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

Thinking Big

A supremely relevant show was "1000 Years of the Olympic Games," a selection of ancient Greek treasures lent by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Athens, many of them shown outside Greece for the first time. Greek antiquities were also seen in Atlanta in 1996 (in a large exhibition sponsored by IBM) and will no doubt be a central focus at the 2004 Games in Athens.(6) The exhibition's statues, reliefs and vessels, depicting athletes and athletic competition, represented a historical moment when art and sport met on equal ground, both being devoted to the glory and appeasement of the gods. While the sacred significance of the Olympics has long since been lost, the naked form of the (male) athlete remains an enduring model of physical perfection.

In the end, it seems that what succeeded best in Sydney were Olympic-scale and Olympic-caliber exhibitions like this, as well as "Papunya Tula," "Sporting Life" and "Urban Dingo"--shows grand in conception and design and of an international standard. Other shows that had themes appropriate for particular museums in the period of the Olympic Games should not have been billed as primary Olympic Art Festival events; it behooves future Olympic organizers to prioritize and be more discerning. The Olympics is, by its very nature, larger than life: the world's best athletes are gathered together; hundreds of thousands of people from around the globe come to watch and support them; thousands perform in the opening and closing ceremonies; stadiums, transit systems and athletes' villages are constructed and a city's aspect is improved (cleaned up, with new roads, tunnels, hotels and restaurants constructed, and so on). For the arts, the Olympics is not a time for understatement and modesty but for blockbuster and spectacle.

(1.) The Olympic Arts Festival of 2000 concluded a series begun in 1997 which, Sydney's Olympic organizers claim, was instrumental in the city's winning the bid to host the games. "The Festival of Dreaming," a three-week program devoted to the world's indigenous cultures, was held in Sydney in 1997. "A Sea Change," a nine-month nationwide program in 1998, focused on exploration and settlement worldwide, commemorating immigrant explorers, adventurers and refugees from war and strife. In 1999, the year-long "Reaching the World" took the work of Australian visual artists and performers abroad. Two painting shows were drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: "New Worlds from Old," which traveled to the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and "Exhibition of Australian Contemporary Art," which focused on traditional and urban Australian indigenous art and toured to Vienna and St. Petersburg. "Sydney 2000 Olympic Design of the New Millennium," discussed in this article, was presented in 1999 at the Royal Institute of British Architects' London headquarters as part of "Reaching the World."

(2.) The artistic director of the Olympic Arts Festival was Leo Schofield, veteran director of many Sydney and Melbourne international festivals. Karilyn Brown was programs director for both the performing and visual-arts programs. For the most part, the city's museums and public institutions worked independently to conceive exhibitions and submit proposals to the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG), from which approved shows received marketing and promotion support. The Sydney Morning Herald, together with the City of Sydney, was a principal sponsor of the Olympic arts programs.