A picture of defeat to ponder
By Greg Baum
The Age
November 6, 2004
 In
every sporting contest, there is at least one loser. In team sports,
there are many losers at a time. In races, there are more losers
than winners. This concept of defeat, at once cruel and inevitable,
fascinates artist Martin Tighe, who has turned it into a series
of paintings and now a sculpture.
"I'm particularly interested in defeat. It's a richer field,
a more complex emotion," Tighe said this week. "Winning
is a simple emotion."
Always in Tighe's images, there are three figures - two losers
outnumbering one winner, as in life. Always, the losers are in the
foreground, always with their heads downcast. Always, the winner
is in the background, partly obscured. Always, you can hear the
silence.
"The joy of victory is everywhere, in the electronic media,
in print. People see it," he said. "An artist has to work
the angles, work in the margins, find ideas that resonate."
Tighe sculpted Victory and Defeat for Xavier College, where he
went to school and is now artist-in-residence, working in an attic
that was once a dormitory for boarders. The metal is bronze, a losing
colour. The figures are footballers, but belong to no code, and
so belong to them all.
The work makes for an instructive contrast with all the shiny cups
and pennants at Xavier, which has a proud and successful sporting
history. It seems to say that to appreciate victory, one must also
know and understand defeat.
"Maybe the richness of defeat is a new idea to the students,
but they can all understand it, because they've all experienced
it, and not just in sport," Tighe said. "I'm not making
a statement about whether it's OK or not, but it happens and everyone
has to accept it."
Tighe was inspired to sculpt Victory and Defeat by the finish of
this year's Head of the River at Nagambie. Carey Grammar, the underdog,
led from the start until pipped at the line by Scotch, the favourite,
the moment marked by the Scotch cox's exultant leap.
Tighe watched from a discreet distance as the Carey crew pulled
their boat from the water, while what he described as Scotch's Moscow
Circus-scale celebrations blared over the PA system.
"The Carey boys, all centre half-forwards, 6ft 1in, 6ft 2,
all bawling their eyes out," he said. "Only the coach
and the boatman were there. No parents, no one else."
Tighe emphasised that he was an artist who dabbled in sport, but
was not a sporting artist. "I'm not interested in personality
in sport. The cult of personality is enormous," he said. "As
an artist, I can't compete with the motor drive, the zoom."
Tighe played Australian football as a boy, but found his true love
on the rugby field. He captained Xavier's first team, now coaches
the school's under-15s, and plays still for a Melbourne University
social team.
He nominates the All Blacks in the World Cup as a prize example
of epic, helpless defeat, as well as Collingwood's ill-starred history
since 1958. During last year's World Cup, Tighe went to Victoria
Park to watch the All Blacks train.
"I felt like tapping the manager on the shoulder and saying,
'Don't you realise? This is a loser's ground!'," he said. "They
didn't stand a chance."
But he holds up Collingwood's most loved son, the late Bob Rose,
as an example of someone ennobled by the way he dealt with life's
many forms of defeats. "A great, defeated soul," said
Tighe.
One of Tighe's paintings is of two defeated All Blacks and a victorious
Wallaby. He observed that the All Blacks' decline had coincided
with a sponsor's insistence that they removed the white trim from
their collar, so that they were more black. "They haven't been
able to adapt to professionalism," he said. In Tighe's painting,
the All-Blacks' collars are white.
One day a couple of years ago, Tighe heard that former Wallabies
captain John Eales was signing books at the ABC Shop in Melbourne.
He made a photocopy of his painting and hastened into the city to
join the queue. When his turn came, he showed Eales the work and
introduced himself.
He could see that Eales was intrigued. They arranged to meet later.
Eales bought the painting, has bought two more since and has become
a patron of Tighe and a family friend. Recently, he introduced an
exhibition of his in Sydney.
Eales was a paragon of sportsmanship, humble in victory, gracious
in defeat, and much admired for it. In Tighe's images, the winners'
attitudes are not triumphal. At most, they are relieved that defeat
had been avoided.
Reflecting on this year's grand final, Tighe noted that no matter
what unpleasantries were exchanged on the field, there was a sensitivity
afterwards. More often than not now, the victor's first thought
was for the vanquished.
But at the Athens Olympics, the supposed pinnacle of sport, not
all were magnanimous. The US women's soccer team paid no heed at
all to Brazil, which it was lucky to beat in the final.
Of course, an artist must also deal with defeat, at the hands of
critics, or when measuring his or her work against its concept.
But Tighe has had much success, with four Archibald Prize nominations
and awards at three of the annual football art exhibitions. He is
working on a painting to hang in the Melbourne Cricket Club committee
room at the new MCG.
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