COOL STUFF
Sport as art: Forty years of Sabres hockey at the AKAG
By Christopher Schobert

A view from center ice in the NHL 360 video installation; photo courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Tim Horton, with Sabres founder Seymour H. Knox III; photo by Ron Moscati.
An overhead shot of Derek Roy; photo by Jim McIsaac
“Is it antithetical for a major American art museum to present a series of documentary hockey photographs?” So asks Hallwalls Contempory Arts Center’s John Massier in an essay for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Forty: The Sabres in the NHL, a groundbreaking visual history running from November 7 to January 9. “As a curator and a hockey fan,” he continues, “let me skip ahead to the truth about these two arenas of action—they are exactly the same thing, manifest in different form.” It’s a bold theory, but one given credence by the photographs and videos that make up Forty. For this is no dusty memorabilia-fest. It is instead an immersive photographic and audiovisual experience featuring the behind-the-scenes work of many, many people.

AKAG director Louis Grachos says Forty features many of the important figures one would expect to see—Gilbert Perreault, Dominik Hasek, Pat LaFontaine, Ryan Miller, et al.—but also offers sights that will surprise. “This exhibition represents a visual history of the Buffalo Sabres’ forty years in the NHL, and in terms of the way it’s constructed, it’s really designed to go through some of the great highlights, the history, and some of the personalities and the players, but what we also wanted to do was create a kind of texture that gave us a little bit of social context—behind the scenes with the workers, the fans, the guys that set up the rink every night, and all the drama on the ice. In other words, all of the elements that make hockey exciting and thrilling.” Grachos felt it was important to bypass the standard way of telling the story of a franchise. “I didn’t want a traditional sports narrative, so I asked our much-loved retired writer for the Buffalo News, artist Richard Huntington, to do an essay that will be part of the text that you’ll read on the walls and in the brochure. We also invited Brendan Bannon, a terrific artist and photographer who does some socially interesting projects and travels around the world. He’s also someone who grew up following the Sabres. We asked Jean Knox, who with her husband Seymour and his brother Norty are really responsible for the team being here—there’s a great legacy and history to that. So we have all the great drama, [and even] images by Julian Montague of the Aud as it was being destroyed.”

Ryan Miller, keeping an eye on the puck against the New Jersey Devils, A post-injury Pat Lafontaine; photos by Bill Wippert.

The on-ice photography included in Forty came, Grachos says, through the lens of essentially three photographers—Ron Moscati, Bill Wippert, and Robert Shaver—who have covered the team for many years, “so there was a great opportunity to get a rich array of images. We also borrowed some things from the Hall of Fame. It’s consciously not an exhibition about memorabilia, or with some didactic narrative that takes you step-by-step through the Sabres.” As Huntington writes, “The sports photographer has never gained much traction in the art world.” But he sees a “vivid, immediate” kind of art in the work of photographers like Moscati, Wippert, and Shaver. “It is left to the still photographer to consolidate the drawn-out drama of a game, to sort the pieces and bring it all down to one solid, seemingly effortless image that simultaneously feeds the brain’s hunger for information and satisfies the eye’s demand for pleasing harmonies.”

NHL Hall of Famer Gilbert Perreault; photo by Robert Shaver.
Mike Foligno keeps an eye on the puck against the Boston Bruins; photos by Bill Wippert.
And this, Grachos says, is evident in the chosen photographs. “We’ve loosely broken down the categories to the color of hockey, fighting, goaltenders, the workers and the social scene behind the Sabres, the vendors; the people who are my age and older are going to be able to remember, ‘That’s the guy who used to sell beer.’ So it will have a dynamic feel. We were not as concerned with having the ‘right’ players, but having some of the best images these photographers had done.”

In addition, there’s a new video installation called NHL 360. “The staff of the Sabres really devised this phenomenal video experience,” says Grachos. “It will be in one of the larger galleries. You will walk into [it] and you’ll be surrounded with images and sounds of the game. The footage was taken from a great experiment the league did last preseason. The Sabres attached a small video camera to the helmets of the referees, the players, and the goaltenders. So that footage and the audio was captured, and the idea is, when you walk in, you’re going to physically feel the sights, the sounds, and the excitement of actually being on the ice. There were three people with the Sabres—Chrisanne Bellas, Mark Blaszak, and Drew Boeing—who made it all happen. It’s a new technology and presentation format, so in addition to the large-scale images, you’re going to see a different kind of context. It’s the biggest innovation you’ll find in this show. They did a great job, and the presentation is going to be very, very cutting-edge.”

Grachos says the initial idea for the exhibition came from a conversation with Sabres managing partner and minority owner Larry Quinn. “He sort of just threw it out there: ‘Would you ever consider doing an exhibition [on the team]?’ I was clear that we would do one that was about the photography and the history … The Sabres are really the organizers of the show, in that they provided the materials. I worked with Sabres staff member Melissa Gebhardt, who assembled several thousands of images for us to choose from. The Sabres staff and I selected the final 220 or so images for the exhibition. The imagery is just unbelievable, and I feel really good about how that all evolved—the decisions were collective. We put together a board and mapped out the show, and then took things away, added things.”

He also felt it was important to bring in Jean Knox. “I wanted her to have a voice. The Knox family did all these great things to bring this team to Buffalo. The marriage of our museum, art, and the Sabres—it’s kind of a nice imagery, so I went for it. And we didn’t want to do it in a marginalized way, so the show will be up in the gallery’s prime exhibition spaces. It’s thrilling.” The team’s anniversary makes for ideal timing, as does the fact that Buffalo is home to this year’s 2011 IHF World Junior Championship from December 26 to January 11. “It’s going to be a good moment not only to celebrate the Sabres’ anniversary, but to show [the history to] international audiences. They can enjoy the show, learn a little bit about the team’s history, and enjoy the AKAG collection, as well.”

Legendary defenseman Jim Schoenfeld embraces Ric Seiling and Dave Andreychuk and Paul Cyr pummels tough guy Ed Hospodar; photos by Bill Wippert.

The NHL Hall of Fame has agreed to bring down all their trophies during the last week of the Junior Championship’s playoffs, giving Sabres fans a chance to see the freshly etched names of Miller and Tyler Myers. “Ironically, in 1970 the Calder winner was Gilbert Perreault and this year Tyler Myers,” Grachos, a Toronto native, says, “so there’s a kind of symmetry there.”

Like Massier, Grachos sees Forty as not just an ideal fit for the gallery, but as a unique event in WNY. “I’m a big hockey fan, and I really loved doing this project. It’s somewhat outside of our programming, but I thought it was a worthy project for the community. What’s so remarkable about this team—and it happens in certain cities—the team becomes a fabric of the community. When they’re winning, everybody’s upbeat, when they’re not, [everybody is] complaining. So there’s a drama there, and there’s also an effort to make the team very active in the community. And just visually, there’s a really interesting aesthetic value. There is an artistry in how a sports photographer has to capture that action. Hockey has an incredible element of speed and skill and physicality, and that’s something that we hope the show will capture in an aesthetically beautiful way.”

In a nice tribute, the brochure features a simple and succinct special thank-you: “This exhibition is presented in honor of Seymour H. Knox III and Northrup Knox for their important role in bringing the National Hockey League to the city of Buffalo.” How fitting, then, that this celebration of the team’s four decades is housed in the gallery that bears their name.

Spree associate editor Christopher Schobert is proud to live in a city that’s home to both a National Hockey League franchise and a major contemporary art gallery.


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