SAN ANTONIO – Five miles northwest of the Alamo stands a remarkable edifice and concept known colloquially as “The McNay,” Texas’ first museum of modern art. It comprises a collection of more than 700 works bequeathed by Marion Koogler McNay, a childless and eccentric heiress who, in her femininity and childlessness and eccentricity and wealth, helped compose a tiny cohort of 20th century Americans: Those who were not for sale.
Last week The McNay opened its fall exhibition, “Estampas de La Raza,” a somewhat forgettable collection of prints that nevertheless features a marvelous mini-exhibition, “America’s Finest,” by local artist Vincent Valdez. “America’s Finest” comprises, among other works, six large, graphite-on-paper portraits of prizefighters. Expertly hung in a minimalist style that spaces the rich works – pencil drawings with no backgrounds, framed by white wood – evenly across a bare white wall, “America’s Finest” reminds South Texas art aficionados what talent lives in our community and prizefighting aficionados how many things our sport is about.
What Valdez is after is boxing as metaphor. In interviews, he’s confessed he is not enamored of prizefighting. There is an element of brutality to it that likely offends what reservoir of empathy makes him capable of art. He is able to wade into brutality’s immediate effects and distant consequences and make art of them, but he is doubtfully drawn to the living, bleeding spectacle of one man pulping another’s face and spirit.
The nearly demolished human spirit is another thing Valdez is after. He is not interested in the underdog’s senseless self-belief – that uncertainty of outcome Carl von Clausewitz taught us is a prerequisite for courage – but rather what irrepressible thing makes a fighter lumber forward to collect a whupping in silence. Valdez is after what possesses a man, far removed from any chance of victory, to sanctify an unwillingness to be broken. As a creator Valdez knows such men are not like him; they construct nothing. But he understands, and proves, they are essential as fundament; they are the crushed and melted and hardened elements upon which an ethnicity constructs its identity in America. In this way the characters Valdez portrays are both our “finest” in their superiority of character, and in the nature of what particles remain once they’ve been pulverized for our amusement.
All Valdez’s works are evocative. None is substandard. They begin with a man whose shimmering trunks bear the Star of David atop the outside of his thick right quadriceps. He is followed by a Native American, done up in a headdress and trunks that partially read “Big Chief” – his promotional costume complemented by Saint Sebastian’s arrows, both as a reminder of what comical gimmickry boxing employs, and what cultural expiation the man performs.
The only of Valdez’s six drawings that features an immediately recognizable figure is his black prizefighter – one who, with his heavy eyelids and gangly frame, could be no one but the Motor City Cobra, Thomas “Hitman” Hearns. Curiously, Valdez situates him atop a black panther-skin rug. The next figure is either an Irishman or an Italian, coins and bills scattered at his feet, a tattoo of a sinking ship circled by banners that read “THIS TOO SHALL PASS” on his tensed left forearm.
Valdez’s most interesting study is his Latino prizefighter. Posed in a ready stance, his right heel lifted, the man wears two teardrop tattoos beside his left eye, signifying either familiars he has lost or others’ familiars he has taken. The band of his trunks has an “N” placed before its iconic “EVERLAST” brand. Beside the fighter a memorial wreath hangs on a squat stand, and across its flowers slumps a satin ribbon whose calligraphic letters spell “NI MODO,” a Spanish phrase used in dismissal. Literally translated, “ni modo” means “neither mode,” the exact opposite of what English speakers mean by “either way.” Figuratively translated, Valdez’s “NI MODO” means “it didn’t matter”; whatever volition the individual showed, larger forces predetermined his ruin.
The final figure is an Asian fighter, a serpentine dragon tattoo circling his shoulders and wrists, with his face, blood streaming from its right nostril, a reminder to those old enough to remember the misshapen countenance of Duk Koo Kim – a South Korean man killed by an American prizefighting ring. An improvised altar of tattered prayer cards and candles spreads before the toe of his left boot.
Much like the black and white photographs in Holger Keifel’s “Box” (a book found in museum giftshops), Valdez’s work shows what the violence of our sport does to the human form. Valdez’s “Big Chief” has much of the left side of his face caved-in from punches, his eye shuttered and its brow peaked and sharpened, his left cheek swollen, even the feathers on the end of his headdress seemingly shaved away. Whomever’s right fist hit him however many times, its concussion induced a stroke victim’s dull mask.
Valdez concerns himself with the aloneness in which a prizefighter traffics. While members of a prizefighter’s ethnicity elect him their savage representative, someone to remind other Americans what a man who goes to synagogue or lives in Chinatown can do them if wrongfully provoked, he is wholly alone in the violence he perpetrates and endures. In a poetic explanation stenciled on the wall opposite his drawings, Valdez is more celebrative than political but confident in what his work is about:
“These poor men, these boxers, these representatives of multitudes
ranked by color of skin, width of nose, and kink of hair,
stand guard above the sacred symbols that mortared and bricked,
hammered and sawed, planted and picked this country
with broken, bandaged hands.”
Praise boxing, then, for inspiring this art, for giving our flinching contemporary culture a place it can still revel in ethnic pride and work through its resultant conflicts. Boxing is America’s most truthful sport, and praise Valdez for capturing it.
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Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
