Sport Where We All Find Our Inner Idiot

Ian Potter Museum, University of Melbourne, Parkville

. Until October 26 www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au THE social role of sport is to provide an outlet for intelligent people to behave like brainless people. Everyone knows there's no zentai intrinsic point in shifting a leather ball from one post to another, no matter how energetic or invested the contest. Nothing is achieved outside the game; no one is wiser or can add a benefit to the world beyond the fury of the struggle. Intelligent people also recognise the costs of sport, severe and permanent injuries, which burden our hospitals every weekend. But sport is a sanctioned release from responsible thinking, and all these scruples are put aside. The whole point of sport is to insulate you from things that matter. The habit of getting excited and screaming for no good reason creates a momentary dome of ignorance; it's a hallowed asylum of folly, a carnevalesque institution of mania against the onus of wisdom. Important and urgent questions should be discussed, such as global warming; but the clamorous distraction of sport assures even the brainiest people that they too can enjoy the mind of an idiot. I was therefore sceptical of the Basil Sellers Art Prize. Why conceive a lucrative prize around sport? Sport is the antithesis of art, because art is all about a purpose beyond the work. Art engenders speculation, a portal to new insights and imaginative growth. Like music, science and philosophy, art promotes an intoxicating wonder for where the mind can reach. Sport offers no similar transcendence, because it lacks any admirable purpose beyond its own arbitrary exertions. Once inside the show, however, I had to admit that some of the works are brilliant. The masterpiece is Bicycles, by James Angus, which should have won the $100,000 prize. The sculpture is a track bike that merges three separate frames, with three tyres, handlebars, pedals and spokes. The machine is throbbing, as if growing through speed. As its form is replicated, the bike is caught in its own vibrations, as if each shudder and thrust in a stressful ride causes the bike to reproduce itself, to project more versions of itself as tremors of staggering zeal. The craftsmanship of this sculpture matches the concept. I hope the artist can gain one of Elvis Richardson's trophies, which amount to a gaudy army, like a field of slayers, such as little boys might play with. So many wins! The copious victories, represented by a horde of trinkets, make you reflect on the utter futility of winning, unless you get financial reward (in which case you could do something spider man costume valuable with the prize money). Elsewhere, Richardson's trophies reveal their own entropy, as her noble cups are rotting away, just as they deserve. It's the neglect to which all sporting victories are destined, because they're essentially trivial and ultimately give history nothing to remember. Kate Daw and Stewart Russell celebrate a marvellous moment from the Olympics in 1968 when Australian sprinter Peter Norman rose to the podium to support the black power salute alongside two black athletes. You feel that Norman really earned the beautiful monument that Daw and Russell create for him. Tellingly, Norman's brave political action completely displaces the memorableness of his athletic achievement. Some of the works are cheeky, such as Scott Redford's hilarious video, which shows men spraying the word "dead" onto surfboards only to cut them up. On another monitor, two young women in zentai come into a luxurious apartment to perform this morbid office. The beach-babes clumsily hack the wobbling boards with a saw, their bodies convulsing erratically in this sacrilegious castration of surfing prowess. I felt the Basil Sellers Art Prize winner, Daniel Crooks' video Static no. 11 (man running), maybe deserved 11th place. It shows a man on a running machine in a gym. But something odd happens. The integrity of the filmed image is stretched across a vertical gulf, which yields a slippery fill of reciprocal flows, as in an irregular mirror. Potter director Chris McCauliffe gives a clever analysis of the work: "like an eerie photo-finish caught up in a time warp". It made me reflect that maybe this "abstract ballet" deserves to win after all, because it's the closest to sport and the furthest from art: it doesn't reveal a purpose beyond its own tricks, an electronic banality zentai bodysuit striving for hermetic excellence.

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