Rancourt/Yatsuk Strike Again

Tom Sanford

First Round of the 2006 NBA Draft

Icons
The icons display various sports teams´ logos and companies’ logos, The Yankees, Starbucks, Mac, Paramount, Coca Cola etc. All these brands define what it is to be American. These logos are made as icons in order to compare these to the religious icons that are worshiped as such. I decided to pick twelve logos and do them as gold icons, twelve being a kind of a religious number. I did not want to pick the companies in order to portray these in a negative way. I picked the companies that have a really strong identity which people have a strong relation to.

Jesus Walks, 2007. 176,5cm x 208,5 cm oil, acrylic, fake silver and fake gold on wood

This is the American crusade over Iraq showing a possible American/Christian victory. Jesus is leading the Americans but he is not depicted as the religious version we are used to but as a character taken from a film where Jesus is hippie-like and fun loving and not like the crucified Christ. I thought this Jesus-character would fit in well in the painting to show the Americans´ crusade into Iraq stepping on dead bodies etc. The Jesus character is taken from Kevin Smith´s “Dogma” (1999) where he is called Buddy Christ.

I have put in some actors who have played soldiers. For example: On top of the dead bodies you see the character Dutch from the movie Predator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) and George Clooney´s character from the movie about the first gulf war, Three Kings (1999). You also see the helmet from my favourite Vietnam movie, Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987).

In the painting you also see myself with this foam finger cheering on, it is like although many Americans are very aware and critical of what is going on and vote against the government it is not really democracy, we cannot really vote them out. I am showing the American imperialism: a combination of a very nice life style and all the crimes we are responsible for around the world. In the painting I am wearing a Reggie Bush football jersey, number 25 New Orleans Saints. During the Iraq war we had this terrible hurricane, Katrina, in New Orleans but nothing was done because all the focus was on Iraq and the government spent so much money on the war in stead of helping our own people in the backyard. Reggie Bush is a black man, and most black people in the US have the names of the families who used to own them as slaves so Reggie Bush could have relatives who were owned as slaves by the Bush family!

In the painting you also see this Arbusto oil drum. Arbusto was established George W. Bush and one of the major investors was the Bin Laden family! You also see George W. Bush as a cowboy.
Also appearing is Britney Spears (just after painting her hair I heard that she had shaved her head!) as a Dallas cowgirl cheerleader in the position of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, albeit in a white trailer trash version. You also see a bumber sticker “First Iraq then France”. I actually saw this sticker on a car near my studio.

I know Thomas and I are really excited to have Tom’s piece depicting twelve shamed sports stars in similar style to the above NBA Draft portraits. Come and See It!

The Institute for Aesthletics

Aesthletics: Game Designers Should Create More New Sports
By Clive Thompson 05.07.07

I catch the Whiffle ball with one hand, spin around, and begin dribbling it off my bat as I drive for the goalposts. Damn: I’m swarmed by defensemen frantically waving their bats and trying to block my shot. Taking a dive for it, I spy an opening — then smash the shot past the goalie.

Woo hoo! I’ve just scored the first goal in a ferocious game of “Whiffle Hurling.”

Yes, Whiffle Hurling. I suspect you’ve never heard of it. Actually, I’m positive you’ve never heard of it — because the sport didn’t exist until two years ago.

Whiffle Hurling was invented in July 2005 by a Tom Russotti, an MFA grad student at Rutgers University — and the sole practitioner of what he calls “aesthletics.” So far, only 10 games of Whiffle Hurling have ever been played. I can personally attest that it’s insanely fun and offers up a genuinely new blend of activity: The crazy intensity of Irish hurling mixed with the low-stress, low-injury appeal of Whiffle ball. It manages to be simultaneously casual and intense, which is perfect for nerds like me.

And it also poses an interesting question: Why don’t more people invent new sports?

After all, we live in a golden age of play. The video-game industry is bristling with innovation: You’ve got haptic controllers on the Wii, titles like Eye of Judgment merging card-games with computers, and the increasingly strange economic activity in online worlds. Our culture is clearly hungry for new forms of play.

