A single-channel view of the piece. Check out the installation documentation video here: http://vimeo.com/11270893 The New Water Sports: Totalitarian Aesthetics, Pride and the Cleansing of Queer Identity in Noam Gonick’s No Safe Words. By Francisco-Fernando Granados Noam Gonick’s No Safe Words is a multi-channel video installation that expands on a short film originally shown in large outdoor screens during the 2008 Toronto Pride Parade. The short film is contextualized by footage documenting the parade and the prominent participation of police forces in the festivities. Queer and politicized, the piece operates at the uncomfortable juncture where oppressive state apparatuses meet public expressions of non-normative sexuality. Appropriating the conventions and venues of mass media, Gonick uses contemporary and historical references to draw a link between the politics of totalitarianism and the aesthetics of sexual power-play that coincide in current North American culture. No Safe Words makes visible a kind of late capitalist gay identity that seeks to un-queer itself, obscuring the history of struggle for gay rights and creating a problematic dynamic that allows some queer bodies to pass as normative and achieve privileges while leaving oppressive hierarchical structures intact. Gonick utilizes the aesthetics and channels of mass media to intervene in the logic of popular visual culture. No Safe Words recalls Sunday Night Football promotional spots, putting together electric guitar-driven music, animated commentary, popping captions and action shots commonly featured in sports advertising. But the conventions and the logic end there. The players are called “fudge packers.” Instead of famous NFL giants like Peyton Manning and Adrian Peterson, the stars featured here are Adolf Hitler and Augusto Pinochet. The teams in the scoreboard are Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Muscular young men, most of them white, cross the boundaries between the athletic and the erotic by engaging in light bondage and making each other wet with beer and water. This is not NBC, but it looks like it could pass. Placed in an outdoor mega screen, the film functions as a queer impostor, planted by Gonick as a means to address the lack of political awareness that is often encountered in contemporary pride parades across large North American urban centres. By creating a sequence that passes as a mainstream media form, the film gives its public something to recognize, but quickly twists this recognition by inserting a seemingly unrelated combination of references to gay male sexuality – “fudge-packers” being men who to anally penetrate other men – and totalitarian politics – Hitler and Pinochet being genocidal dictators. While the relationship between homoeroticism and totalitarianism explored in the piece may not be immediately recognizable, there are a series of iconographic precedents in the history of Western art that link the two. Gonick shows one of the football players, shirtless, tied to a post; his long curly hair drips with beer poured on by his mates. “I think he likes it!” says the announcer, explaining the athletic young man’s open-mouthed smile. He is presented in ecstatic captivity, the sexual appeal of his body only intensified by the vulnerability of his situation. The open-mouthed smile grants an identity to the body. His pose and expression recall Il Sodoma’s 1531 work, Saint Sebastian. The painting presents the saint, almost naked, being pierced by arrows but with a rather orgasmic expression on his face. Gonick’s allusion to Il Sodoma provides historical context to his choice of subject matter. Citing examples that range from Ancient Greek sculpture to early twentieth century photography in the racist American South, Stephen F. Eisenman traces the history of representations of violence as bliss. The “formula of beautiful suffering” (111) presents victims in rapture, as though their punishment transported them into a state of delight. The representation of such delight in punishment works as a legitimization of violence. The Christian civilizing mission of sixteenth century Europe frames the beautiful suffering in Il Sodoma’s image; Gonick’s critical iteration of the formula is framed by the politics of North American occupation in the Middle East. He restages the formula of beautiful suffering in No Safe Words, amplifying its scale and highlighting its persistence in Western culture. No Safe Words recasts the images of (homo)sexualized torture that have emerged in the aftermath of North American intervention in the Middle East. In another scene, five bare-chested hunks, arms tied back again, kneel in line facing the camera. Rainbow coloured underwear is put on their heads by men dressed in dark gear. The men then pour bottled water on the captive’s heads. These are “the new water sports,” the voiceover says. The image of underwear covering a man’s features echo