Art + Sport – Basil Sellers Art Prize 2012
September 2012
Watching the London Olympiad, flipping from event to event across multiple cable TV channels, I was pleased to stumble across the men’s discus throw.
Not only a sport dating back to antiquity and the origins of the Olympic Games but also one that had inspired an iconic art work, Myron’s Discobolus of around 450 BCE. Eagerly, and as it turns out, naively, I looked forward to the competitors striking a classical pose before launching the Frisbee of yore. Of course, Myron’s marble man didn’t spring to life in London; today’s discus thrower is more a hybrid of coiled spring and whirling dervish. Not quite the aesthetic experience I’d hoped for. Nevertheless I found some small satisfaction watching the performance of a German competitor by the name of Munch; yes, he did scream.
It turns out Olympic athletes abandoned the artistic model early: competitors at the first modern Olympics of Paris had attempted to mimic the action of the Discobolus before an American competitor took the medal by simply marching up to the mark and throwing the discus as hard as he could. Therein lies one reason why art and sport are now seen as separate spheres. Classical antiquity repeatedly melded the ideas of art, physical beauty and ethics: an ideal mind in an ideal body. But instrumental values – the desire to win at all costs – relegated aesthetics to the sidelines.
Australian cultural critics have always claimed art and sport were divided by sensibility; a running culture war between jocks and nerds, plebs and aristocrats. Architect Robin Boyd, like a latter-day Wilde, lamented the ‘terrifying moronity’ of the crowd at the MCG. Playwright David Williamson insisted that artists had to leave the country before they were ‘stifled by the deadly distrust of creativity in sports-obsessed Australia’. But I don’t think Australia divides so neatly into high-minded culterati and the low-brow hoi polloi. Certainly the audience data suggests that the punters are buying tickets for both cultural and sporting events.
Historically, the distinction has been more a moral one. In his 1892 memoirs, Henry Parkes suggested that sport was a worrying distraction from nation building. ‘One danger to a sound and healthy public spirit in Australia is the inordinate appetite for sports and amusements’, he wrote. ‘Outdoor exercises and indoor recreations are excellent within rational limits; but man in a civilised state has capacities for something more, and lives under obligations to use his capacities for much higher objects . . . the citizens of a free state have always on hand their duties in preserving the continuous well-being of the State.’ I’m not sure how many Melburnians could live up to Parkes’ measure today. Sports fans don’t figure that it’s a matter of choosing between going to the Boxing Day test and, say, building an orphanage. But I think most could detect the moral judgement implicit in high brow dismissals of sport; the suggestion is always that there’s something better, more uplifting, to do with your time.
Not that artists themselves take that view. With the third Basil Sellers Art Prize on the wall, I’ve now viewed over 1,000 entries in a competition encouraging artists to engage with sport. The $100,000 first prize is an inducement but I can’t recall any entry that looked like it had been cooked up solely for a shot at the award: the artists were well inside the ballpark already.
Once seated in said ballpark, however, I wouldn’t say that artists look at the game in quite the same way as your typical sports fan. They’ve a sharp, but not moralising, eye for the fault lines of the sporting ethos and our national character. Lauren Brincat’s video, Ten metre platform speaks of an omnipresent but unnameable element of sport: failure. Having established the terms of her performance – she would dangle by her fingertips from the platform until she fell into the water below – Brincat recorded her inability to go through with it. A striking aspect of the recent Olympics was the difficulty many had with second-best. In Australian eyes, silver became a new base metal; nothing but gold would do. Watching the women’s javelin (flipping again), I was stunned to see many competitors deliberately foot fault, after their throw had been measured, in order to scrub an unsatisfactory measure from their record.
Artists, on the other hand, look failure square in the eye. In an instrumental age, when the KPI is king, parading one’s failures is almost a declaration of liberty, a momentary release from outcomes, metrics and deliverables. For the Olympics, it’s ‘Faster, higher, stronger’. For artists, to borrow from Beckett, it’s ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’.
Dr Chris McAuliffe is Director, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. He has recently returned from a year at Harvard University as the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies.
The Basil Sellers Art Prize 2012 shows until November 4 at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.
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