Technical Knockout
Boxer, scrapper, parry—Archie Moore’s work moves through the tropes assigned to him, resisting, reworking, refusing.
By Tristen Harwood
Issue 1, Summer 2023/24
Boxer. All lives have their tropes. You could be the boy from the bush or the city Blak. Maybe cynicism is your thing. The artist or a mechanic with the calloused hands. You’re always the wittiest one at the party or the drunk or a ghost. You can choose, but sometimes you have little control. If you are the artist, curators and art historians and critics will assign tropes for you: now music is your thing. You’re the movie lover. The one with the boxer’s name. No. The boxer. Or it’s that you’re plagued by memory like the empty hole that’s been dug over the past couple-hundred years (Diane Seuss, Frank Sonnets, 2021). Consider this. Archie Moore’s father named him after the World Light Heavyweight Champion boxer Archie Moore. He is the third-best boxer of all time. At the level of the symbolic, boxing leaves no ambiguity.
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Technical Knockout by Tristen Harwood is featured in full in Issue 1 of Memo magazine.
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Archie Moore’s “impoverished aesthetic” transforms memory, class, and race into immersive, unsettling worlds. Rejecting the tidy self-disclosure of trauma narratives, his work lingers in ambiguity—neither confession nor critique, but something in between.
KIRAC’s gonzo filmmaking shatters art world niceties, but their entanglement with Michel Houellebecq—novelist, provocateur, reluctant porn star—turns chaotic. As lawsuits fly and reputations fray, the real spectacle isn’t the film itself but the battle over who gets to tell the story.
Dean Kissick’s Downward Spiral chronicled the art world’s contradictions with the breathless urgency of an end-times prophet. Now, with the column closed and the critic in semi-exile, the question lingers: was he a voice of his generation, or just another scenester burning out on his own myth?
