Dennis Hollingsworth

irrational, purely visceral

Barcelona Bullfight from Patrick Bullion on Vimeo.

This link sent me into thoughts about bullfighting again. I searched Google for videos of Jos? Tom?s, and this is the best one I found, his performance in Barcelona that I missed back in 2008.

Here is a snip taken from the Michael Kimmelman article I posted back in 2009, in this part of the article, Kimmelman is talking to Cayetano Rivera:

I pressed him about killing the bulls.

He paused. ?I?m not a hunter, and the first time I killed a bull it didn?t feel good,? he said. ?It was shocking. Nobody loves the bull more than the bullfighter, that?s for sure. But it?s a responsibility, and it wouldn?t be fair to have someone else kill the bull. It?s only fair that I risk my life doing it.

?Today, people have so many other ways to entertain themselves ? movies, Internet, sports, television ? and maybe the interest in bullfighting is because there?s nothing else that offers so much reality,? he said. ?It?s like what my grandfather told my brother, ?Some bullfights are so important that your life doesn?t matter.? And it sometimes happens when you are completely given over to the moment in the ring that you really don?t care, you just forget about your body. And it?s incredible.?

It occurred to me then that he sounded like an artist. Bullfighting survives its own social anachronism not just because of its machismo mythology, but also because of an irrational, purely visceral response that fans and bullfighters like Rivera share. Being irrational, it defies normalization, remaining something exotic even in Spain. And in the end this describes the way art tends to operate. That?s not a moral judgment. It merely helps explain the eloquence that some people find in what others see as utterly worthless and contemptible..

Here's what I think of when the subject of bullfighting arises. I think of deep human history, a village with crops and animals to support it. One day, the first day of its kind, the elders send the youth to go out and kill the bull to feed the village, its time has come. How could they do this? Hundreds of pounds of bristling killer instinct. Animals like this were on the open range, techniques of stalking and overcoming were of no use in this situation. So, they constrained the animal in an enclosure. They sapped its energy in stages to bring it closer to the human arena where one of the lads, no doubt the bravest among his peers, delivered the killing blow in close quarters. Without a doubt, the contest was formalized into a system of limitations (a type of tradition) and within its constraints, art emerged.

In a world that continuously promised the immanence of the eschaton; a reminder of our fragility, our all-too-humanness, of hubris; a vivid sense of how far we fall from perfection is what civilization seems to need at the moment. To witness a fleeting moment of perfection in the midst of a constant mortal striving that almost always falls short, this is what bullfighting, and all sport, and all art, seems to be about to me. This is how I make sense of it.

Posted by Dennis at April 14, 2011 5:39 PM