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Studio 11: Sport and Aesthetics

Ajay Hothi

Sport is one of the most significant components of the everyday. From professional and semi-professional, to amateur; from competitive to non-competitive, each of us has participated in sporting activity in our lives. Sports have their own sections in every newspaper and every news report. Sports brands dominate both the high street and the catwalk. Sport is fashionable. Sports stars are prominent figures – role models, even – across a variety of media. Sport affects us.

Sport is affective. Every sporting moment is unique. Sport is transformational – for the spectator, arguably, more than the sportsperson. Sport is ritualistic and relies upon faith, passion, the warmth of the crowd, and of being present.

Sport is political, and is often used by those in power as social propaganda.

Sport is symbolic. Sport is classist and divisionary. Sport is subcultural. Sport is anti-intellectual.

Despite the fact that sporting competition is determined (in almost every instance) by the on-field activities, sport itself is a dialogue between its participants and its non-participants. The experience of the participants is shared back-and-forth with the experience of the non-participants.

Sport is catharsis: a collective purging of emotion.

This studio will examine the concept of aesthetics as applied within that most everyday activity: sport. In his work Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga described language, poetry, and art as forms of "play". As with any artist, the sportsperson channels both instinct and practice, and working within the established methodologies of their chosen field, aims to create instances unique in all history. In moments such as those, the artist attempts to demonstrate the genius of man; the sportsperson, the limits of human movement. And yet we can discuss aesthetics not as a process but as an event: it occurs instantly, in the moment of viewership and is a shared moment. Sport never ends.

Selected readings

  • Austin, J.L., (1975) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Barthes, R. (1964) Elements of Semiology. London: Atlantic Books
  • Benjamin, W. (1936) "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations (2015). London: Bodley Head.
  • de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Critchley, S. (2017) What We Think About When We Think About Football. Profile Books: London.
  • Curran, A. "Brecht's Criticisms of Aristotle's Aesthetics of Tragedy", in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 59, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 167-184
  • Hickey, D. (1995) "The Heresy of Zone Defense", in Air Guitar (1997) Los Angeles, CA: Art Issues Press.
  • Mumford, S. (2018) "The aesthetics of sport and the arts: competing and complementary", in Majumdar, B. (ed.) Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics (pp.723-733)
  • Winner, D. (2001) Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football. London: Bloomsbury.

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Studio image: Ajay Hothi. Banner: Hans Op de Beeck, Staging Silence (3), video still (detail), 2019

A collage of an athlete on the background of artwork, by Ajay Hothi

Details

Tutor Ajay Hothi

Dissertation Studios 2021–22

 
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Drawing

Studio 01: Another Place

Ektoras Arkomanis

Out of a direct treatment of place, whether subjective or objective, emerges another place. It is neither new, nor fixed in time, but it has remained unexplored, scarcely documented – piles of lime and useless cicadas.
Mind map of essay/writing project

Studio 02: The Critical Thinker’s Guide to You: Making Sense of Writing in Creative Cultures

Robert Urquhart

This studio focuses on the relationship between creative practice and criticism – and how theories and cultural and social networks help shape and define the creative process.
Unknown lady, on steps outside a home in Kingston Jamaica

Studio 03: Fashioning the African Diaspora

Elli Michaela Young

Exploring the fashioning of the African diaspora and with a particular focus on the Caribbean Island of Jamaica, this studio aims to think through how fashion and dress is used to grapple with ideas of self.
Nash Studio

Studio 04: Meaningful Work

Paul Harper

This studio will consider the value of making in itself, independent of the product or outcome, exploring the idea of craft as meaningful work.
Zhang Kechun, Fishermen wading in the river, Shaanxi province (2019)

Studio 05: Thinking with Ruins

Danielle Hewitt

Thinking With Ruins begins with the idea that to think about ruination allows us to approach subjects that are of interest materially, aesthetically and politically and it allows us to work across scales - from dust to debris to object to landscape.