Yet how many new major physical sports have you played in recent years? Zero, I’ll bet. The pantheon of major team-sports — football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey — hasn’t significantly altered in decades.

So Russotti decided to expand the field a bit. By creating a new sport, he decided, he could level the playing field between athletes. When you join a pickup game of basketball or football, it’s always slightly marred by the fact that some of the players will be totally experienced — making it slightly more dull for the less-expert folks. A new sport wouldn’t have that problem.

Russotti began casting around for ideas, and while visiting a family vacation home in the country, found a pile of discarded Whiffle bats. Presto: Russotti decided to design a variant of hurling that uses Whiffle plastic. The rules are generally similar to the old Irish sport: You can catch the ball with your hand and remain stationary, but to move you have dribble the ball on the Whiffle bat. Otherwise you have to pass by hitting the ball.

“I figured it’d have all the action, the exhilaration, but different physics because of the plastic balls and bats,” Russotti told me when I met him and a gang of friends in New York to play the game. (He also instituted some delightfully silly rules: One team is required to wear sombreros.)

As we raced around the field, I quickly intuited some basic strategy. For example, I realized that I didn’t need to drive up too close to the goals — I could shoot successfully from midfield. Then I realized that it paid to be aggressive: If the opposing team was about to gain control the ball, I’d dive headlong into the mud and whack it away — using something closer to a golf swing. Pretty soon I’d developed a reputation on my team for being psychotically willing to fling myself nose-first on the ground.

Meanwhile, one of my opponents demonstrated a scarily amazing facility for dribbling the ball long distances — which let him easily traverse the field, since you’re not allowed to interfere with a dribbling player.

Essentially, were figuring out how to play. And this is, counter intuitively, a big part of what makes a new game so great: You get to explore the intriguing and unpredictable ways that the rules interact.

Video-game players understand this implicitly: We often find that the thrill of a new game is in theprocess of mastering it — not the mastery itself. (Indeed, once a video game is mastered we often stop playing it.) You never get this experience with an existing, well-known sport like soccer or football, because the rules have been exhaustively explored.

Russotti, too, has had to gradually fine-tune Whiffle Hurling as he watches how the athletes interact. During the first game, he discovered that offensive players were camping out near the goalposts, which made it trivially easy to smash a goal past the goalies. (I love it: Camping.) So Russotti instituted a 15-foot goal-shooting line. And after personally suffering a brutal black-eye injury in the first five minutes of the inaugural game, he instituted a “no physical contact” rule.

This is other delicious thing about playing a new sport: You get to watch the rules evolve, which gives you front-row insight into the intellectually fascinating process of game design. Baseball and football and hockey all underwent the same tweaking process, but because they don’t change much any more, people don’t think of them as designed objects. And because we don’t think of them as designed objects, we don’t think about designing new sports.

The irony, of course, is that Russotti is merely doing what children already innately do. Children in playgrounds invent their own physical games every day. It’s a completely natural human activity, but it’s drummed out of us once we go to school and are told that the small group of advertising-supported team sports are the only “serious” ones. For the rest of your adult life, you never deviate.

Unless, of course, you hook up with Russotti. In a few weeks he’s going to showcase another new sport he’s invented: A version of basketball played with three opposing teams, three nets and two balls.

I can’t wait.

From Wired Magazine

Alex Brown

We are really pleased to have young gun, Alex Brown’s hyperbolic nature of warfare drawings. Rendered from hours and hours of video gaming, history book reading, and concentration, he methodically brings his determined compositions to life. Come see them in person!

Read Alex’s interview in Esopus Magazine

Marisa Olson

96-00-04-08

“…takes its title from the years of the Presidential elections in which I’ve voted, likening each to a “Pepsi Challenge.” The implication is that the elections are largely a media spectacle and there is ultimately little difference between the “red” and blue” candidates, often leaving voters with a sour taste about their non-choice.”

