Art goes sports-mad

The Herald Sun, 16 July, 2008

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With a big new sports-art prize and three shows of sports-related photos, Melbourne is in the grip of a sporting art frenzy, writes Mischa Merz

ART and sport are so often in opposing corners, but a new $100,000 prize has brought them together. Basil Sellers, a businessman and sports fanatic, is the creator of the new art prize with a sporting theme.

Described as the"turnaround king", he is well known for breathing life into ailing companies.

He is also a former basketballer, owner of the Newcastle basketball team and longtime art collector and sports philanthropist.

The finalists vying for the prize will appear at Melbourne University's Ian Potter Museum next month."There'll be colour and movement but also history, politics, humour and controversy," says prize judge Chris McAuliffe, who is also director of the Ian Potter Museum.

Among the 16 short-listed artists selected from 355 entries are three who work in the same art school, the Victorian College of the Arts, and jokingly remind one another of the pending showdown.

Kate Daw, whose collaboration with Stewart Russell about sprinter Peter Norman, works with Richard Lewer, another short-listed artist.

Painter Jon Cattapan was once Lewer's post-graduate supervisor at VCA and is now a colleague of both.

Cattapan is perhaps the seasoned veteran of the group, at least when it comes to art.

He has been exhibiting for 30 years, was the subject of a major retrospective last year and this month a book about him Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories will be published by Miegunyah Press.

THE 52-year-old painter is relaxed about the competition. He has submitted three paintings that consider different aspects of Australian rules football, from the humble paddock to the corporate arena.

A lifelong St Kilda supporter, the artist goes to games every week and has recently been trying to teach his six-year-old son how to kick a football.

He says art and sport are similar in the way that an artist has to take"body blows" during career lows and keep on going. Both also have a certain element of creativity and self-absorption.

He admits, though, that they're seen as a strange mix, adding:"A lot of my artist friends have been fairly bemused that I've launched into this."

Though they clearly depict sporting grounds, players and spectators, Cattapan's paintings are based on themes he has been exploring for many years about reconciling big ideas with personal ones."I thought I could use AFL footy as a metaphor for things that move from local to global, things that are about the community and the personal and the communal."These kinds of ideas have been of interest to me for some time in my work anyway," he says.

Cattapan has used images taken from his mobile phone, others from his high-school yearbook as well as his two children perched on his car bonnet watching a game at the Peanut Farm oval in St Kilda."There's a kind of nostalgia for the pure simple pleasure of just running on an oval in a paddock. And there is also some kind of parallel to being an artist."For me, as I've become a little bit older, and particularly the space I'm in at the moment where I'm very busy as an artist, there's a nostalgia for a much simpler time when it was just the purity of simply wanting to try to make a picture as opposed to being within the art world."

Though Cattapan places himself outside the game, Richard Lewer likes to get his hands dirty. The 38-year-old New Zealander is sport-obsessed and relentlessly competitive. His work is intense and autobiographical.

His past work has involved training as a woodchopper, having a boxing fight in a gallery and making work that documents his weekly table tennis games with friends. For the Sellers Prize, Lewer has done three works documenting these activities etched in white on green billiard table felt.

He has also included a piece about his childhood rugby games with his father watching from the sideline."The works are very much about relationships," says Lewer, who is on the social club committee of the Northside Boxing Gym, the subject of one of the works. He trains there three times a week."The committee is also about friendship, loyalty and a shared commitment to the wellbeing and longevity of the gym," he says."My work's always been really physical and has always taken a masculine approach. At art school I was always a bit apologetic about that. Most artists are repelled by sport, but there are all these parallels between sport and art," he says.

Despite his competitive nature, Lewer still feels strange competing for a prize with other artists because they're not really running in the same race."I'm hugely competitive. I'll play to win, but in the end I don't care who wins. I'm not going to tear myself up about it."

The other finalist, Kate Daw, who runs the program in which Lewer teaches, recently sent him an email about the Sellers prize saying:"May the best woman win."

But Lewer points out that she has a man on her own team.

Daw and Scottish-born Stewart Russell have chosen a historic sporting event. Their work, titled A simple act, celebrates Australian sprinter Peter Norman's 1968 anti-racism stance at the Mexico Olympics.

Norman, who came second in the 200m final, wore the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights in support of his fellow competitors, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their fists on the podium.

All three athletes found their careers crashed after their stand.

Daw and Russell interviewed Norman, who died in 2006, and thoroughly researched the event and the climate of the times.

They have created a multi-discipline installation, including full-colour silk screen prints on fabric, printed posters of the historic act, an embroidered version of the badge, text from their research and interviews as well as several paintings."What I find fascinating about this whole case is that generally in Australian culture we love to absolutely flaunt our sporting prowess," Daw says."If we have anyone who's broken a world record or done anything extraordinary, we know who these people are.

"But after it all happened, Peter's athletic career was shut down by the authorities because it was seen as a shameful act," Daw says.

Basil Sellers Art Prize. Winner announced July 31. Ian Potter Museum of Art, Swanston St, Parkville, Aug 1-Oct 26, Tue-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat, Sun noon- 5pm.