An invitation from architect Will Alsop to design a multi-purpose building
of 6 floors or more for inclusion in Italian architectural magazine, L’Arca,
for the February 2010 issue.
www.arcadata.com

Donald Smith

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings > Donald Smith: The Fifth Quarter Arts Club incorporating the Life Room.Org

Stephen Farthing RA

Donkey; Luxor
2009
Photo by Stephen Farthing 



Madonna; the back story
oil on canvas
2009




Easel; Louvre
2009
Photo by Stephen Farthing

My memory as a student, of drawing in the life room, is of feeling it was all about working my way towards an image, not of having one in mind that I needed to put down, but of knowing neither how I should draw, nor what the drawing should look like.

My aim as I see it today was to sift information and try to make sense of what was first before me in three dimensions, then put it on the page as two.

I now see drawing as a translation process that is not absolute but provisional, for me It’s the speculative nature of the thinking behind drawing, that makes drawing “drawing“. The materials and subject matter, I suspect don’t really matter, they tend to look after themselves. So when I think about the life room I don’t get hung up on pencils and paper and the naked human form, I think first about a place where I might start or finish the day, a rehearsal space where it would be nice to go and work for an hour or so.

A long time after I formally finished being a student I taught for four years at an academy. Their mission placed the craft of making hand-made images of the human figure at the centre of the day. At that academy students dressed in T-shirts and jeans , surrounded by plaster casts, seated on donkeys and standing at easels (from the Dutch word ezel, meaning “ass”) drew in informal rings around a naked subject.

From the managements point of view life models were expensive, unfortunately necessary and generally unreliable casual workers, who, if they were any good probably wouldn’t be around for very long.

I was told several times that before her career really took off Madonna had been a model at this academy. At first I would respond saying “Do we have a drawing of her from those days?” thinking we could sell it, nothing ever emerged, later I took to saying“ I’ve been told Sean Connery was a model at Edinburgh College of Art.”

The plaster casts unlike the models stayed still and got dusty, unless that is ,they were moved, then cracks appeared and eventually bits usually fell off. This wear and tear didn’t really matter, as even as imperfect replicas of the past they made visitors feel secure. They weren’t just good, they were very good, they generated neither health nor safety issues, they were non-judgemental members of a very demanding community. They were always there and ready for work, requiring neither comfort breaks nor remuneration, they were never too hot or cold, they were in fact perfect academicians.

In theory the students preferred warm flesh to cold casts, but in practice, standing before one or other at an easel, drawing board, paper and pencil in hand it became clear they felt less intimidated and more comfortable with their static, colourless, hairless already looking a bit-like-art before–you-start appearance. Twenty or so calcium shells stood around us all day everyday reminding us of classical taste, connoisseurship, collective ideas of perfection and finally at a practical level of how much easier it was to draw a reasonable good tonal image of a cast than to engage with living flesh.

If we step back from the Academy and remind ourselves that this is the present, we find ourselves in a world where there are very few plaster casts and life drawing classes and where the life model speaks of nostalgia not anatomy and the plaster cast to high camp not the classics.

What doesn’t change by either stepping back from the academy or through the passing of time is the degree to which the human figure remains centre stage in the visual arts.

Over the last quarter century, post Pollock, post abstraction we find Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovich, Vito Acconci, Mathew Barney, Joseph Beuys, and Chris Burden and that just the A’s and the B’s! all placing skin, fat, muscle, bones and the human presence at the centre of their work.

This said, When Vito Acconci was asked to recall his ambitions as a child he replied “ I thought in terms of either writing or art. I began as a writer, my background isn’t really art, it’s writing. Until I was around 27 or 28 I thought of myself as a writer. I never went into drawing, I don’t like the way that I draw. I don’t like anything that my hands produce but I like to think that I can form sentences, and that I have the start of an idea. ¹

The life room once serviced the assumption that if you spent enough time drawing something you would not only get better at drawing in general, but get to know that something better, the life room put the human figure centre stage.

Once the heart and lungs of every art school, it was the meeting place where students learned not just about drawing, but the history, theories and theology of art. The life room was not a performance space, it was a rehearsal space and just like the gymnasium it was designed to build not just physical but psychological strength and confidence.

