Art and Sport Down Under - Uri Tzaig - Tracey Moffatt - Sylvie Blocher - Alan Fleischer - Patricia Piccinini - Rosemary Laing - Lin Onus - Lorrie Graham - art exhibit focussing on art and sports for the Olympic games

Art in America, May, 2001 by Roni Feinstein

Sydney's Olympic Arts Festival mixed historical, indigenous and contemporary art in a panoply of shows.

Included in the exhibition "Sporting Life," which was presented at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the Olympic Arts Festival held in conjunction with the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, was a video by Israeli artist Uri Tzaig titled [infinity] (1998). Set within a kind of boxing-ring enclosure, two teams play an unnamed ball game. Both teams consist of men and women wearing the same red costume (each with a different configuration of large white dots), so their members are virtually indistinguishable. The players run, spin, jump and turn with considerable grace and skill as they bounce, carry or pass the ball. The game is shown at a normal pace as well as speeded up and in slow motion, and the camera angle occasionally shifts from a side view to full-face close-ups or to a distant, overhead vantage point. All the while, a digital clock ticks away the seconds remaining in the game. When the clock hits 0, there is no pause; the numbers simply begin to climb, and the game goes on.

This work relates to the Olympic Games through the grace and skill of Tzaig's players (they are actually professional dancers) and through the spirit of teamwork that pervades the field. In this match, however, there are no winners, no medals, no expressions of national pride, no commercial sponsorship, no media coverage. The game is endless and pointless: This evocative work offers multiple levels of meaning.

Tzaig's video ably demonstrates some of the differences between art and sport. They belong to separate worlds (and institutions), tend to have different audiences of different sizes and employ their own forms of address. Yet art programs have been a chartered component of the modern Olympics since the games were held in Stockholm in 1912. At that time, a Pentathlon of the Muses was initiated--an international art competition that awarded gold, silver and bronze medals in the areas of music, sculpture, visual art, literature and poetry. In the early '50s, the poor quality of the submissions and a general lack of interest led to the competitions being replaced by performing-arts programs and visual-art exhibitions arranged by the host cities. Today, the arts festivals planned in conjunction with the Olympic Games are important components of a city's bid to host the games. Sydney's petition included an elaborate, four-part, four-year arts program.(1)

Framing a Festival

The Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival encompassed music, dance, theater, film, performance and the visual arts.(2) It extended from the first week of August to the middle of November (Australia's spring), overlapping both the Olympic and Paralympic (for disabled athletes) games. The visual-arts exhibition program featured a mix of the historic and the contemporary, the international and the homegrown. Not surprisingly, the city of Sydney was the star attraction. Many shows focused on its environs and landmarks; its people, customs and ethnicity; its art, culture and history; and its sophisticated architecture and design. In a few, the focus widened beyond Sydney to include the state of New South Wales or the entirety of Australia. Another category of presentations highlighted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art; contemporary indigenous work from Oceania and New Zealand was shown as well.(3) A third category introduced historical art and artifacts with exhibitions such as "1000 Years of the Olympic Games: Treasures of Ancient Greece," Leonarda da Vinci's Codex Leicester (lent by Bill and Melinda Gates) and a show of traditional Korean ceramics and scrolls, all at the Powerhouse Museum, or "Dead Sea Scrolls" at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.(4)

With upwards of 50 art exhibitions presented at 31 venues citywide, the sheer number of shows was a problem. The festival's 47-page illustrated brochure did not distinguish among them. Lesser shows were put into the same pot with retrospectives of quality, significance and worth. A show consisting of photographs of cities taken by teenagers was given the same billing as an exhibition of masterworks from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney's major art museum.

Sporting Life

This said, quite a number of things were done right. Several large, well-researched and well-curated exhibitions would have been at home in major museums anywhere. A few of the smaller, quirkier shows were also appealing and enlightening. (A significant component of the Olympic Arts Program--the public sculptures--is considered in a separate article by Felicity Fenner [see Ground Work].)

"Sporting Life," the show that included Tzaig's video, was a three-part exhibition organized by MCA curator Rachel Kent. This intelligent and provocative exhibition was one of the high points of the festival and could be a model for future Olympic art festivals. The heart of the show was contemporary art: recent and newly commissioned works by 18 artists, half of them Australian and half international, which reflect upon the interconnections between art, sport and everyday life as well as ideas about rules, competition and the emphasis placed upon winning. These works address the gap between art and sport in today's society and challenge the idealization of the athletic body; their ironic stance provided some much-needed comic relief in the face of the earnestness of the games themselves.