Is Gymnastics Art?

Just beginning to read an article (Platchias, 2003) from the European Journal of Sport Science entitled Sport is Art. Platchias attempts to identify the common features of art and sport - difficult because both are open concepts. In fact in some ways, art can be said to be delineated by the cultural classes who confer the label of art on certain forms of production and consumption. Think, for example of your local opera house, if you have one, and now consider its status relative to the latest Muse concert.

The distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic is important; natural landscapes, for example, or people, can be aesthetically pleasing without being considered to be works of art. And one of the distinctions between art and sport is that art is considered to be without purpose or end product; it is an act in its own right, partly unconscious of its own artistry. While the end product of sport is more purposive. Sport is unarguably aesthetic, but is it art?

But if art is wholly unpurposive, what about the commercial backgrounds of many artists and authors; how many of the portraits in the National Gallery, for example, were commissioned works of art? Wasn't Michelangelo paid for his efforts in the Sistine Chapel? Doubtless deeper reading of this article and other, related literature will fill in the gaps and render a more complex framework for consideration.

In the meantime, however, about three pages into the article, as is generally my habit, I found my mind wandering, and went to explore Youtube. It didn't take me long before I found this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_55nfeBj4Q

This is Olga Strazheva's floor exercise from the 1989 World Championships. Set to Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, its choreography is partially derivative of Nijinsky's 1913 choreography, and was composed in its entirety by choreographers of the Bolshoi Ballet. Wasn't it rather timely that Strazheva's extraordinary floor routine showed up on my computer? To me, Strazheva, her coaches and choreographers produced a piece of performance art. Regardless of the fact that it was performed in a sporting arena it integrated art with sport seamlessly. Isn't this proof that sport is art, without all of this talking? Hmm ... I wonder what Judith Mackrell (dance critic for The Guardian) would think?

Does the sporting aspect of this routine, its manner and place of performance, reduce this work of art to a mere confection of art viewed through the lens of sport? After all, the routine consciously exploited an art form, and the work of major artists, with a view to underlining the artistic superiority of the Soviet team at that competition. It was a routine developed to stretch this particular gymnast's expressive and gymnastic capabilities and to provide her with a tool to win medals. The aesthetic in the routine is unconscious; the artistic there to prove a point. So, art, or not art?

Then it occurred to me that if sport were art, someone would need to be in control of the cultural capital, and delineate exactly what was art, and what wasn't. (That is a crass and over-simplified way of putting it, but please bear with me for a year or two while I develop the cultural capital to make this argument more effectively.) I would suggest, therefore, that the Soviet Union occupied the high ground in this respect during the 60s, 70s and 80s. They shaped the sport in the image of ballet and circus (a higher art form in the USSR than the West) and effectively closed the door on alternative interpretations of the sport, which were inferior by comparison. (And thank goodness for that; would you prefer to have watched more floor routines like this one? Although a version of this did take the world title in 1979; I wonder who possessed the cultural capital then?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP-8V_hE3F8

Who would have been brave enough to deny the Soviets the cultural leadership of the sport? You wouldn't want to be labelled uncultured, now would you - note the close relationship to the Bolshoi Ballet - are you going to take them on and win? (Although Eberle's coaches and the judges who gave her the win in 1979 didn't seem to mind too much. An anomaly that is difficult to explain perhaps.)

But who are the gatekeepers of the artistic in gymnastics now? Is there a dearth of artistry, or has it merely changed as an art form? Even if artistry has disappeared, does the inherent aesthetic in gymnastics render the sport art?

Reference

Platchias, D (2003) 'Sport is Art' European Journal of Sport Science vol 3 issue 4 pp 1-18

Comment added 8.10.2010

This is a bit of a mangled account based on a rapid reading of an article fragment, and isn’t helped by the lack of secondary references that for some reason are pretty thin on the ground in the body of Platchias’s work. My emphasis on the importance of cultural capital is derived from his mention of members of the art world ‘christening’ works of art (Dickie, 1974, cited by Platchias, 2003) – I have taken this further to identify the idea of cultural capital, for which my source is Pierre Bourdieu.

The thought that this leaves hanging in my brain is whether there is some equivalent concept to ‘cultural capital’ in sports and whether the transference of this capital influences the shape of the sport. What political influences held sway, for example, during the 1979 World Championships? This was admittedly a low point in Soviet gymnastics history when they lost the world team title to Romania, and the world floor title went to the unfortunate Emilia Eberle. Can this be interpreted as a temporary sway in the ownership of the sporting cultural capital? What were the underlying cultural tensions present beneath the mostly dominant cultural ethos of the Soviets, and who owned them?

The second floor exercise video is Emilia Eberle of Romania, competing in the Olympics in 1980. It isn’t the timeless 1979 World Championships floor exercise set to music by Boney M ('Brown Girl in the Ring' (1978)), but it does include the impression of a child having a tantrum that was so unforgettable in the 1979 version. The change of music barely makes a difference to the routine. I do have the feeling that Eberle manages to finesse this version perhaps a little more than she did a year earlier.

Reference

Dickie, G (1974) Art and the aesthetic Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press