WORKSHOP FIVE - Museumslabor-Sport und Kunst - Sport and Art - Ruairí O'Brien

Museumslabor

Report V

On the 21st of June I was asked to give an extra workshop for a group of young teenagers attending a special sport school. It just so happened that on this day a visit from a very important person to the room which we were using for the "Museumslabor" was also planned.
So we had to move to another location in the museum building for what was to be the fifth workshop in the series. This having to deal with quite a different atmosphere as the new space was actually a lecture hall. The room was neutral and cool, an architecture that did not speak to you. It expressed very little of the special “Castle” feeling but perhaps it is good for looking at slide show lectures.
I decided to work with this small “irritation” and see how I could use it to open up a possible path of communication between myself and the boys and girls about to arrive.
The Room was nearly a square with no windows; the white space had a black wooden bank in front of the area where the screen onto which a beamer could be played. In front of the lecture bank where 9 rows of black wooden seats with stainless steel frame’s which were interlocked.
It was quite a high ceiling. At the back were more chairs stacked upon each other.
I decide to wait outside and watch the arrival of the “Teens” from the staircase, thus I could access who’s who and what’s what.
Up they came, a long drawn out group with bags, rucksacks and coats, groups of 2 and 3, a couple of loners, larger groups of 6 and 7 and then a straggler or two, the teacher at the rear.
As I was standing offside I could let them enter the room without them noticing that I was watching their moves, already trying to analyse their style, their mood, their vibes, their character.
I waited.
I went into the space.
Yes as I had a imagined the group had settled in the chairs in the form with which they had climbed the staircase only the seating order was a little different. A large group of 7 sat at the front all boys, behind two empty rows then on the side a group of 3 behind them a pair followed by a loner followed by two empty rows and then a larger group of 6 all girls.
I decided to make the first move with this theme.
"Good morning !"….lets analyse the groups interaction with the space…a good subject….what could that have to do with the type of sport they have chosen to pursue? I asked them to one by one come up to the front and write their name and their sport on the laptop which was connected to the overhead beamer.
Very interesting, team sports and individual sports, we all know the “loneliness of the long distance runner”

The idea that artists have an easy relaxed life might be a cliché that pleases but the reality is truly completely different. Artists like sports men and women spend many lonely hours perfecting their art, without success and recognition their work is often badly paid. Often “artists” and I use the general term which could include writers, painters, musicians, just to mention a few “Classical forms of expression” among the traditional art forms, are “competing among their fellow contemporaries for their place in the world. Success and recognition comes with being discovered. Many a sportsman has had the talent but did not get the right breaks. Today managers or agents for sport and galleries for artist play a very important role in the networking of a young artist or sportsman or woman. Big money is involved and being in the right place at the right moment or knowing the right people can make the difference. From time to time talents like Maradona or Picasso appear and rise above all “unnecessary” man made political structures or schools of thought. For the rest who have been given the “Hand of God” the way is long and hard. The great advantage of many artists over sportsmen and women is that their development and their work can be spread over an entire lifetime free of the physical demise. Of course this is often also only partly true as “artists” require not just mental strength but also great physical strength to achieve their goals, this is not always obvious to the human untrained eye but it is always there. Some artist bundle this power and have short bursts of activity and production which comes and goes almost sprinter like others extend over their whole life a steady marathon like production. Some are so explosive that they burn out after a short time never again being able to reach the summit they once so easily conquered. Today there are also so many new forms of sport and art that are specialist areas for example graffiti, computer art or snowboarding, areas that have a small public interest, dancers, chess players, were does art stop and handcraft begin…..football as an art form, a dancing expression as spatial thinking, chess, installations in space. Where does sport and art meet? In architecture one has to understand space, feel space, and imagine space. A footballer must also be able to see space, think in triangles, feel geometry as a dancer does, take procession of the room between his opponent, create new rooms of attack, corridors shifting, velocity of ball, speed of man, a vision, instinct, courageous action and ….these words can interchange to describe art or sport. A team trainer or football manager like an art collector has to understand his “art form” the "artists" available to create the perfect team or round off the perfect collection. Every player he buys or artwork he acquires changes the collection or team and interacts with the other “pieces” to open up new possibilities of understanding or beauty or success. With these thoughts we played with the idea of what a museum does, how a collector thinks to build a bridge to their own personal experience and the world that they knew. I asked them in between discussions to test the space of the room. I asked them to take procession of the room in the form of a small experiment. “stand up and re order the seats so that we can talk to each other in a more effective way… in a ”beautiful” way, In Italy the call football “The beautiful game”. They rearranged as a team the seats in an oval form. We discussed this form…it was not quite symmetric; there is a lot of symmetry in Gymnastics I said lets try again and please look at the floor tiles this time……This time the form achieved was symmetric and fitted perfectly in the grid of the flooring. I then did a spatial experiment with their assistance, working with chairs and the pupils as communication installation, I set single chairs with a school boy or girl into the space reacting, improvising with the result I set the next chair and pupil into the space as a reaction to the last one, continuing with this “Method” I filled the space with little communication islands. I then asked them to talk about their individual sports to tell and ask each other across the islands about sport. This I recorded as I moved through the space. We went into the exhibition and looked at the work, talked about space and light, about the “worth” of the work exhibited. We looked at a painting “the rugby players”. Back in the “lecture” room I repeated the experiment asking the pupils to change chairs and partners and this time to talk about the exhibition….to talk about art! Two communication installations one titled “Sport in Space” and the other “Art in Space” were achieved. We said good bye and I promised to send the accompanying teacher the recordings to discuss further. Sport and art when looked at together are all about the expression of human existence.