Statement:

Sport and art share many attributes, probably best articulated by the language with which we comment on them. Words like ‘excellence,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘passion,’ ‘discipline,’ ‘practice,’ ‘strength,’ ‘triumph,’ and ‘performance’ are as comfortable in art criticism as they are in sports commentary. While it is possible to regard the two activities as inherently similar (for example, they both achieve no practical outcome, they both elicit strong psychological affect from participants and viewers, and they both loosely fall under the umbrella of entertainment), a more specific comparison of common traits could be necessary to tease out their similarities and differences. To do so, this work uses the hand gestures with which umpires communicate the rules that engender the game as content for a performance, a practice that relies on governing rules and their embodiment to give rise to the work and the artist’s ideas. As a tongue in cheek reference to the austerity of much performance art and the seriousness with which many of us engage with sport, particularly the way that both activities consume and seduce us, various umpire’s gestures are performed on video to music as an absurd burlesque dance routine. In this manner, the work pokes fun at the seriousness with which we take ourselves and our pastimes, particularly given the fact that when viewed from different or distanced perspectives most, if not all, things make equally little sense.