Get at her work

Justin Rancourt & Chuck Yatsuk

“…To the few who can bring down a hoop, it’s a taste of truly being on top of the world. In a game of constant movement, this is a moment that can end the game instantaneously. Game over.”

From These Crazy Dudes’ proposal for show, see a lot more of their work @ VBPA

Maria Dumlao

Interrogation Mark (Stadium 1) digital collage, 2008

Interrogation Mark involves gathering both violent images from the current war in Iraq and pastoral images from various lifestyle magazines and books.  In the tradition of collage, the images are digitally combined in a way that suggest that dread, violence, and general pathos underpin popular images promoted in our culture.

More at her website

Lee Walton

Definitely one of my favorite artists, Lee Walton has  been gracious enough to offer a collaboration with Thomas and I as curators of this show. We will be executing the third iteration of his ongoing project, You Make the Call, in which a site specific floor sculpture is determined by the results of multiple rounds of Lee golfing. Thomas and my responsibility is to devise the system that will be used to represent these strokes and holes of golf played, and then to execute and document this evolving floor piece.

We are in the throes of figuring out what system we want to pursue, if any of you internetters have an idea, send it on over.

Super Bowl XLII, 2008

A Shot A Day

March 26—August 15, 2003
(San Francisco, California)

On March 20th, Lee Walton began a round of golf at Lincoln Park Golf Course.

Taking only one shot a day, he finished the round over 5 months later.

Each day, the latest shot along with a brief commentary was posted on the web for the “cybergallery” to view.

The amount of pressure with each shot mounted as more cyber fans began to follow the round.

By the 15th hole, hundreds of people from all over the world were following Lee’s round of golf.

Feeling his joy and frustration, many fans e-mailed words of encouragement and support along with golf tips and related anecdotes.

LW: “The amount of pressure that weighed on each shot was unbearable. Sinking the final putt on hole #18 was the single most incredible accomplishment of my entire life.”

Rob Carter

Wrigley Castle, 2006

Foobel (an alternative history)
2005, color/sound, total running time: 8 mins 56 secs

Statement on Stadia

These photographs address the conflicting relationships between architecture, sport, religion, class and entertainment that have made these structures so historically significant. The first series focused on English football stadia by visually removing them from their actual location and placing them within more unusual environments. The Church of England is an image of Old Trafford (home to Manchester United), placed in the partially blurred town of Canterbury. Here a stadium which is sometimes referred to as ‘The Church of England’ is placed along side (and obscuring) Canterbury Cathedral – home of the Anglican Church. The image represents the great historical disparities that exist in England in terms of the significance of the country’s cities in relation to faith, community and scale.

The most recent series of photographs represent a more international perspective. The idea of the stadium (in this case Baseball) as a fortress or palace refers to the role of ‘the team’ to their fans, but also considers the iconographic and historical status of the buildings themselves. Here all the locations and stadiums are essentially American, but the castles are from Europe. The implication is that these stadia are often the iconic structures of the U.S. urban landscape in a way that older structures (like castles) are in other parts of the world. Though they form a significant part of the identity, culture and employment of the community, the architecture and franchise is often surprisingly disposable.

Process: All these images are made by digitally manipulating an existing image – adding or removing items to create a composite. The perspective is then altered (stretched) and the image reprinted. The imagery is then cutout or twisted out of position in three dimensions and sometimes new photographic elements added, then re-photographed from an angle that corrects the perspective alteration. As a result, physical transformations take place in the space just above and just behind the imagery. The viewer can see the thickness of the paper, as well as the imagery or printer pixilation on its surface. This process helps to make the digital changes more visually compelling, but also undermines the slickness of these changes by drawing the viewer’s attention to the surface of the image. The idea is to involve the viewer in questioning their perception of the imagery as well as to form a metaphor for its malleability and the transience of the architecture pictured.

More at his awesome website

Jessica Tam

Ring Monsters, 2006

One Mask, 2007

Interview Coming Soon!

In the Mean Time, have a look at the overwhelming world of masculine power on her website: Jessica Tam