June 19, 2005
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Tim Laun
From Tim Laun’s Web site, a rendering of his projected Brett Favre cyclorama.
June 19, 2005
Ball in Flight and Other Jock Art
By WARREN ST. JOHN
LAST Sunday, Tim Laun crouched down behind his Jugs Football Machine, a large blue metal tripod with two whirling white tires on top, and loaded a National Football League-size Wilson ball into the breach. With a single swift motion and sudden thwap, the ball was arcing over the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens: a perfect imitation of the trajectory of an N.F.L. punt. Four and a half seconds later, the ball thudded onto a square of freshly sodded grass painted with hash marks, like a swatch from a football field, as a group of neighborhood kids watched in perplexed wonder.
“I love seeing that perfect arc and perfect spiral,” Mr. Laun said a little dreamily, as he loaded another Wilson into the machine.
Though the act of firing footballs with a Jugs machine takes place routinely on the practice fields of America as a way of training punt returners, his project is not a mundane part of preseason practice. To hear Mr. Laun, a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan from Wisconsin and an adjunct professor of art at Hunter College, tell it, it is a work of art: one with a specific title: “Hang Time.” As part of an exhibition called “Sport” at the sculpture park, Mr. Laun is firing football after football into the blue sky with the Empire State Building and the East River in the background. Those willing to sign a waiver can attempt to catch the machine-generated punts. But if no one is around, Mr. Laun is content to fire his footballs to no one at all.
“It’s that suspended moment in the game when no one can touch the ball,” Mr. Laun said as another ball sailed skyward. “And that person waiting and looking for the ball, they look like the depictions of rapture in Renaissance paintings.”
Mr. Laun, who happens to bear a striking resemblance to his hero, Brett Favre, the Packers quarterback, is a member of a little-known but growing band of artists who take their inspiration from sports: some to comment critically on the strange, at times perverse, hold sports have over the modern psyche, others to celebrate the beauty of the body in motion and still others to explore the emotional intricacies that make spectator sports fascinating to fans.
“Most of the sports images you see are about glorification: there’s no irony,” said Ron Baron, a sculptor whose 31-foot-tall “Excavation 1.2 SOC: A Monument for the Weekend Warrior” stands at the center of the park and resembles an archaeological site full of old discarded trophies and sports equipment. “This is not about putting sports figures on pedestals.”
Some sports artists merely incorporate the imagery of sport into their work, while others create elaborate performance pieces that resemble sporting events as much as art. At the sculpture park, for example, next to a Claes Oldenburg-style 6-foot-by-5-foot version of an athletic cup protector, is a pole stacked with 35-pound weights. Its artist, Lee Walton, buys a weight every few days at a Modell’s sporting goods store on the Upper East Side, walks for two hours across the Queensboro Bridge and through Queens, then slips the weight onto the pole. Mr. Walton has made 20 trips. He plans to make 48 in all before the exhibition ends, when the weights should be stacked pole-high.
The work, titled simply “Stacked,” is about what Mr. Walton called the fine line between dedication and absurdity that many athletes walk in their training. “Think of like a shot-putter who spends his whole life – 15 or 20 years – practicing to throw a steel ball,” Mr. Walton said. “For what? Knowing that it could all be done in one trip with a truck gives the walk more meaning.”
Artists have been interested in sports at least since the discus throwers of ancient Greece, and modernist painters were fascinated by the fluid motion of bicycles in a velodrome. But today’s artists are working in a world where, because of photography and television, images of athletes in action are ubiquitous to the point of cliché. On some level, said Alyson Baker, the executive director of Socrates Sculpture Park and the curator of “Sport,” sports artists are trying to find ways to view sports with fresh eyes.
She said Mr. Laun’s punting piece, for example, was about removing many layers – commentary, TeleStrators and instant replay – between the viewer and the game.
Ms. Baker said that when she put out a call for proposals, she expected more emphasis on extreme sports. Instead, she said, “almost all the works had a nostalgic sense to them.”