The life room is no longer central in the education of visual artists. Today artists and designers still plan and rehearse, they write, draw, photograph and talk their way into projects, they still make sense in two dimensions of what they experience in time and space, they still produce provisional images as stepping stones to final resolutions.

What I suspect however is lost in space missing is a meeting and rehearsal space. A place were students immersed themselves simultaneously in learning, listening, looking and practice, a place that connected the art school interior to the world outside, and the past to the present and future.

The Life Room at Chelsea Space is a tentative proto-type, your feedback will help shape future Life Rooms.

¹ Designboom interview at the office of Vito Acconci in New York on may 21st, 2006

Stephen Farthing, Monday, 12 October 2009

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings > Stephen Farthing RA Madonna and the Donkey

Bodily Functions at Ancient Olympia: Socio-political Views of Athletic Nudity

Judith Waring

Ζηνὶ γενεθλίῳ: …
Ἀλκιμέδοντα δὲ πὰρ Κρόνου λόφῳ
θῆκεν Ὀλυμπιονίκαν.
ἦν δ᾽ ἐσορᾶν καλός, ἔργῳ τ᾽ οὐ κατὰ εἶδος ἐλέγχων

Zeus…
made Alcimedon an Olympic victor beside the hill of Kronos.
He was beautiful to look at, and his deeds did not belie his beauty

Pindar, Olympian 8.19-20, for Alcimedon of Aegina winner of the boys’ wrestling event 460 B.C.

Olympian ideals rest in the lap of the gods. ‘Excellence’ (arete) of the athletic body and of the body politic are the promulgated legacies of ‘demokratia‘. Ancient Olympia is, in a way, a metaphor for classical Greece – a statement on a (con)fusion of culture and politics. In troubled times the late fifth-century orator Lysias used the concept of Olympia to make the case for ‘democracy’ over ‘despotism’ in his panegyric speech Olympiakos. While as an ideal Olympia could provide a definition of a constructed panhellenic culture, yet the reality was more one of fiercely autonomous, often warring, city-states (poleis). But Olympia was exclusively Greek and conspicuously so. The place itself is situated in a naturally beautiful plain, watered by the river Alpheios, located in the north-western Peloponnese. Here from 776 B.C. to A.D. 393 athletic contests (gymnikoi agones) were held with male nudity displayed. In the end a charge of ‘paganism’ had the event closed down.

Olympia was considered the most prestigious of the four national athletics contests with the attribution of the (not quite local) hero Herakles as founder. His ‘Twelve Labours’ were depicted in semi-relief on metopes around Zeus’ temple, the main sanctuary. The fifth-century lyric poet Pindar wrote victory (epinician) odes to immortalise the winners. These poems were sometimes performed at the games, and more often, after the victor returned to his home city where he was feted and rewarded. Events took place beside the temple precinct and were open to free-born Greek males only, in two categories, men and boys. Women, slaves and non-Greeks were barred not only from competing but also from spectating. The programme which lasted for around 5 days was made up of running (various distances), throwing the spear (javelin), long jump, discus, wrestling (these 5 also combined as the pentathlon), boxing and the pankration, another type of pugilistic discipline in which anything was permissible except eye-gouging and biting. And finally races for horses and chariots and a running event in full armour.

Apart from the last two events, athletes competed nude. The fifth-century historian Thucydides stated that this was so while non-Greeks who in their own countries only practiced boxing and wrestling, did so in loin-cloths (Peloponnesian War 1.6.5). Nakedness as an identity is particular to the Greek athlete. But christianity and time collude to distort how to look at this nudity. One argument is that nudity was a purely pragmatic position, an appropriate ‘costume’ for exercise. The eighth-century B.C. athletes Orsippos and Akanthos have both been credited with being the first to run naked, and, of course, win. Perhaps it was also a way of viewing anatomically the ‘men only’ ethos of the contests. But that Olympian ideal of the naked and toned body, tanned from exercising outdoors was much more than competition. The athlete, as concept, was used extensively in the artistic programmes of sculpture and vase-painting. By contrast women did not venture beyond the threshold of the home. Modest virtue was made visible by clothing and in the appearance of pale skin (increased by use of cosmetics) and an un-toned, soft body. If a woman was other, she was, at very best, a prostitute. Until, that is, the fifth-century sculptor Praxiteles unveiled his Aphrodite of Knidos who had absolutely nothing to hide. The Knidians, renowned for their wine and medical school, adored her; unlike the islanders of Kos who, given first choice, had preferred her clothed sister.

