Elizabeth Spavento
Matt Hern is a Canadian activist and writer who argues for a more active engagement with sports, physically and intellectually, as a spectator and participant. A former sports writer, Hern asks why sports, with immense power and mass appeal, are no longer seen as a legitimate source of innovation and debate. What follows is a brief introduction to Hern’s argument in his 2013 book, One Game at a Time: Why Sports Matter with a hint of the political ideologies that inform his practice and off-the-cuff art criticism. Curator, Elizabeth Spavento, hand selected the hyperlinks that appear throughout the interview, which serve as reactions to, interpretations of, and banter with the conversation.
Elizabeth Spavento: Hi, Matt! Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. I was fascinated by the talk you gave at the New Foundation in Seattle. Particularly, how sports can be viewed as a metaphor for radical politics. I’m wondering if you could unpack that and explain why you think it’s critical for the intellectual class, for lack of a better term, to take sports seriously.
Matt Hern: I think it’s important not to think of sports, and embodiment in general, as a metaphor for radical politics. We can certainly consider athletic or bodily activities metaphorically, but I believe that that gives them short shrift. There’s more there. For a very long time, ‘thinking people’—intellectuals, particularly leftists, progressives and radicals—have had a habitual tendency to deride sports and athletics as the province of lug nuts, thugs and idiots. They are reticent about their affiliations and love of sports, both as a spectator and participant. But, the simple point I would like to make is that there’s a tremendous amount for us to value about sports—metaphorically, but much more so as a site of radical politics, even liberatory politics. Sports—and when I reference sports I’m talking both about participation and spectatorship—are a site of incredible enthusiasm, joy and love for so many people.
I tend to be antagonistic to simplistic renditions of the Marxist notion of false consciousness or alienation, or really any other analytical framework that suggests that people don’t know what’s best for them. I find it incredibly condescending. Everyday people of all stripes invest a great deal in sports. They find all kinds of meaning and creative production in the full scope of activity. I think that’s our first clue: we have to speak, acknowledge and listen to people’s joys, pleasures and desires. So many of us love watching sports, playing sports, talking about sports, and participating in sports—and by ‘sports’, I mean the full range of activity, because I feel it’s fruitless to try to define what is and what isn’t a sport.
We need to radically expand our notions of sport to encompass all manner of permeable borders. Like handcrafts, a creative discipline which was once dismissed by art purists but whose exclusion from the realm of art was later challenged by more recent generations, sport should similarly be re-imagined. I’d like to define sports as a site for broad based creative participation and production, and not worry about policing its borders.
ES: Yes, your advocacy for a broad-based participatory practice is interesting. In your book, you talk about radical participatory urbanism. How are these two concepts related—if they are to begin with—and what has your personal experience with them been like?
MH: Participation is a malleable word. It’s one that I use, but that I use it with all kinds of caveats, because certain platforms allow for certain kinds of participation. Participation is a catchall phrase that is rather hollowed out of meaning. Often people are allowed to participate in activities that are actually catering to their own subjugation, to their own disenfranchisement, to their own alienation. Participation is a solid starting point, but we have to look at who is participating, in what, for whom, and on what basis.
ES: Definitely. Can you give an example?
MH: Sure. Your fine country [US] is presumed to be a democratic country on the basis of having political choices, but those choices are typically reduced to a Coke versus Pepsi decision in terms of congressional and presidential elections. You really only have a choice between two flanks of the same party. It’s an incredibly shallow kind of democratic participation. In my country [Canada] as well, the notion of participatory democracy is reduced to ticking a ballot once every couple of years. That, to me, seems highly inadequate in all kinds of ways. And I think that’s true for almost all notions of participation. We have to interrogate them first and ask: who is being asked to participate? Under which conditions? What are we being asked to participate in?
ES: Do you see sports as a more democratic process then, in terms of participation?
MH: Well, I think we have to talk about participation in a variety of ways. What kind of participation are we talking about? When a website asks you to join in a conversation about the new line of IKEA furniture, for example, is that really participation? Or is that a marketing ploy? Maybe, maybe not. I’m interested in those kinds of questions, but I’m interested more in the idea of creative production, in a [Gilles] Deleuze and [Félix] Guattari sense. How is it that we can participate in a world that other people created for us? How can we produce the world around us? I’m fascinated by the distinction between consumption and production, the ways that everyday people in various places–myself included–can be part of producing the material, cultural and social spaces around us.
ES: Can you talk more about how sports fit into that idea?
MH: For many of us, we feel most creative in places where we have the capacity to express ourselves physically: on the field or in the gym for example. When people talk about playing sports, they talk about it being the space where the true person is revealed. Are you the kind of person that gets back on defense? Are you the kind of person who passes the ball? Are you the kind of person who complains about a foul? All of those factors count. They matter. And those tropes extend to fandom as well. You love cheering for a team that works hard, for a team that sticks up for one another, that exhibits the values you hold dear. So in both cases, that of playing sports and that of spectatorship, we begin to culturally and socially produce–and undoubtedly materially produce–the world around us.
