Tonci Kranjcevic Batalic writes on the work of video artists featured in conjunction with the EGLSF AGA opening in Split (details HERE):
The image of sport that we have today is a spectacular image with set meanings, defined mostly by media, especially televised pictures.
In the 60s Marshall McLuhan tried to define TV's image on the basis of its technical specifications, as well as physical and psychological perceptions of it, as a "cool" medium, or medium that requires an additional commitment for the interpretation of information, thus making the receiver of the image an active and critical observer.
The situation we have today with the presentation of sports as a spectacle in media is just the opposite: a uniform image of sports where viewer is treated as a passive observer, and his emotional reaction is simplified to basic euphoria or disappointment about the success or failure of a sport event. Such a communication process would classify TV media as a "hot" media, a term which for McLuhan describes "high definition" media. It is interesting that today, with the transition of TV images to HD, the viewer has made the path from active to passive recipient. However changes of the technical characteristics of media did not play the key role in that transition. The level of individual experience interacts with media and socio-cultural context play the key role in defining reception.
Apart from being presented in a form of video, the works of artists in this exhibition have in common a demand for an active and critical interpretation of offered information. Another common point in presented works is artist's performative act, in which the artist, accepting or violating the rules of sport, creates new and unfamiliar situations that reflect both personal and social reality.
Freedom of decision and imposed social values are related to the construction of gender identity in the works of Renata Poljak and Vedran Perkov. From the perspective of sport, the works of Boris Šitum and Sandra Sterle manifest absurd situations. Sterle's act is opposing professionalization of sports and thus indicates aesthetic and ideological elements of sport as a game. The absurdity of Šitum's serves from the roof of the bankrupted Uzor factory refers to the current socio-political situation. Experimenting with recording and animation, Ana Hušman reconstructs the historic match between Argentina and England in 1986, thus indicating the social and political relations that can be found in football.
A wide range of topics found in these sport-related performative acts indicate multiple possibilities of sports in the construction of individual and social realities and identities, which are usually ignored in spectacularized and professionalized sports of today. This exhibition is a reaction to passive acceptance of simplified sport images promoted by the media and society. It is an incentive for understanding sport as a space of realization of different kinds of social and human conditions.
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