PROTEIN

Heavy metal enthusiast and graphic artist Štěpán Adámek from Prague preferably sees himself in a healthy manly profession: the butcher.
Meat proteins are badly needed when practising sports.
Sports seem to be another of Adámek's healthy interests
... although.


Štěpán Adámek, 'Self Portrait'

Štěpán Adámek, 'Untitled'

Štěpán Adámek, 'Kozel' (trans. 'Billy Goat')

Štěpán Adámek, 'Babice' (trans. 'Old Woman')

BOOMERANG EFFECT

The essence of recycling is that what you throw out comes back to you to be used again.

The sports equipment ultimately embodying this is of course the boomerang, famous for naming a theory of reactance.

German artist Wolf von Kries parcelled and stamped a handmade boomerang and sent it off to Australia to an non-existant address. After a while the parcel was returned to his own address.



Wolf von Kries, 'Boomerang' (2002)

3D B-BALL

Berlin artist Angela Lubic created a graphical 3-dimensional basketball court projected on the outer wall of a school building. 3 basketball hoops are attached within the graphics. A pedestrian zone is transformed in a recreational zone for sport and exercise

The entangled lines of the courts are very disorientating and with a third hoop it seems new rules are in order to play the game.







Angela Lubic, 'Jump and Win' (2010)

KÖRPERKULTUR

The fitness of the human body and art have a lifelong relationship. The modernists of the Bauhaus were aware of that. Mandatory in the education program of the Dessau arts & crafts institute was physical exercise.



László Moholy-Nagy, 'Sport Makes Appetite' (1927)



Oskar Schlemmer, 'Mann' (1928)



T. Lux Feininger, 'Sport Am Bauhaus' (1928)

RAUSS!!!

In his work "A.C. Forniture Sud" (1991) Maurizio Cattelan assembled a football team of Senegalese immigrant workers living in Italy. The work is a comment on both every Italian boy's dream as well as social and political realities professional sports in Italy and the rest of Europe have to deal with.

NO PAIN, NO DUANE

Duane Hanson - 'Jogger' (1983) mixed media - Saatchi Gallery

A Gentleman's Game

The discussion about sport and society goes back centuries.
In antique philosophy health of mind and body were contected.
In the middle ages monks, who invented many of the forerunners of nowadays popular sports like tennis and baseball, were frowned upon as their spiritual life surely sufferd from playing games.
Ball games were all the rage in the European cities at least since the 15th century. In the Netherlands playing ball games was prohibited and abandoned to beyond the city walls due to too many inconveniences caused like smashed glass windows and over run pedestrians. Eventually halls and enclosed courts were built within the cities to accomodate the sportsman.
It seems, viewing pictures from that age, that ball sports were rather a gentleman's games.
In this day and age the social debate on sports focusses mainly on the use of drugs, but also on concerns about fans/hooligans and superstardom: 'show me the money!'.