A View From Above: The Pre-Game Meal by Nathaniel Sullivan
Tuesday June 25th
7:30pm

This event is free, but has a maximum capacity of 12 people, the same as a basketball team, please RSVP here

This event is part of the Exhibition Wicket Leeks, in the Flux Gallery from June 22nd to July 13th

A View From Above: The Pre-Game Meal is a multimedia lecture performance about the statistical and sexual mythology of basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain. On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a single game, a record that still stands. In a 1992 autobiography, he claimed that he had slept with 20,000 women. I read this book when I was 12 years old, a skinny kid growing up in Canada with hoop dreams. I have wondered about those two numbers since then.

In the performance, Chamberlain the myth, and the beautiful game he played are a frame for exploring the enculturation of young men, the formation of identity and the near certainty that childhood heroes will disappoint. The performance unfolds over the course of a pre-game meal, scientifically sound nutrition to bring the everyone to peak athletic performance within a few hours.

Nathaniel Sullivan is a creative non-fiction artist. He makes documentary videos, multimedia lecture performances and site-specific guided tours. He uses these forms of truth-telling to combine facts with speculative ideas in order to explore the roots of power and social control. Often, he uses one character and an event from their real life as a way into the story. He has made work about Francois Mitterrand’s rumored last meal, exploring the limits of reason, Wilt Chamberlain’s mythological sex life, in which he wrote a teenaged version of himself into the story to critique the enculturation of young men, and the semi-fictional love letters JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, to retell the story of the current financial crisis.