Nudity and exercise, intrinsic to the state-sponsored education of young men (ephebes), defined in visual culture the oppositions of Greek/non-Greek, citizen/slave, male/female, adult/child. This had much to do with city-state politics and the demands of an army and a navy (triremes were powered by rowers) to defend and acquire territories. The fourth-century historian Xenophon recorded that in Sparta, the paradigm of a fully militarised city-state, good physical condition was officially regulated and frequent public ‘inspections’ of citizens’ bodies carried out by civil servants. Accordingly the socio-political ideologies of the athletic body were represented and fetishised in public art, particularly in free-standing figurative sculpture which had by the fifth century freed itself somewhat from the architectural. The ‘Discus-Thrower’, Diskobolos, (c.450 B.C.) by the sculptor Myron who worked mainly in bronze, has survived in several marble Roman copies: the athlete is crouched over, his throwing arm extended behind his body, at that critical moment of restraint before, with the concentrated power of his god-like physique, he uncoils to release the discus. Myron has been much eulogised, then and now, for his emphasis on the harmony and balance of the human form. And, maybe the discus-thrower is instinctively attractive to the gaze because of a divine perfection in his human physicality. The ‘Townley Diskobolos’ offers another narrative on how to look at the Olympian ideal. The head of this marble Roman copy had been restored ‘incorrectly’, that is, not as the ‘original’, nor indeed Myron’s bronze. The restorer replaced the ‘new’ head looking downwards rather than backwards towards the discus. He saw this, along with the collector Townley, as bettering the ‘ideal’.

Olympia and the other contests were the apogee of an athlete’s career, the big stage on which to perform. But the everyday reality of training was part of a broader programme of youth education. The local gymnasion (sports ground) had, at least, a running track and a palaestra, a building which housed changing facilities and was constructed around a sand-filled courtyard for wrestling. Olympia’s gymnasion is topographically typical, situated beyond the sanctuary walls and close to a stream. Evidence from Plato’s dialogues (in particular Charmides) together with an emphasis on the viewing and display of the nude male elicits a homoerotic charge to gymnasia as social spaces. Sports grounds, it seems, were venues for personal, sexualised relationships between an older man, ‘an admirer’ (erasta) and an adolescent boy, ‘the beloved’ (eromenos). This is ‘Greek Love’. The fifth-century sculptor Phidias, when already ostracised from Athens for impiety, inscribed the name of his eromenos on the little finger of his colossal, gold and ivory (chryselephantine) cult statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the seven ‘wonders’ of the ancient Mediterranean world; and at the statue’s feet was a relief of the boy putting on the olive crown of the victorious athlete.

Olympia and the Olympian ideal inscribed the political, the sacred and the personal on the body. But the body beautiful was invariably a manifestation of the needs of the body politic. What’s new?

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings > Judith Waring Bodily Functions at Ancient Olympia

23 digital drawings in 60 minutes using a Wacom Graphics Tablet

Bruce McLean

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings >Bruce McLean Gymposium: Drawing and Posing in the Life Room 13.11.09.

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings > A Quick Run Around the Ancient Site of Olympia – a snapshot

David Ferry

David Ferry Motorway Men 1979

Time:   1978-9 (but could be the present)

Place:   Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, The M1 and M6 Motorways, The 100 Club, the Marquee Club, The Greyhound, and other ‘New Wave’ music venues in London.

Scenario:   The art school life drawing class, a group of undergraduate fine art students, a nude life model, sometimes male, sometimes female, drawing boards, easels, donkeys, charcoal, putty rubbers, penknives, masking tape, paper and drawing pins.
5.00pm on a weekday, a two-hour session awaits……….

(*The classic ‘life class’ was pretty much standard fare in the art school world of the late Seventies. Some students went for fun, some out of boredom and some out of a genuine curiosity. I guess others went for a type of condition of purpose, in as much as they thought that it was just a good thing ‘to get their eye in’ or as a type of dietary supplement towards making their ‘main work’ better in some way!)

Enter Mario Dubsky………

True mentor figures leave indelible tattoos on ones mind. They can also be formidable and in some ways intimidating people (Dubsky certainly subscribed to both of those characteristics)!

ACT ONE: Setting Up…….

The actor / life model, sometimes they found a pose themselves or were (as in Dubsky’s class) given one by the tutor. Chalk was drawn around the salient points of the chosen posture, so that after a comfort break the ‘model’ was able to resume the same position. I remember once that Dubsky constructed a scaffolding rig around the room to pose the model/s on.

Now comes the interesting bit. How on earth does one begin? A vertical or horizontal composition perhaps, what choice of weapon? A sharp 3b or a lump of charcoal? What style? What period? What school of thought?
The sheer amount of choice opens a deep vein of creative opportunities! But still the main question remains, how do you begin?

The mentor speaks…….

“Consider the structure and dynamics of the pose, regard with awe the relationship between bone, flesh and architecture, consider the metaphoric connections with the outside world, …. Use your imagination it is the mother of invention, well if you don’t have one or refuse to use it, you better get out now!”

ACT TWO: Drawing…

Last Friday I saw the punk acts Johnny Moped at some very grubby venue in South London, on Saturday the original Ultravox line up in Soho, and on Sunday Generation X etc etc… the week before I had been up North to see my parents. I had a miserable plastic meal in a bland motorway service station looking at equally bland characters and situations that invariably became the focus of the lyrics of so many national punk anthems. Well that’s as maybe, but how do you put those refrains and situations into the seemingly static laboratory conditions of the life class?

NO INTERMISSION STRAIGHT TO THE FINAL CURTAIN:

the cleaner comes in…

Easels turned around and the drawing group look at the results of the session, Dubsky resplendent with his checked lumberjack shirt, stroking his neatly trimmed beard, looks intently at his own drawing.

“I shall carry on with this when I get back to the studio, there is still much to do, but the main dynamics and structures are in place and once a firm structure has been established you can add many things to the overall composition as it will not fall apart and will also be able to carry the metaphors and symbols accordingly: because remember, we are not producing a mere study or performing a sort of circuit training, we are making an actual ‘drawing! “

All of a sudden the ‘life class’ made sense, it was not so much a static operation, but the perfect vehicle for personal ideas, stories and creative interaction.

It was possible to fuse seemingly disparate aspects of time, space, metaphor and narrative together.
The life class was the essential ‘mothership’, it was the outside and the inside, the shopping mall, and the cathedral, the motorway and all the national galleries of art.

Like so many powerful or important moments in life, the ‘Dubsky Life Class’ represented to me a liberating experience where the imagination was allowed to run free, but was harnessed by the relationship of form to content resulting in an idea.

I can think of no better way to describe this curios and wonderful chamber called the ‘life room’.

David Ferry 2009.

Mario Dubsky 1939-1985, British Painter and Teacher.

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings > David Ferry ‘Above The Intersection……. Punk Rock, scaffolding, and Mario Dubsky’

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings >What’s My Motivation: Actor and writer Dudley Sutton acting up and working out in the Life Room

Paul Bonaventura reflects on the frequently overlooked relationship between art and sport

George Best in action

It is a well-known fact that the majority of writers on soccer have been reporters rather than scholars. In the person of Arthur Hopcraft, an intermittent contributor to the sports pages of The Observer and The Sunday Times during the 1960s, we have a correspondent whose insightful comments on every aspect of the national game warrant the kind of attention normally reserved for studies of a more academic nature. The Football Man, Hopcraft’s best-known book, is a masterly examination of the compulsion of soccer, and in it he discusses fully the peculiar fascination that the game exerts:

‘No player, manager, director or fan who understands football, either through his intellect or his nerve-ends, ever repeats the piece of nonsense trotted out mercilessly by the fearful every now and again which pleads, ‘After all, it’s only a game.’ It has not been only a game for eighty years… What happens on the football field matters, but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others; it engages the personality.
It has conflict and beauty, and when those two properties are present together in something offered for public appraisal they represent much of what I understand to be art.’

Whether or not we agree with Hopcraft’s rather Orwellian definition of art, we cannot but be moved by the passion with which he voices his beliefs, nor by the veracity behind his assertion that soccer is a creative discipline, which has the ability to stimulate the personality. What is true of football in particular and sport in general – that they have to be apprehended rationally and emotionally – is of course equally true of the arts and sciences, related frames of reference be which we as practitioners, spectators and consumers make sense of the world we inhabit. Seen together, sport, the arts and science constitute a declaration of who we are as cognitive, sentient and physical beings, and give us the means to chart the geography of information that we are continually called upon to negotiate in our daily lives.

Of the three, sport has been the victim of the most myopic prejudice, a narrow-mindedness that regards it as a subject unworthy of meaningful exploration. In a paper on the social origins of soccer for the Joint Panel on Leisure and Recreation Research, Eric Dunning reports that hostility towards sport is probably connected with the work-centred character of the dominant values of our society and with the fact that game-playing is held in low esteem by opinion-formers. The idea that sport was an ignominious activity of little cerebral or emotional worth gained credence towards the end of the 17th century and ensured that the subject in the visual arts was never likely to attain the moral status enjoyed by landscape, say, or history painting or portraiture. By contrast, I should like to suggest that the practice of sport is one of the forms most revealing of human identity, that it is a more than acceptable subject and source of inspiration for artistic enquiry, and that it should be regarded in the same light as all other manifestations of creative endeavour. Furthermore, I would argue that sport and art derive from broadly similar aesthetic impulses and share in a common inheritance by providing for the communication of ideas without recourse to word-based languages.

Given the disdain with which the intelligentsia has treated sport it is hardly surprising that visual artists who fear for their reputations have largely avoided it in their work. Although there are some notable exceptions, these have generally been overlooked in the official histories and have attracted recognition only on the rarest of occasions. One such occasion took place in 1953 when the Football Association organised an exhibition called Football to celebrate its ninetieth anniversary. Open to any piece of work which depicted ‘a game of Association Football in England or any scene directly connected with it’, the show attracted over 1,700 entries and was selected by a distinguished panel, including William Coldstream (Slade Professor of University College, London), Sir Philip Hendy (Director of the National Gallery), Sir John Rothenstein (Director of the Tate Gallery) and Philip James (Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain). The 32 prize-winning and 127 other selected exhibits featured paintings and sculptures by Michael Ayrton, Terry Frost, Ghisha Koenig, Albert Irvin, L.S. Lowry, F.E. McWilliam, William Roberts and Michael Rothenstein, and testified to the fact that, at least amongst some members of the artistic community, the importance of soccer as an active and philosophical pursuit made it worthy of their attentions.

Half a decade earlier, Ben Nicholson’s paintings were beginning to display signs of that artist’s well-documented interest in racquet games. In a letter to the American painter G.L.K. Morris, quoted in the catalogue accompanying the recent Tate Gallery retrospective, Nicholson mentions that he had ‘some new idea of work… something to do with things which flow into each other (Raphael and Lacoste influence)’. Nicholson was an ardent follower of tennis and had a particular admiration for the French champion René Lacoste. Jeremy Lewison has pointed out that Lacoste’s trajectories around the court during rallies and the ways in which he stroked the ball across the net found their echo in Nicholson’s paintings, and that the artist himself frequently made direct comparisons between the rhythmic, linear character of his forms and the flight of a tennis ball.

More recently, Sean Scully’s recurrent use of the stripe reveals him to be a painter who favours an equally rhythmic approach to the making of art, one based in some measure on his interest in karate. Like the other martial arts karate encompasses varieties of stylised expression and the movements made in combat find strong parallels in the kinds of movements made by Scully’s body in the laying down of paint. When Jackson Pollock was asked whether his paintings referred to nature, he replied that he was nature, and Scully too is always trying to close down the gap between what he sees, what he feels, what he is and what he wants to make. ‘If you choose the fine arts’, explains Scully,

‘you are left with an object. If you choose the martial arts, you are left with a memory. What I try to do is take this knowledge, this way of being which karate embraces, and put it into my paintings… Life is banal until it is invested with a commitment and painting and karate are no different from anything else in that respect. The forms that I use in my paintings may appear to be banal, but they are given another life when the body and the intellect and the emotions are harnessed together.’

In a statement redolent of Hopcraft, Scully encapsulates the crux of the relationship between sport and art, which is that both require a harnessing together of the body’s corporal and cerebral resources to bring about their birth, and that both require a sustained imaginative commitment to raise them above their routine ‘terrestrial’ origins.

Notwithstanding its persistently impoverished position on the cultural grid, the spectacle of sport in art has been regarded in a more favourable light prior to our own century. In his groundbreaking book on the theme published in 1925, William Baillie-Grohman conjectured that since hunting was made the subject of the very earliest cave paintings, followers of sport could rightly claim to have given the first incitement to art. Referring to British sporting painting, Oliver Millar maintains less controversially that an artistic interest in such subjects began with scenes depicting feats of horsemanship and the chase. Sporting and animal pictures can be found in work from around the end of the sixteenth century onwards, although it was not until the emergence of John Wootton one hundred years later that Britain acquired its first dedicated painter of sporting themes. His rubbing-down scenes and races in progress show the horseracing world in action for the first time, but it was in the 1760s, with the arrival of Sawrey Gilpin and George Stubbs, that equine imagery acquired its finest exponents.

With Stubbs in particular there is a thoroughly new feeling in the paint for the morphology of the animal and for the relationship between figure and ground, and in Hambletonian, Rubbing Down the artist has bequeathed to successive generations one of the finest works ever painted by a British artist. This extraordinary composition has never lost its capacity to astonish, a capacity contrived from Stubbs’s ambitiousness of scale and the assuredness in his handling of the subject. Much of its power derives from the fact that the artist has compressed the horse and its two handlers into a box-like space, cramping them together on what are otherwise the wide-open spaces of Newmarket Heath. This has the effect of focusing the viewer’s attention on Hambletonian’s nervous eye and heaving flanks, evidence of a harrowing race of marathon proportions. Stubbs’s highly developed sensibility was founded on his incomparable familiarity with the anatomy of the thoroughbred and leaves us in no doubt that his observations led him to look upon the racehorse as a vessel of transcendence, the quality which is just as readily associated with the achievements of artists as it is with those of athletes.

Understandably, Stubbs’s legacy continues up to the present, and nowhere is it more richly endowed than in the work of Mark Wallinger. Fuelled by his desire to produce work that is simultaneously entertaining, spectacular, and socially and politically demonstrative, Wallinger has adopted a magpie-like approach in his appropriation and usage of styles from other periods. His indebtedness to Stubbs makes itself most keenly felt in Race, Class, Sex and Fathers and Sons, two sets of canvases that find their immediate source in reference books for horse breeders and the artist’s long-standing interest in horseracing. Like many of his peers, Wallinger has a strange and slightly uncomfortable relationship with painting, but he believes it has retained ‘a little bit of magic’, and it is this that he has elected to explore in these closely related series. While questioning of painting, patriarchy and the commercialisation of sport, Wallinger’s canvases may be read on one level as naturalistic portraits of specific stallions, and they pay homage to Stubbs’s entirely new level of pictorial accomplishment.

Wallinger’s use of photographs from studbooks stands close inspection beside Francis Bacon’s use of Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of naked wrestlers. In Bacon’s case, however, the artist has effected a transformation of his source material, locking the couple into a sexual embrace. As Dawn Ades has noted, the distance between the photograph and the use to which it has been put is ‘not that great and the aggression is more emphatic in the sexual encounter’. Bacon’s distortions, she goes on, ‘give the muscular sensation of spasm or contraction; it is sight, touch, tension, orgasm, together. It is a way of rendering visible invisible forces.’

Bacon’s interest in sex-as-sport also found an outlet in the truncated nude figures with cricket pads, ‘anatomically vague, sexually suggestive and figurally potent’, which he reprised on a number of occasions towards the end of his life. Although he came from a sporting family – his father was a racehorse trainer in Ireland – Bacon’s use of such subject matter was founded on its ability to provide him with what he described as ‘an elliptical way of coming to the appearance of bodies I have known’.

In a separate comment, Bacon put forward the notion that painting today ‘is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down’. What Bacon is saying is that the artist’s ability to conjure up a telling artistic statement is dependent on whether that individual is able to grasp something of importance when it presents itself for consideration – whether, as Sean Scully has intimated, an artist is ‘able to recognise the implications of his own actions and, more importantly, of recognising whether something has implications’. It is this gift of recognition that in art and sport distinguishes the great from the mediocre and the mediocre from the poor.

By late 1967, the Manchester United and Northern Ireland striker George Best had developed into one of the most exciting footballing talents ever seen, and his position at the head of soccer’s elite remains largely unchallenged to this day. Arthur Hopcraft confirms that no other virtuoso could match his range, and that ‘it was a variety of talents which made him so important: the demonic, barely credible capacity for forcing his way out of a ring of defenders, when he might lose the ball and regain it so that the tackle became part of his dribble; his courage in a crowded goalmouth, allowing him to head goals against much bigger men; his inspired eye for a long ball from a deep position behind him’.

All of these skills were predicated on Best’s ability to recognise, second by second, the significance of any action on the pitch; on his taking advantage of what happened when the stuff splashed down in front of him. As viewers, we are able to witness and define what it is that makes Bacon and Best incomparable, to talk to about their understanding which is no less sagacious for sometimes being untranslatable, but we can only speculate about why their actions should be constructed as significant, about why they succeed where others fail, about why it is that only some are able to sense when things have implications.

Art and sport provide us with complementary information on the expressive potential of the human body. Correspondingly, they stand for nothing unless we are able to suspend our disbelief and invest the useless fictions of the studio, the football field and the racecourse with meaning and import. For just as Best and Hambletonian seemed to overcome the limitations imposed upon them by their biological selves, so Bacon, Nicholson, Scully and Wallinger have gone beyond the restrictions of a practice that consists of nothing more that the movement of pigment over a flat surface with a short hairy stick.

This article first appeared in Modern Painters, vol.7, no.2, spring 1994

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings > AN EQUAL MATCH ?Paul Bonaventura

Kenny Hunter

Published by The Multiple Store, London, 2010

Painted bronze
each figure: 60x19x19cm
edition of 11

Artist’s Statement

These works are based on research taken from a selection of young athletes.

The sculptures like their subjects are neither complacent nor nihilistic; they positively express the contradictory times we live in. Beyond the world of athletics we can discern from their collective faces, the journey from innocence to experience. These sculptures show vulnerability, a strength of conviction, and a developing individual, not yet at their prime as an athlete.

Their concentrated gaze signifies that moment of mental preparation, which immediately
precedes action. The pose is self-conscious and evokes the awkwardness but also the raw
intensity of youth.

There is a fine thread of ambiguity running through my approach to these artworks dealing with the relationship between interiority and exteriority.

Overall I have selected to work with athletes who to a large degree are solo competitors, I am
attracted to their solitary pursuit and their internal struggles.

These works will be cast in bronze and painted white, evoking the historical materials of plaster and marble, and alongside high tech sportswear will also allow classical culture and
contemporary culture to both find a voice within these artworks, thus accommodating the multiple desires and readings that surround them.

The political and historical context

The politics of race, sex and nationalism have featured in almost every modern Olympiad evoking protests, walkouts, boycotts and even terrorist atrocities. What is clear from this is the Olympic games not only provides an arena to test our bodies, it is also a surrogate arena for our ongoing political and ethical conflicts.

If we look at the legacy of historical athletic sculpture, we must first consider the original and defining model, that of the Ancient Greeks.

During the Archaic and Classical periods athletic statues were idealised forms, which changed to something more akin to portraiture during the Hellenistic period. What is also clear is that statues of athletes were displayed in the same sacred area of Olympia beside those of Hero’s and God’s, thus we can be sure that they had an elevated status within Ancient Greek culture. The statues that remain for us to consider today are youthful, lithe and often contemplative.

The other historical model, which cannot be ignored, was the return of the athletic nude during the 1930’s. Both Hitler and Mussolini commissioned athletic sculpted figures, which claimed Greek inspiration. They displayed theatrical national pride, gladiatorial attitude, bodies bursting with clumsy dynamism. The glorification of the athlete equated with the heroism of the soldier.

Historical Athletic sculpture does not address individuality and generally prefers idealised form. It also does not address the diversity of human life, sex, race, or ability, preferring the male as the main subject. Finally it focuses on notions of idealised beauty and perfection, rather than celebrating a life committed to sport. In the light of this history I have developed a strategy for research and development of my ideas.

As with all my previous projects there is a blending of Ancient Greek influences and historical
precedents into the work. In the selection of the sports represented I have studied and considered the sporting events featured in the Ancient Olympic Games and have specifically selected the ones which can enable direct comparisons to contemporary competitive sport, such as running, throwing and boxing.

As a group of sculptures they contain inner dialogues, they relate to the traditions of athletic
sculpture, yet will resolutely represent the time that they were made, most importantly they
display none of the traditional notions of idealised perfection, instead there are contradictions,
tensions and subtly provocative elements.

Kenny Hunter, July 2010

This work features on theliferoom.org courtesy of the Multiple Store, London.
For further information and sales of this and other Multiple Store editions contact:

T: +44 (0)7760 666518
E: info@themultiplestore.org
W: www.themultiplestore.org

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the liferoom.org > projects/artworks/writings > Kenny Hunter, YOUNG OLYMPIANS

the idea

the Life Room is a unique combination of art studio and gym consisting of a series of apparatus for fitness and drawing – running machines and easels, rowing machines and drawing boards, plaster casts and plasma screens. the Life Room is a new site for the body and the mind, a place for improving physical and intellectual well being, and a place for social interaction.

Where do people go at the beginning of the 21st century for self improvement and social exchange – bars, museums, restaurants, libraries, theatres, cinemas or concerts, evening classes, the internet café, the gym?

The human body is one the central themes in Art, and drawing is one of the primary ways in which we communicate, record, and understand. In contemporary culture the human body is still central and is most commonly expressed through sport, dance, pornography, art and fashion; in glossy magazines, television, on the internet, and in the gym.

The rise of the fitness gym in the late 20th and early 21st century represents a new realisation of the Olympian ideal and classical beauty; a place to see and be seen, where people work on and observe the human form and where individuals can recreate themselves by sculpting/modelling their bodies through exercise. The gym also presents an ideal site for artists to observe and contemplate the human form and create images.

The life drawing studio was once the heart and lungs of every art school, it was the meeting place where students learned not just about drawing, but also the history, theories and theology of art. Today the human body is no less important in the daily thinking of artists and designers than it was two hundred years ago, However, few schools have retained a life room facility and ‘drawing’ in the 21st Century may mean many different things.

the Life Room is cross disciplinary and aims to link art, design, science and medicine. It is an enquiry into what might constitute life drawing in the digital age and is a search for a new cultural and social space for the future.

the Studio

The combination drawing studio/gym is a place dedicated to observation, reflection, action, learning, endurance and shaping. It takes its themes from historic and modern Olympian ideals and contemporary approaches to physical and intellectual wellbeing, culture, and learning.

the Life Room is intended to be open to the widest possible audience and uniquely encourages participation in art and fitness in one space, inspiring new ways of thinking and creating. Like any other gym it will be a place to see and be seen and to contemplate the intricacies of the human form. It is not a performance space, it is a rehearsal space designed to build physical and psychological strength, endurance, confidence and understanding.

The first live Life Room project opens in Winter 2009 at CHELSEA space, London. It is a pioneering cultural experiment but is strategically timed with the ambition that the Life Room could appear in museums, galleries, educational institutions and fitness centres across the country as part of the Cultural Olympiad and the 2012 Olympics. This concept has the potential to have a lasting effect on the planning of educational, fitness, and cultural public spaces.

the Website

the Life Room website will be a place for ideas, new projects, writings, and artworks picking up on themes inspired by Life Room and will be a holding space for documentation of Life Room events and exhibitions.

Contributions to the projects/artworks/writings section of the website are by invite only.

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