Nathaniel Sullivan
The Artist Who Plays Basketball
I am an artist who plays basketball.
I am an artist who plays basketball and isn’t it funny how I call both things practice?
I am an artist who plays basketball and sometimes those practices are radically different but sometimes they are quite similar.
I am an artist who plays basketball and my practices require repetition and ritual.
I am an artist who plays basketball and my best work happens in the moment.
Doing without Thinking
I was always the tallest kid in my class. Until I wasn’t. Growing up tall meant that I played basketball, but it wasn’t until I played up a level that I became a basketball player.
In my junior year of high school, I was thrown into the mix on a very good team in a competitive conference. The players were bigger, stronger and faster and I wasn’t able to use any of the physical advantages I had with players my own age. So I dedicated myself to improving my skills. A hundred free throws before breakfast, hundreds of jump shots before bed. But it wasn’t working.
At higher levels, the game is mental. This dawned on me as opposing players consistently found spots on the floor where they could take advantage of a fraction of a second or a late defensive rotation. The separation point from good to great is in your head; it requires the development of an athletic intelligence.
Athletic intelligence is easy to recognize. When it unfolds it is a beautiful and creative act. It is the perfect pass that catches a player in full stride on a backdoor cut. It is knowing where that player will be before he even gets there. It is the undercurrent of our body given form, so it is naturally an elusive and mystical thing. It is intelligence without thinking. But what does that mean?
Athletic intelligence is not memory. I memorized all the plays. I listened intently as our coach screamed at us about where to be on the floor in certain moments. But the moments in the game where practice, thought and action unified to create perfect sequences were fleeting. More often than not, I would miss an opportunity because I was running through the playbook in my head, as the play was unfolding. I would get pulled from the game, and from my seat on the bench, trying to burn the visuals of the playbook into my head, thinking that my problem was a lapse in memory. I knew the plays, but in the moment, I was gripped by the fear that I didn’t. All of the fluidity of pickup games and practices was gone. I was tight. I was thinking.
An athletic intelligence is not a force of will. I had will power. I woke up at 5am and ran through all the variations on the plays. I got more shots up after practice from the spots on the floor than the plays were designed to open up. Repetition frees the mind of slower moving thoughts and allows the body’s fast twitch muscles to react to situations. For a while, this seemed to work, because I stopped trying to remember, and just played through the actions. But still, there was no fluidity to my movements. In a game, a play only worked once or twice, before the other team learned to anticipate and counter it. This is when great players emerged, players who could read the defense and adjust accordingly. Again, I watched from my seat on the bench.
Athletic intelligence is not metaphorical. You can’t think abstractly about what you are about to do. This is the province of artists: to make meaning. And this was my problem. The second I started to consider the meaning in my performance—for instance, whether I was having a good game or a bad game—my mind began to work outside of my body’s potential. Basketball is a series of movements, small actions taken incrementally. It is never one big decision, but rather a series of little ones that are executed in the moment.
Humphrey Bogart used to place a pebble in his shoe before he acted in a scene. As he was called on to act, he would grind his foot down on the pebble, so that his active mind would be focused on the pain, rather than the delivery of his lines. Similarly, athletes must empty the active mind in order to empower the body.
Being ‘clutch’ requires this emptiness. If players made meaning out of imminent free throws that could win a game and deliver a championship, then the 90% free throw average would plummet. The key is to quiet the mind and direct its focus to a series of short actions. This ritual is not about superstition, but a sequenced behavior that recalls the body to its familiarity with the action. Shoulders back, two dribbles, elbows in…swish. In that moment, for the athlete, the mind is empty, the body relaxed and ready, and the moment—rehearsed through repetition—has already occurred. In practice.
Why do I call my work as an artist a practice? I call it a practice because, like taking 500 jump shots a day, it is a process where I come to meet myself daily. For me, a studio practice is a solitary ritual that I keep to maintain my identity as an artist; it is a space and time for me to reflect, to doubt, and to critique. What sustains my studio practice is the possibility of creating something meaningful that can be shared. I spend most of my studio time self-consciously pursuing this end, and rarely share work with others. But occasionally, I will follow an idea or action without any hint of its resolution. This is when my art surprises me, and in reflection, teaches me something about myself. This is the work that I enjoy showing the most.
A View From Above
While I was in graduate school, I started doing a performance lecture called ‘A View From Above,’ named after the autobiography of basketball legend, Wilt Chamberlain. In the book, Chamberlain claims to have had sex with 20,000 women. He is also famous for scoring 100 points in a single NBA game, a record that still stands. He was a Goliath at just over seven feet tall and 300 pounds, agile, quick and able to leap high enough to pick quarters off the top of the backboard (which is 14 feet in height). In the performance, I granulate the statistics, twisting the soft round numbers presented in the book into points per quarter, minutes per game, and semen by gallons. I had read the book for the first time when I was twelve, and in the performance I look back at that young person, on the cusp of manhood. I get to skewer myself for being an awkward teenager, and I get to skewer a sports hero for his sexual hubris. It is probably an exaggeration, but what if it isn’t? It is a performance about measuring up—man against myth—and confronting the mortality of heroes. In the end, Chamberlain died with his impressive physique bloated and congested from heart failure, a body once capable of superhuman expression now inert and decidedly un-mythological.
Up until then, the art that I produced was tight, endlessly revised, and self-consciously trying to be art. I once spent two years doing nothing but re-editing a fourteen minute video. But with the Wilt Chamberlain performance, I was speaking with my own voice about something I genuinely loved. It was my first time doing ‘performance art,’ and it felt right as a performance. I was doing without thinking. I was preparing like an athlete. It was exhilarating and terrifying every time I did it. Once I began, it swelled with its own energy, equally dependent on my mood and the crowd’s energy. Of course, I wanted it to be perfect, but it never was. Nevertheless, I kept chasing perfection. And just as in basketball, I had to live with imperfection. A good shooter takes 500 shots a day, but even on a good night, a great shooter will miss half of those shots. The form is the same every time: elbows in, feet set, following through. I prepare and practice perfectly, but I have to let go in the moment. In retrospect, I can wish things had gone differently, but I can’t change a thing. Performance unfurls in time. I am me. And I have a body. What a perfect form for an artist who plays basketball.
Nathaniel Sullivan is a video and performance artist who has lectured on subjects as varied as Francois Mitterrand’s last meal, Wilt Chamberlain’s sex life, and the love letters of banker Jamie Dimon. For the past year, he has taken this practice to the streets, leading a guided walking tour of an abandoned housing project re-imagined as a Richard Serra sculpture, conducting a seminar on desire from the back of a limousine, and performing for one person at at Brooklyn Nets game. http://nathanielsullivan.net