Art > Life: On Three Baseballing Pictures by Erin Wong

Woody Allen says in 1977’s Annie Hall that we’re “always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.”

In the relevant scene of that film, we’ve just witnessed Allen’s character Alvy Singer directing a play in which Singer has rewritten a breakup between himself and the titular Hall (played by Diane Keaton), such that she rushes after, and professes her love for, him.

For Allen’s Singer, the potential outcomes are binary in nature: either Annie does or doesn’t leave him. The former is what happens; the latter is what happens — what is perfected — in art.

The sort of perfect we find in the three drawings above, courtesy of (male man) Erin Wong, is different. Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax are, by most accounts, the closest thing that baseball has seen to perfect. There are details that could be edited — maybe DiMaggio’s personal life could’ve been less turbulent, maybe Mays wouldn’t’ve had an age-42 season, maybe Koufax’s brilliance could’ve lasted a couple-few more years — but one could also make the argument that these imperfections actually make each player’s respective resume even more striking.

But achieving — or, at least, gesturing towards — perfection isn’t always a case of choosing one of two outcomes in a binary relationship. Rather, Wong’s pictures are a product of a desire to re-see players whose respective mythologies are well known to the point of being tired.

Wong’s drawings — like a batter totally at ease with his own weaknesses — don’t try to do too much. Rather, they seem to ask simple questions. “What would Joe DiMaggio look like were he crossed with an older Ed Sullivan?” “What would Sandy Koufax look like were he thinking the words ‘I know something you don’t know’?” “What if gravity had only a minimal effect on Willie Mays’ hat?”

It’s not unusual to hear people say art is dead because everything has been done. What sort of conceit does it require to imagine that one’s age would be the one to kill an immortal thing? In its own, small way, Wong’s drawings make it clear that art isn’t dead, won’t die. All it requires is the desire to ask small questions and the technical skill to answer those questions in the relevant medium.