For some,
art and sport, like oil and water, don't mix. "Maybe it goes back to the schoolyard,"
says Paul Costantoura, author of the recent Australia Council report Australians
and the Arts. "There were sporting types and there were non-sporting types."
But Costantoura uncovered a surprising degree of overlap. Of those surveyed,
78% agreed that "people can enjoy the arts in the same way that they enjoy sport."
While followers of Shakespeare or Shirvington might beg to differ, both arenas
offer audiences a primal ritual, says Costantoura: "It's the vicarious struggle
of the hero. Will they succeed or will they fail?"
During the
Sydney Games, Leo Schofield is hoping for some crossover curiosity. As maestro
of the Olympic Arts Festival, which opens this week, he has brought some 4,000
artists from around the globe to compete for attention over the next six weeks.
In founding the modern Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin sought to recreate ancient
Olympia, when "letters and the arts were always harmoniously combined with sport."
But after his Pentathlon of the Muses was abandoned in 1948, Olympic arts have
often been sidelined by sport. "Whatever festival you mount, it will only ever
be a pendant event to what is, after all, the biggest festival in the world--the
Olympic Games," Schofield says.
To help steal
some of that thunder, the former advertising man is starting cultural proceedings
a month early, and making the program as loud and large-scale as possible. If
Mahler's choral Symphony No. 8 for a thousand voices at the SuperDome on Aug.
19 doesn't get attention, nothing will. "It will celebrate both things," says
Schofield. "The merger of sport and art."
In the ancient
Panhellenic Games, the two were as tightly bound as a winner's laurel wreath.
At Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, "1,000 Years of the Olympic Games: Treasures
of Ancient Greece" reminds us that where bull leaping and chariot racing have
fallen from favor, art has endured.
"The athletic
body, the perfect human body, has formed the basis of the study of art for centuries,"
says Rachel Kent, a curator at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. With "Sporting
Life," the MCA's Olympic offering, Kent explores how sport has seeped into the
contemporary consciousness: photos of gym junkies show how identity can be constructed,
while a video of a university football team poses the question, "Are stadiums
museums?" Nearby, in a room of trophies gathered from everyday Sydneysiders,
sport becomes art and art becomes sport.
When the Olympic
torch bobs up the Opera House steps on Games eve, the two will blur even more.
Schofield, for one, doesn't see why the Olympic ideals of "faster, higher, stronger"
can't also apply to the arts: "We can measure our performance against the world's
best practice, our companies against other companies, just as athletes measure
themselves against competitors from other countries." Let the arts begin. n
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