Seen Report: Fine art, fast balls. Are sport and art that different?

The galleries are empty. The Out Of Offices are set. The flow of stories and tips has turned away from art and towards holiday destinations and summer reading lists. At this time of year there’s seemingly nothing the art world would rather do than shut up shop and slink off to southern Europe in search of a little sun, sea and perhaps a couple of new, wealthy clients. If you’re looking for entertainment, then now is the time to look outside the art world.

At this time of the year, my attention turns to sport. The past few weeks I’ve spent my evenings watching the Euros and catching up on Wimbledon. Each day my inbox is flooded with newsletters rounding up the latest developments in the Tour de France and the Test cricket. Recently I caught myself scrolling through baseball accounts on Instagram. I put it down to a moment of madness. I’ve even thought about starting my own running club. And then of course there’s the big event, the Paris Olympics.

Not everyone shares my point of view. When I asked one gallerist for his opinion on art and sport, his reply was simple, “abolish sports!” Sadly, this idea that the two shouldn’t – in fact, can’t – mix seems surprisingly common. I think this is msitaken, the two ends of the art nerd – sport jock spectrum are closer than ever. You can put part of this down to both groups’ shared love of gathering stats and arguing over decimal place differences, whether that’s in batting averages or auction prices. You can also see it when athletes talk about their chosen sports in terms of art. They know there’s a difference between a winning move and a beautiful move: England and Spain both made it to the final of the Euros, but everyone agreed that Spain played better, more beautiful, football; in tennis, the double-handed backhand is a stronger, faster shot, but the one-handed backhand is more elegant and makes for a better press photo.

At the same time, artists have gotten into the game, making works that combine fine art and fast balls. In 2016, Asad Raza turned the interior of Milan’s deconsecrated church of San Paolo Converso into a working tennis court. In 2018, Elmgreen and Dragset turned the interior of Whitechapel Gallery into a perfect facsimile of a disused swimming pool and a few years later they made Berlin’s König Gallery into a full-size tennis court. Since 2019, the Instagram account Art But Make It Sports has been noting the strange similarities between the two.

Two of my favourite works of recent years have been sports-related. Last year in London, Edel Assanti held Marcin Dudek’s magnificent exhibition ‘NEOPLAN’, which saw the Czech artist install a destroyed fan bus in the gallery space. He topped it off with a launch night performance in which he ran around the room, ‘painting’ the walls with orange pyrotechnics. A hooligan’s fantasy realised in a white cube. It’s now on show in ‘EKIPA’ at the Museum Ostwall, Dortmund. There’s a similarly dark story told in Matthew Barney’s 2023 work, SECONDARY, a cinematic take on the incident that left New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley paralysed from the neck down. It’s currently on show at five locations around the world, including Sadie Coles HQ, London and Fondation Cartier, Paris.

Just last week, I was at the launch of Sherbet Green’s new show ‘In Contiguity’. I bent down to pick up a beer from the ice bucket and noticed vinyl lines all over the floor. Gallerist Mazzy-Mae Green explained it’s a temporary installation by Juliette Lena Hager. She’s taken the lines of tennis, football, basketball courts and applied them, almost at random, over the floor of the gallery. I saw it as a physical manifestation of the unwritten rules of the art gallery: where to stand, how to move, and what’s allowed and disallowed.

I think that the art world can learn a lot from sports. Thankfully, I’m not entirely alone. Another gallerist I spoke to said that mountain climbing taught her to be “comfortable being uncomfortable,” a valuable skill when starting up a new project space. She also compared the “slow and steady incremental improvements” in weightlifting to a career in the arts. “Same story for most sports, right? Keep going back to it, keep making small improvements.”

So this is my call for artists to take up sports. Pick up a ball, a racquet, your swimming goggles or your running shoes and go and try something new. It’ll teach you to think quickly, to respond with accuracy, and to build small moves into a long-term strategy. It’ll teach you to accept failure and rejection (all too common in art) and how to respond to that. You won’t always hit the goal or get the drop on your opponent, but if you save your energy you can pull something out of the bag later. If nothing else, taking up a sport will provide you with a welcome break when creative block strikes, and it’ll get you out of the studio and into the fresh air. Seriously, all those paint fumes can’t be good for your lungs.

 

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