The thing that I find the most irritating, though, is that often people are critical of sports and say, ‘You know, it’s okay to play sports, but watching sports! That’s passive and consumptive.’ No one would ever say that about theater, for example. No one would ever say, ‘Well, that’s fine if you go act in a play but watching a play—that’s reprehensible! That’s pathetic!‘ No one would say that about music or about dance either, yet people deride sports. They say, ‘Well, okay, sports are fine. It’s okay to watch and okay to play as long as it’s an amateur sport. Because, if it’s professional sports, they’re all perverted and supporting unattainable ideals and completely contaminated with capitalism.’
ES: Do you agree that professional sports are contaminated?
MH: Absolutely! Professional sports are maimed by all kinds of corporate capitalist insanity that can make sports watching an exercise in gritting your teeth against corporate idiocy. The sports world is rarely a good ambassador for itself. But, what area of our lives hasn’t been maimed by capitalism? You go to a dance performance, and a cigarette company could sponsor it. Or the Venice Biennale—it’s just another exercise in capitalistic consumptive mechanics. Certainly we can (and should) articulate a critique of the art world or sports or any aspect of our lives on an anti-capitalist basis. We can be highly critical of sports and art and love, while still honoring their creative production.
ES: One thing that I love and honor about sports is its ability to bring people together. What do sports teach us about building a team and forming community?
MH: I should hasten to say that for many of us, sports were incredibly informative and positive experiences in a plethora of ways. But I would also say that for a greater number of people, sports were a site of alienation, of unbelievable sexism, racism, homophobia and other awful circumstances. It’s hard to say that sports are this kind of panacea, that they are this kind of world with unicorns, rainbows and sunshine. It’s a mixed bag. For many people, certainly for queer and trans folks, for women, for people who are not skilled athletically, sports are a site for domination. And we know that from the idiot jocks at high school parties, from hooligans at bars. We know that. But what I’m arguing is that it is much more than that, and that it can and should be much more than that.
Sports form places where we encounter difference in a visceral way. People are often from very different backgrounds, possessing different skin tones, different values and beliefs. For many of us, sports are a site where we share ground with people who, for various reasons, we probably wouldn’t spend much time with otherwise. We spend close, careful time with them, often in direct bodily contact, in locker rooms in states of semi-changed or full nakedness or on the field, running into them, reacting to them and learning from and about them. For many of us, it is a way to experience differences that are largely unavailable in most aspects of our lives.
And, when we think about how to work with people who may or may not be anything like us through complicated and challenging situations, the place where we can experiment and learn these ways of being is on the sports field. The things that you learn stay with you for a very long time.
ES: And they go beyond the field as well. The community that forms doesn’t just implicate the people on your team but your entire environment.
MH: Yes. If I’m throwing a baseball in the street with my kids, traffic slows down. Our neighbors come out and talk to us. Its a reactivation of public space. But on the other hand, it’s because my kid and I don’t feel like walking to the park. What is that? Activism? Sports? How you define the action is less interesting to me than what is produced through that action. I think it is better to have permeable borders. The problem with trying to stabilize the definition of any word or any concept is that it inherently denies difference. That I could encounter an idea or a piece of art, and have one opinion and you can encounter the exact same but arrive at a completely different set of opinions, is exactly what policed definitions are trying to negate. So, I’m fascinated by the idea that you can look at something and say, ‘That’s art!‘ and I could look at the same thing and say, ‘Really? That’s art?‘ and it would be fine. We can do the same thing with sports and ask whether hula hooping is a sport, but the more interesting conversation lies in the differences in our perception of it—blurring the lines between what constitutes sport or art.
Matt Hern is a community organizer, activist and writer. He is known for his work in radical urbanism, community development and experimental education programs. He has founded and directed the Purple Thistle Centre, Car-Free Vancouver Day and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives among many other community projects. His books and articles have been published on all six continents and translated into ten languages. He currently teaches at the University of British Columbia’s MBA program as Adjunct Professor in UBC’s SCARP program. He has taught at many other universities, and continues to lecture globally. He lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
Elizabeth Spavento is a Portland-based independent curator and writer interested in millennial culture, unstructured time and alternative states of consciousness. She has organized exhibitions in New York, NY and Portland, OR and is currently co-curating ALL RISE, a series of temporary public artworks for a 90,000 sq. ft. empty lot in downtown Seattle, WA. Her newest project, Maximum Fun explores the cultural and ideological implications of New Sincerity and will take place in August 2015 at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.