print" by Eakins or one of his assistants.

14 See Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Loco- motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1979).

15 Quoted in Carmean et al., Boxing Pic- tures, p. 30.

16 "As a Spanish Artist Sees Us: Ramon Casas Is Impressed by the Prizefight," Sun [New York], 11 April 1909. I am

grateful to Carmen Lord, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Casas, for sharing this article with me.

17 Michel Foucault's writings have influ- enced my discussion of the body as a subject of power. See Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," Art After Mod- ernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 417. See especially Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

18 For observations on boxing's mix of af- fection and violence in recent times, see Joyce Carol Oates, "Kid Dynamite," Life (March 1987): 66.

19 Anyone who interprets boxing in homoerotic terms is in controversial territory. This is primarily because a homoerotic analysis undermines the very hyper-masculinity of boxing, which assumes that masculinity and tough heterosexuality go hand in hand.

For various views of boxing that are, at least in part, in opposition to my own, see the following (note that these writings are mostly about professional boxing): Arthur Krystal, "Ifs, Ands, Butts: The Literary Sensibility at Ring- side," Harper's (June 1987): 63-67; Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (New York: Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987); Ronald Levao, "Reading the Fights: Mak- ing Sense of Professional Boxing," Raritan (Spring 1986): 59-76.

For Arthur Krystal "a fight is a fight," not "an aesthetic enactment, erotic dance, savage ceremony, or chess match." Ronald Levao concludes that boxing is most truly "highly skilled and highly dangerous, a keenly focused public exhibition of human will and in- telligence translated into articulate en- ergy." Like a number of other scholars, I am reading this "articulate energy" as partly erotic in nature. For example, see Gor, Manly Art, p. 142. For essays on sexuality, gender, and sports, see Ross Runfola and Donald F. Sabo, Jr., eds.,Jock: Sports and Male Identity (NewJersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980).

15 Smithsonian Studies in American Art

This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sat, 09 Aug 2014 06:41:18 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions