The 4th International Symposium on Emerging Techniques: SportArt

Calla d'Or, Majorca
12th-16th October 2006

Inclusive registration fee (travel, accommodation, registration) is £250
Symposium registration fee only, is £50/£15 (conc.)
Both fees include access to daily climbing and tumbling workshops, 
as well as sessions of escalatory rhetoric, vertical polemic, 
all keynote presentations and panel discussions.
 
For registration details and further information:
irational@irational.org


'Whenever I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my chequebook'
Jack Parlance, in Le Mepris

'Every sport pretends to a literature'
Alistair Cooke


Call for papers and actions

The International Symposium on Emerging Techniques is a restlessly
discursive interdisciplinary forum for artists, academics and amateur
enthusiasts. In previous years, the symposium has been called to
consider topics as diverse as 'Domestic Science: genetic modification in
the kitchen garden' and 'Spectres of the Spectrum: piracy, transmission,
reception and static'. It has convened on a camel caravan leading into
the Great Mosque of Djenné, on an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea and
in the catacombs beneath Paris. 

This year the Symposium convenes on the cliffs and in the caves of south
western Marjorca, Calla d'Or, to get to grips with the emerging
techniques of SportArt. 

With an eye on the 2012 Olympic Games, this gathering will map out the
parameters of an emerging discourse and practice that promises to be an
increasingly intense focus of public and corporate cultural investment
and media attention. SportArt intervenes in an institutional apparatus
that conflates art, sport and tourism in the production of a novel
managerial artefact: the 'cultural economy' (comprising of the
'creative' and 'leisure' industries). 


This is the final call for papers and actions addressing the emerging
techniques of SportArt. We welcome submissions that speak to or perform
to the following rubrics:


      * The spectacle of culture:
"There is culture, which is the rule...there is the exception, which is
art. Every one speaks the rule." - Jean-Luc Godard
Under the signs of Theodore Adorno and Guy Debord can be placed two
oppositional approaches to the spectacular commodification of 'culture'.
On the one hand, Adorno holds the autonomy of art against a marketplace
culture. On the other hand, Guy Debord deploys tactics of disruptive
appropriation. Given that SportArt might at times resemble the 'stunt',
how is it to be placed in a genealogy of avant garde, modernist and
postmodernist art practices that address the 'spectacle of culture'?
Where does it stand between the athleticism of action painting and the
less physical discursivity of conceptual art? How is it to be situated
in relation to situationism, Dada, and various strains of performance
art? For that matter, where does it stand in relation to rhythmic
gymnastics and chess?

      * Freedom and constraint or the rules of the game:
Founded in 1960, by a group of leading French writers and
mathematicians, Oulipo, aimed to explore the potentials of literary
production through the voluntary adoption of formal constraints. They
noted that all artistic forms consisted of more or less arbitrary rules
and constraints (rhyme schemes and metre in poetry, say), in any case.
Sports, too, are defined by a conformity to recursive regimes devoid of
utility - twenty-two humans on a rectangular plot of earth endeavour to
sink a leather bladder in a net using only their feet, chests and heads.
SportArt asks, faced with a rock and the laws of gravity, or, faced with
a wall and the dictates of the town planner, what are the rules of the
game?

      * Performance and spectatorship: 
The practices of sport and art share a number of family resemblances,
the most significant of which are perhaps the centrality of
'performance' and 'spectatorship' to each. The possibilities of solitary
practice, notwithstanding, we ask what are the dynamics of doing and
looking, and what role do technologies of record play in SportArt?

      * Modernism and Machismo:
Boxing, fencing, and hunting are key elements of a modernist tradition
to which Hemmingway is central. What are the gender dynamics of the
contemporary practice of SportArt and what are its connections with a
modernist legacy? 

      * Amateur athletics and Corporate sponsorship:
The institutional economies of both contemporary art and sport are
marked by a tension between, on the one hand, an ethos of amateur or
vocational disinterest (art/sport for art/sport's sake), and, on the
other hand, the imperatives of sensational commercial exploitation. What
will be the material and economic conditions of SportArt? Will it have
sponsors or patrons? Will it find public support or develop as the
private pursuit of committed amateurs? How will it fit into the
institutional matrix of the flourishing culture of 'Blairite Baroque'?

      * Technology and Nakedness:
Given that many SportArtists have emerged from net.art practices
predicated on the appropriation of a massive technological
infrastructure, SportArt's ethic of 'nakedness' and renunciation of
'equipment' is perhaps somewhat ironic. To climb without shoes or chalk,
to sleep beneath the stars and travel without burden into a vanishing
distance. But what is 'nakedness' in an often toxic urban environment,
and what are the potentials of mobile and textile technologies for a
practice in an increasingly 'localised' nature? 

      * Sport, art and fascism:
Leni Riefenstahl and Adolf Hitler's Triumph of the Will is perhaps the
greatest and most disturbing aesthetic achievement of fascist sporting
spectacle. How might the emerging discourses of SportArt position
themselves vis a vis the spectacular legacies of the fascist and social
realist aestheticization of sport, on the one hand, and the sensational
commercialisation of much contemporary British art, on the other? 

      * Irony and Death: SportArt and romanticism 


Invited participants include: 
Kayle Brandon - home scientist and arboreal artist 
Heath Bunting - retired artist and SportArt practitioner 
David Lammy - culture minister
Kate Rich - domestic industrialist and commercial artist

Made possible by:

department for culture, media and sport:
Aiming to improve the quality of life for all through cultural and
sporting activities, 
to support the pursuit of excellence and to champion the tourism,
creative and leisure industries.



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