Piledriver

For Piledriver, scores of practices are brought together that consider the exhibition an arena. Within its capacity as an ideologically vacuous zone, the actuality of the staged space colludes in adaptive political stances. Anna-Sophie Berger, Oroma Elewa, Julie Falk, Harun Farocki, Lourdes Grobet, Runo Lagomarsino, Twan Lugten, Céline Mathieu, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Jonathan Monk and Gozié Ojini do not resolve into a fixed position. Kayfabe and spectatorship are kept in the same hold; the crowd enters the square called a ring.

Wrestling is the longest standing excuse for an oiled-up pair to clasp in public. From the Greek palaestra to Turkish yağlı güreş, where olive-drenched pehlivans reach for grip onto the rivals leather shorts, intimacy is continually staged as combat. Iran’s zurkhaneh turns it into ritual with drums, Ferdowsi recitations and swinging clubs. Mongolian bökh wrestlers resign when the thigh touches the ground, sumo negotiates heaviness on salt and clay with offerings buried under the centre of the circle. American wrestling took out the grip and scripted it. Roland Barthes anticipated this, describing wrestling not as a sport but as a spectacle, a morality play of pure gesture. He noted where the momentum stops: when a wrestler lays it on too thickly, the crowd turns on him, “because it condemns artifice.” They probably object not out of a longing for actual suffering – to an extent the situational arrangement is agreed upon – yet they will start protesting when the violence is badly staged. (The World of Wrestling, in Mythologies, 1957)

The piledriver begins with a complete reversal of the body. One wrestler is held upside down against the other’s body, legs raised and head pointed toward the mat. The pause before the body is brought down allows the audience to read the scene as that of one body gaining absolute control over another. The wrestler going down tucks their chin and takes the impact across the shoulders. The minimal pivot is most of what stands in between a neatly choreographed movement and a broken neck.

A machine that lifts a weight and drops it onto a pile is also called a piledriver, striking over and over until the soil stops giving way. As the pile enters, the ground’s resistance becomes part of what supports the structure. Gilbert Simondon, a contemporary of Barthes, had a name for this: associated milieu, the part of its surroundings that a machine draws into its own functioning, until the thing it resists becomes a working component. (Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, 1958)

WWF made defiance geopolitical in the 1980s. Hulk Hogan, tanned, blond, bandana’d, defeated the Iron Sheik at Madison Square Garden. In doing so he rescued the nation from an Iranian villain, who waved the flag of a country that had recently held Americans hostage. The Iron Sheik was Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, a genuine Greco-Roman wrestler. The athlete was staged as the villain, while the effigy became America. The wrestler’s neck gets thicker where it has been hit. (World Wrestling Federation; since 2002 World Wrestling Entertainment)

Piledriver opens Friday, November 13, 7–11pm with a wager* on a demonstration of the banned wrestling move, Diagnosis, a reading by Céline Mathieu, broadcasted to Jason Hirata's exhibition Accumulator in artspace Pucks, Vienna, Unlike All Other Empires, a performance by Runo Lagomarsino, and a sound performance by Rotterdam noise band intermittent fasting.

Developed in close collaboration with local wrestling initiatives, performance FDAIC, curated by Fréderique Scholtes, assistant curator Kimiya Jahanshahi, set against Barthes framework by curator Rawad Baaklini, with support of the estate of Lourdes Grobet, Nils Staerk, Silke Lindner, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Van Abbemuseum library, DVR collective, anonymous consignors (Antwerp/Brussels), Seoul National Museum.

*during the opening only, it is possible to win an artwork part of the exhibition for a wager of 9.33

For more information contact communicatie@vanabbehuis.nl
Stadhuisplein 3, Eindhoven, open Thursday to Saturday 1–5pm (temporary location)