The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) by Halberstam Judith

Author:Halberstam, Judith [Halberstam, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Fourth Place: The Art of Losing

The highs and lows of the Olympic games every four years showcase the business of winning and the inevitability, indeed the dignity of losing. The unrelentingly patriotic coverage of the games in many countries, but particularly in North America, gives a beautifully clear image of the contradictions of American politics and more specifically of the desire of white Americans to flex their muscles and pose as the underdog all at the same time. While individual American athletes practice plenty of failure at the games, American audiences are generally not permitted to witness those failures; we are instead given wall-to-wall coverage of triumphant Yanks in the pool, in the gym, and on the track. We are given the history of winners all day, every day, and so every four years American viewers miss the larger drama of the games, emerging as it does from unpredictability, tragedy, close defeat, and yes, messy and undignified failure.

In a photography project associated with the Olympic games in Sydney in 2000 the artist Tracy Moffat took profoundly moving pictures of people who came in fourth in major sporting events (see plates 1 and 2). In a catalogue essay associated with a show of these works, Moffat says that she had heard rumors that someone had suggested her as one of the official photographers for the games that year. She comments, “I fantasized that if I really were to be the ‘official photographer’ for the Sydney 2000 Olympics I would photograph the sporting events with my own take on it all—I would photograph the losers.”1She says that while everyone else would be directed by the mainstream media to watch the triumphant spectacle of winning, she would focus on “the images of brilliant athletes who didn’t make it.” Ultimately, however, she settled on the position of fourth for her photo record of losing because coming in fourth was, for her, sadder than losing altogether. By coming in fourth the athlete has just lost, just missed a medal, just found a (non)place outside of recorded history. Moffat notes, “Fourth means that you are almost good. Not the worst (which has its own perverted glamour) but almost. Almost a star!” Fourth place constitutes the antiglamour of losing. As she says, it is not the perverse pleasure of being so bad you are almost good; no, fourth represents a very unique position, beyond the glory but before the infamy.

Moffat tried to capture in her photographs the very moment the athlete realized that he or she had come in fourth: “Most of the time the expression is expressionless, it’s a set look, which crosses the human face. It’s an awful, beautiful, knowing mask, which says ‘Oh shit!’” She photographs swimmers still in the pool, their bitter tears mixed with chlorinated water; her camera finds runners exhausted and exasperated, fighters knocked to the ground, players picking up sports equipment after the event. The whole series is a document of desperate disappointment, dramatic defeat, and the cruelty of competition.

These

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