Only one piece in the show – an elaborate contraption called “Terrain Park, Featuring Backside 180″ by Nicholas Arbatsky, which resembles a snowboard half-pipe – is inspired by extreme sports. Mr. Arbatsky, an avid snowboarder, plans to take a truckload of snow to the sculpture park, which is at Broadway and Vernon Boulevard on the East River, on July 30 and to let snowboarders jump off his sculpture.
Many of the artists in the “Sport” exhibition are athletes and embody a kind of oxymoron: the jock artist. Mr. Walton, 31, grew up in the Bay Area in California in a family obsessed with sports. “We never went to a museum,” he said. He was recruited to play college baseball at Sonoma State University.
From an early age, though, he was obsessed with drawing. One night in 1999, when he was a graduate student in art, he found his passions at war. A World Series game came on as he was doing a drawing assignment. “I had always kind of kept them separate,” Mr. Walton said of sports and art. But that night, he said, he had an epiphany.
“Artists want to be different from everybody else,” he added. “I found that if I was myself – like a jock kind of guy – that was different.”
Mr. Walton’s projects are usually participatory. He created one called “One Shot a Day,” in which he played a round of golf by taking a single shot each day. The round took him five and half months to complete, and he documented the experience with video and photography, which he put on his Web site, www.LeeWalton.com.
“That project was basically an attempt to put as much pressure and weight on each shot as possible,” Mr. Walton said. “In golf they say play one shot at a time. I wanted to find a way to play my shot and then to have to live with that shot for 24 hours. A bad shot would affect my whole day.”
DURING the National Basketball Association season he engaged in a free-throw-shooting contest with Shaquille O’Neal of the Miami Heat, who is notoriously bad at free throws. To hone his form, Mr. Walton availed himself of a free-throw coach who once advised O’Neal, and for every shot O’Neal took in a real game, Mr. Walton took one wherever he happened to be – in local gyms or playgrounds – and then posted a video of his efforts on his Web site. Though he led O’Neal for the early part of the season, Mr. Walton went down to the N.B.A. star 350 to 342, out of 756 free throws.
The obvious rub for sports artists is figuring out a way to finance their work, much less to make a living, since their performance-oriented projects are not usually salable. Mr. Laun gets by with a job overseeing Hunter College’s art studios on the West Side, and his “Hang Time” was in doubt for some time as he scrounged up the $2,000 to buy a Jugs Football Machine. “I don’t have a track record of selling a lot of work,” he said.
Occasionally opportunities for commissioned work come along. Mr. Laun was asked to redesign his high school mascot. (The job was worth $50.) Mr. Baron, the sculptor who created “A Monument for the Weekend Warrior,” received a commission to build two 16-foot-diameter O’s out of 7,000 discarded plastic trophies for Autzen Stadium at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
“The piece is made of trophies that at one point had a lot of personal value,” Mr. Baron said, adding that he hopes it challenges viewers to ask themselves, “Why does this thing no longer have value?”
Perhaps the most ambitious piece by a sports artist – the equivalent of Christo’s “Gates” – is a project planned by Mr. Laun, called “The Favre Era Video Cyclorama,” which would be a circular installation of over 200 televisions, each showing a game from the Green Bay quarterback’s career. Viewers would walk into the installation wearing wireless headsets, which could be dialed to the audio for each game.
Mr. Laun said that if he has his way, the games will be shown with commercials to replicate the experience of watching them in real time. He estimates the project might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – money he does not yet have – and says the work will be about the collective relationship between fans of the same team.
“You spend 15 years watching those games,” Mr. Laun said. “How much ownership of that experience do you have as a fan?”
Ownership occasionally complicates the work of sports artists, as Mr. Laun learned when his art gallery, Parker’s Box in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, included computer renderings of the Favre cyclorama in a show of his work. (The images can be seen at www.FavreEra.net, where his schedule for his punting project also appears.) Mr. Laun had hoped the show might lead to financing for his project, but instead it earned him a call from James Cook, Mr. Favre’s agent, who objected to unauthorized use of his client’s image.
Mr. Laun considered the phone call depressing because of what it said about the corporatization of sports, but he said his main fear was of upsetting Mr. Favre.
“My first thought was to be embarrassed for disturbing his ecosystem,” Mr. Laun said.
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