Agiant rubber Pilates ball soared high in the air at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, while below it, actors and artists traded body-checks and elbow jabs.
A scrum of a dozen were playing a freeform sport called circle rules football. The point of the game — 30 percent soccer, 20 percent rugby, the rest pure Dada — was to pound the ball through a single, soccer-style goal that sat, like an object of Druidic devotion, at the center of a ring of orange pylons.
One player punched the ball with his fist. Hey, hands on that guy! Wait, hands are allowed. So are shins, chests, forearms and — ouch — faces, apparently.
As the match raged on last Sunday, players dribbled the giant ball awkwardly on the turf as if it were a basketball borrowed from Claes Oldenburg’s garage. At one point, the goalie for each team wrestled each other to the turf Greco-Roman style beneath the crossbar, while a player on the wing swatted the huge ball violently onto a blanket far from the field of play, where a young couple were sunning themselves with their toddler son. Out of bounds!
Wait, there are no boundaries.
It’s art, get it?
Greg Manley, a 24-year-old actor who lives in Brooklyn, created circle rules football three years ago as an experimental theater project at New York University. Since then, the game has inspired a plan for a league of its own and has been played in more than eight cities around the country, including Puerto Rico, and in Prague.
The game is also one of a growing number of highly conceptualized art-sports that have been invented in recent years by young artists and promoted on YouTube and other Web sites. These sports, like vikingball, class-conscious kickball and straightjacket softball, are supposed to be competitive games, but also art.
Circle rules football, for instance, is intended to highlight the common thread between improvisational theater and athletics, an improvisational performance in its own right. “Everything inherent in theater is inherent in sports,” Manley said. “Drama is conflict, and there’s no better conflict than the Super Bowl.”
Like Manley, many artists say their absurdist sports are an outgrowth of the contemporary art-world trend toward participatory art, which is intended to break down walls between artist and audience. But beyond the high-mindedness, the skinny-armed aesthetes also seem to be on a personal mission to reclaim sports from the bull-necked athletes of their youth.
Sure, like other young ironists who wear vintage 1980s T-shirts and listen to Of Montreal, the adherents of art-sports could just play dodgeball and kickball on weekends. But by creating their own games, they are making a statement that sports can be something different in this steroid-pumped, travel-team era — namely, fun.
“It isn’t about proving yourself,” said Scott Peterson, a 23-year-old actor, of circle rules football. “It’s about having fun, playing — both in terms of ‘a play,’ and ‘playing.’”
Matthew Slaats, of Staatsburg, New York, conceived “1 v 1,” an alternate-universe form of one-on-one basketball involving a paddle-wheel and ice tongs. Michael Coolidge, a 31-year-old Canadian artist, is the Abner Doubleday of mini-bowl transformodrome, basically bocce ball crossed with mini-golf. Abby Manock, a Brooklyn performance artist, created bag tag, a relay where competitors change into costumes — polar bear, bag lady — as they race to scoop detritus like milk cartons or old stuffed animals into color-coordinated trash bins.
OK, maybe these games are more performance art than sport. But to be fair, in 1891, when James Naismith divided 18 snowbound Massachusetts students into opposing teams and instructed them to toss a soccer ball into peach baskets nailed on opposite walls, the first game of “basket ball” must have looked pretty Duchampian, too.
With much contemporary art leaving regular folk baffled, art-sports can be a way to reach out to the masses, said Anne Elizabeth Moore, a conceptual artist and writer in Chicago. In January, Moore organized a mock-Olympics called the Unlympics, featuring a dozen invented sports like stop, drop and roll and duration jump-roping, which drew hundreds of participants (the “summer games” are scheduled for July).
These sports, she said, were inspired in part by the art movement social practice, in which audience participation — highlighting personal interaction and community involvement — is considered a medium in its own right. “So much of art has been moving in the tech direction,” Moore said. “I just feel like that is separating people.”
Sports, of course, are often perceived as too base a subject for fine art — apologies to LeRoy Neiman. Still, the marriage of the two has a rich tradition, from Greek depictions of the pentathlon in black-figure vase paintings to Jeff Koons’ basketballs floating in a fish tank.
In recent years, sports have been popping up in many forms of serious art, like the Berlin filmmaker Harun Farocki’s 12-channel video installation on World Cup soccer or the American photographer Hank Willis Thomas’ manipulated images exploring sports and race. Last year, at the Tate Modern in London, artists of the Fluxus movement, a do-it-yourself aesthetic, held the Fluxolympiad — featuring the balloon shot put, the flipper race and soccer played on stilts.
In many ways, it’s easy to imagine that these sports aren’t meant to attract the masses, but alienate them.
When artists become interested in sport, “they become terribly anxious that they could be confused with the quote-unquote normal fans,” said Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University and author of In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Belknap Press, 2006). “So intellectuals, when they play games, they cannot just play normal games. It has to be intellectualized.”
And the arcane games also help shut out the high school lettermen. Manley, who gave up soccer and football for theater in high school, said that making up your own sport leveled the playing field — no one knows the game better than you do — something not possible if artists tried to square off in basketball against people who had been playing for the last 15 years. “We’ve been out of practice awhile,” he said.
Last Sunday in Prospect Park, about 183m from the circle rules football match, Tom Russotti, a Brooklyn artist, was sweating away with about 20 other players in a game of his own invention, whiffle hurling.
Russotti, 31, the founder of what he calls the Institute for Aesthletics, invented a version of the Irish sport of hurling that uses whiffle ball bats instead of traditional wooden hurleys. The sport has been played since 2005 in New York, California, Chicago, and once, on a slag heap outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
While the game, at first blush, looked like lacrosse for sociopathic 9-year-olds, whiffle hurling, Russotti said, constitutes art because its smirky costumes (ruffled collars, Indian dhotis) and team names (St Brendan’s Reformatory for Incorrigible Self-Knowing) subvert the conventions of sportsdom. And by throwing artists and stockbrokers on the same field, he said, both are forced to explore new identities.
“If you go to a gallery show, there will be the artist in the corner and the rich financier people, but they don’t have to deal with each other,” he said. In a game, “their personalities come out really quickly.”
He is surprised by how Type-A stock traders enthusiastically tap their inner surrealist and hit the field in uniforms with sombreros or Pele-era short shorts. Conversely, mild-mannered artists can turn cutthroat. One player, an animation artist, is “the prototypical vegetarian Williamsburg hipster,” Russotti said, “but when you put him out on the field, he goes berserk.”
As players swung their bats like medieval maces, the air filled with the thwack of plastic on plastic, and plastic on flesh. Unlike most art, the risks in art-sports are physical, not emotional, said one participant, Martha Clippinger, 26, a painter and sculptor in Brooklyn.
Still, there are limits. “With no health care,” she added, “I’m being a little more careful with my dives these days.”
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