The Nervous Peal

Walt Cassidy

The Nervous Peal is a series of ink and graphite drawings on carbon pigment print, featuring outdoor athletic sculpture drawn against photographic images of public settings. The drawings serve as blue prints for the three dimensional realization of the sculpture.

The structures will be physically and visually challenging public works. The goal with each form is to have basic workout components, complex elements for more advanced athletes, and contemplative spaces for meditation and reflection. The sculpture will enhance the theatricality and performative elements inherent in physical fitness and strength training, while illuminating the environments in which they are installed.

The forms in The Nervous Peal serve a ritualistic utility in that they order and regulate the energy that inhabits and interacts with them. They create balance in mirroring and simplifying relationships that extend into other aspects of our lives. Yukio Mishima points to this idea in Sun and Steel, where he states:

“…the relationship of muscles to steel was one of interdependence: very similar, in fact, to the relationship between ourselves and the world.”

Henry Rollins, in his essay about lifting weights, The Iron, writes:

“That's the way the Iron talks to you. It tells you that the material you work with is that which you will come to resemble.”

If we come to resemble the materials in which we work with, could it also be true that we come to resemble both physically, mentally, and spiritually the structures in which we inhabit and navigate?

Could the performative sculptures in The Nervous Peal create a residue in the brain and stamp the psyche with reflective signatures that echo throughout the everyday life and communities of the people who use them? My hope is that their positive function, essence and energy will be contagious in this way.

It is from this vantage point that my idea of building public athletic sculptures is being initiated. The agenda in creating them is in the prospect that they will resonate, as bells do, the qualities of balance, order, transcendence and illumination.

The title, The Nervous Peal, came to me when I was observing people cruising for sex. I found myself watching men paced back and forth in patterns. It reminded me of bells pealing. As a concept, a progression of bells draws a metaphor for me of a hunger that resonates when a man is confronted by any obstacle, and the subsequent transformation that occurs upon it’s mastering. It is a call to elemental performance, a performative hunger, if you will.

“I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light.” Yukio Mishima

The landscapes used in The Nervous Peal were shot in the Vale of Cashmere, a gay cruising section of Prospect Park, and Jacob Riis Park, a beach frequented by the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community. These serve as ideal conceptual staging locations.

Riis Beach was originally created by Robert Moses as the alternative beach geared towards the immigrant communities of New York, who were unwanted at the more mainstream Jones Beach. Today, it remains a location for the disenfranchised to gather, away from the tourism and commercialism of other recreational areas. Much of it’s charm today is due to the fact that is has been left unattended, weathered and abandoned. It maintains a renegade quality and attracts people who through choice or no choice, exist outside of the suffocating compartmentalization of the commercially driven mainstream.

The Vale of Cashmere is a lush Aubrey Beardsley-esque area of Prospect Park demurely tucked away on the Eastern side. It is often sited as the most beautiful area of the park, and is laced with hidden trails that lead deep into two areas of broken dilapidated fountains that serve as staging areas for cruising and sex, most prominently in the evening and nighttime hours. As much of the surrounding neighborhoods are Caribbean and African, it is not unusual to see ephemera used in Santeria and Voodoo littered along the paths and amongst the trees. The mixture of the dripping foliage, sexual energy and mysticism threads these hidden paths with a distinctive ritualistic vibration.

The Nervous Peal developed out of my interest in aligning art, spirituality and athletics. The combination of these three components, along with a long standing interest in community, street culture and the urban landscape form the foundation for this project.

As an athelete, I feel a parallel between strength training and the order that I seek in art making. In the ritual of lifting weights, one is trying to push a heavier load through a strict regiment of form, in order to obtain optimum power and strength. In my artwork there is an illustrated energy form attempting to move through some type of course in a drive to gain passageway into the next level of experience. This, to me, is transcendence, and is synonymous with the idea of presence.

In a return to Olympic tradition and integrity, The Nervous Peal project emphasises the inherently primal, artistic, performative, and spiritual aspects of fitness. This purist ethos is illustrated clearly in contemporary approaches to strength training, such as CrossFit*, Parkour*, and their various adaptations seen on playground structures, and in the streets.

The sculptures are designed to cultivate these alternative, yet somewhat traditional approaches and make them more accessible to people of any social or financial class. In harnessing the theatrical aspects of public athletics, this approach not only uplifts the individual by providing dynamic structures to train on, but also creates a strong focal point for the development of communities rooted in well-being.



*CrossFit is a strength and conditioning brand that combines weightlifting, sprinting, gymnastics, powerlifting, kettlebell training, plyometrics, rowing, and medicine ball training.[1] CrossFit contends that a healthy, fit person requires proficiency in each of ten general physical skills: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, agility, balance, coordination, and accuracy.[2] It defines fitness as increased work capacity across all these domains and says its program achieves this by provoking neurologic and hormonal adaptations across all metabolic pathways

*Parkour is a utilitarian discipline based upon the direct, successful, swift traversing of one's surrounding environment via the practical application of techniques, based around the concept of self-preservation. It is a non-competitive, physical discipline of French origin in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles in the most efficient way possible, using only their bodies. Skills such as jumping, climbing, vaulting, rolling, swinging and wall scaling are employed. Parkour can be practiced anywhere, but areas dense with obstacles are preferable and it is most commonly practiced in urban areas.

Astoria Pool

The Aquazanies

The Aquazanies were a troupe of boys who performed comedy and diving acts in the early 1940s at city pools, including East 54th Street in Manhattan and the Aquacade at Flushing Meadows.

Lifeguard at Jacob Riis Beach, 1934

Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers