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ABSTRACT
For two weeks in October 2017, the San Diego gallery Helmuth Projects displayed Sondra Perry’s installation IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 Or Mirror Trick for Vitrine and Projection. In the installation, Perry meditates on her twin brother’s involvement in the class action suit O’Bannon vs the NCAA in which college athletes challenges the NCAA sale their names, images and likeness (NILs) to the video game company EA without the players’ consent. Perry excavates the conditions of visibility that structured the NCAA’s application of the so-called amateurism in O’Bannon, confronting the game with contested concepts of love and histories of display value as their intersection materialised in different registers of analysis: the juridical, the political economic, the familial and the aesthetic. The hours I spent with Game were filled with double-takes and second-guesses as Perry’s likenesses leapt between these registers, careening through the impossible inside of digital processes controlled by something or something they could never hope to see.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. NAH NAH is the shared effort of Lissa Corona, Marine Grize, Nicholas Lesley and Alexis Negron. The collective cohered in Fall 2017 when Corona et al. left the San Diego Art Institute after the Institute’s instalment of a new director under whom they were unable to continue programming oriented to equity, inclusion and social justice. This exhibition also featured video work by Corona, exploring sexual violence and the spectacularisation of women’s testimony. For a recent account of these artists’ departure from SDIA see Fernandes (Citation2017).
2. Perry was born in 1986 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Her work with video games, surveillance and racialised vision is exemplified in pieces like Resident Evil (2015) and TK (Suspicious Glorious Absence) (2018). Game was commission by the ICA Philadelphia and Henie Onstad Kunstsentes in Oslo and exhibited at the Brigid Donahue Gallery. Perry received the Nam June Paik international media prize of the Kunststiftung NRW for GAME in 2018.
3. For a sample of art world commentary about Game please see Snoad (Citation2018), Billard (Citation2017), and https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201803/sondra-perry-74319.
4. Associated Press, “$60 Million Settlement Approved in NCAA Video Game Suit.”
5. O’Bannon v. NCAA 7 F.Supp.3d955, 965 (N.D. Cal. 2014) .
6. Feminist legal scholars have long prioritised circulation over restriction in intellectual property law, arguing that leaving resources in the commons acts a more powerful incentive for creative work than does the promise of proprietary knowledge. Yet, as the NCAA appeals show, the first amendment also creates a devastating grey zone that registers NILs as a property, publicity and privacy at the same time as it suspends all three.
7. For an example that intersects music, voice and the aesthetic, consider the case Waits v Frito Lay. In 1988, Frito Lay hired a soundalike to record a song inspired by Tom Wait’s “Step Right Up” to advertise Salsa Rio Doritos. In the ad, a Waits-like voice grumbles charmingly through a list of vegetables and spices. This world-weary voice appends earthy intrigue to the processed snack food and indulges white audiences’ imagined intimacy with black blues tradition. The opinion even quotes a fan’s over-the-top description: “like how you’d sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razor blades … . Late at night. After not sleeping for three days.” Though this show-stopping account, the law resounds Waits’ voice as precisely that of hard living romantic artist that it ought to protect. To get by when he was down on his luck in the 1970s, he did a dog food commercial. The opinion’s opening gambit makes it hard not to hear traces of these hard times in the voice itself. But Waits’ leans into gritty story only to distance himself from its limitations. Years later, the then-struggling artist stands by an artistic integrity he would have bad luck not intervened. “Artists live somewhere in their dreams and they deal with a lot of ideas and thoughts,” he said “I think they should be kept in that world.” Waits appends rights of privacy to a romantic artist figure nestled in a fragile, otherworldly enclosure into which Frito Lay and market. And yet, rights of publicity rules also guaranteed him a higher payout because the earlier ad established his voice’s market value.
8. For an example, please see “Andrew Anthony: The Voice of EA Sports.“ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIS2afJX_Wk.
9. Golden Hill Community Plan, undated.
10. The block has recently been sold, but the owners haven’t disclosed when demolition will begin (Bailey Citation2017). Many have businesses have moved or closed since I started writing this. Helmuth, the SRO Lounge and the City Liquor house remain.
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Amy Cimini
Amy Cimini is a violist and musicologist and she is currently Assistant Professor of Music at UCSD. She is happy to be finishing her first book Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life.