Pro-Wrestling as Modern Ritual

Currently my art work focused on the ever-expanding and ever- shrinking realms of public space and the transformative effect of public spectacle. Pro-wrestling provides a very organic source of inspiration and investigation into contemporary social interaction and ritual in our technological society. Wrestling provides its fans with a medium for thinking and expressing beliefs about their culture. Though it is absurd and full of buffoonery, it is also defiant, hopeful, liberating and unifying. Fans are not detached connoisseurs looking down on life, in the cold comfort of irony, they are total participants in a spectacle of their own making, shouting obscenities, throwing chairs and expressing their worries in a mob like catharsis of triumphant foolishness. Yet Pro-Wrestling isn't fooling anybody. The volunteery suspension of disbelief is paramont. It is a rite of passage into the "brotherhood" formed at the spectacle. The Wrestlers and their various mythos become the catylist for the group mind forming outside the ring, the performance created by the audience.

Viewing pro-wrestling as a performance and a form of sculpture, the wrestler’s body becomes an exaggerated expression of our inner desires, beliefs and emotions. Ideas of masculinity, narcissism, vanity, family, sexuality, death and dying, bestiality, primitivism and schizophrenia are encapsulated in the persona of the wrestler. These ideas play out in the ring and are tested, manipulated and transformed with every pin of the opponent. It is more important for the pro-wrestler to make their character believable and to reinforce their mythos than actually win the match. This friction between performance, spectacle and the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the spectator has a transformative effect and can also function as a measure of the beliefs and ambitions of American society.