Nick Croggon

Contemporary art is rife with attempts to join itself to sport and entertainment, from Matthew Barney's Cremaster 4 (1994) and 1 (1995) to Gabriel Orozco's abstractions of newspaper sports images in Atomists (1996) to Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's filmic portrait of French soccer star Zin dine Zidane, Zidane, un Portrait du 21e Si cle (Zidane: A Twenty-first Century Portrait, 2006). Similarly, Australian artist Shaun Gladwell's videos are saturated with images of the artist and his peers at play. The games they play are serious and usually risky. With sumptuous, slow-motion cinematography - but minimal post-production digital manipulation - Gladwell's videos portray seemingly casual feats of physical coordination, grace, and endurance by him and other skateboarders, as well as breakdancers, capoeira practitioners, and BMX bicyclists. Yet, the easy grace of these movements belies their intrinsic, complex motivations. Moving beyond notions of critique and critical practice, so vital to 1990s art and theory, Gladwell's games embrace immersive infotainment. While such strategies have been examined for their political potential, we argue that Gladwell's videos - which offer gesture as their sole content - are more ambivalent in their political charge. They tap into an older understanding of the affective ground that underpins the merging of art and mass culture.