Studio 06: The Practice of Space – Writing Atmospheres in Art and Architecture

Nico de Oliveira

Dissertation Studio 06 looks at space as practice, since each location is a mutable entity framed as a moment in time, populated by individuals and shaped by their actions as artists, musicians, curators, designers, architects, writers and spectators.
Boy 'sucking it up'

Studio 07: Suck it up

Matilda Moors

This studio takes a sideways looks at the intersection of youth culture and late capitalism considering the impacts and influences of desire, the cartoon, consumerism and cuteness in shaping our lived contemporary experience.

Studio 08: The Conquest of Joy

Aleks Catina

This studio encourages dialogues around the cultural production at a time when narratives founded on certainty have ceased to make sense.
Mark Titchner, Mirror asking 'Are you free to determine your actions?'

Studio 09: Paths of Desire

Heidi Yeo

“Design needs to be plugged into human behaviour. Design dissolves in behaviour.” Naoto Fukasawa
Man under a cascade

Studio 10: The Hammer without a Master

Joseph Kohlmaier

Studio 10 explores the strange space between individual and collective, ecological action. It embraces the idea that we think, remember and decide ‘in the world’, rather than in our heads; that we are connected in unexpected ways; and that this connection may be a key to navigating life in an increasingly paradox present.

Studio 11: Sport and Aesthetics

Ajay Hothi

Dissertation Studio 10 will examine the concept of aesthetics as applied within that most everyday activity: sport.
A collage of Archive/Studio Images

Studio 12: Curating Interiors: The Studio Becoming Museum

Helena Bonett

This studio explores key concepts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – from questions of knowledge, history and nationhood, through to authenticity, agency and value – by means of an exploration of the particular interiors worked in by artists, makers and other practitioners.
Cards from Alastair Crowley's Tarot Set

Studio 13: Visualising the Future

Matthew Wraight

Cultural history, from high art to kitsch, is littered with visions of the future; some inspiring, some ridiculous, almost all of them wrong.
Tent on the shore of a Scottish Loch

Studio 14: Technical Pitches: Outside is free

James Payne

Outside is indeed free, but you need the skills, the kit, the knowledge and ideally ‘the look’ to fit into this world. This Studio will investigate how architecture, furniture, clothing and product design shape the work, living and leisure cultures they support. How these have influenced our relationship to our environment and indeed how this relates to resources at a local and geo-political level.
Objects suspended and floating

Studio 15: The Voice of Things

Lesley Stevenson

This studio will offer a challenge to the idea that objects are unruly things and need to be brought to heel by labelling, categorising, taxonomising. Instead, it offers an invitation to give voice to the mute and invisible, by listening to objects and treating them as allies.
Anonymous stencil of a quotation from a letter from Leopold 1 of Belgium to his niece, Queen Victoria

Studio 16: “If I stay silent nothing will change”: Identity, Politics, Social Change and Creative Culture(s)

Christina Paine

This cross-disciplinary studio considers how power, culture, politics, identity, representation, activism, social media, and mass culture theory intersect with a range of arts practices, including photography, architecture, design and fine art, film studies, fashion and music, sound, pop art, and theatre.
Code of Hammourabi, Stele, Musée du Louvre

Studio 17: A History of Efficiency

Trevor Norris

There is nothing inevitable about the way we organise our societies, and we now recognise that transnational and historically embedded structures of economic efficiency are killing the habitable planet. This Studio explores the trade-off between efficiency and creative flourishing in structures of extraction, production, property, commerce and law; and asks where these efficiencies sit in our bodies, behaviours and feelings as both long-standing cultural legacies and contemporary harms.
A body engulfed by a web of string

Studio 18: A Material World

Gina Pierce

The Studio will consider how textiles in fashion, furnishing, art, and beyond are embedded in our cultural traditions and give us insight into ourselves and our society. We will ask about their relevance in terms of the environment, gender issues, wellbeing and consumption.
Spread from a magazine showing an African Interior

Studio 19: The African Interior: Dark Continent to Centrefold

Harriet McKay

This dissertation studio will argue for an idea that much of the rest of the world is ignorant of/ignores. That is the understanding that Africa does design.