Considered Compulsion Vaasa

John G. Boehme

Still and video from Considered Compulsion Vaasa, 2013, 2-hour performance. Images courtesy Marcus Lerviks.

 

 

Considered Compulsion Vaasa is part of a larger body of artworks that explore sport as a metaphor for construction, projection, and destruction of identity. The work investigates sport as an apparatus of the state to influence cultural and national identity. Embedded in it is the athleticism, gesture and movement commonly associated with sports.

The materials for this performance included suet (fat), sunflower seeds, a blue sports uniform, a garden rake and Australian rules football. The actions involved one hour of raking, and one hour of molding a suet ring and slamming the ball onto it. Their combined duration of two hours matches the length of an Aussie rules game.

This piece is a synthesis of research that emerged through performances that took place throughout Australia from June 18^th to July 9^th, 2013. In August 2013, the work was part of the Platform Performance Art Festival titled “The End of World – Or Why the World Won’t End.”

As a widespread ceremonial ritual of the industrial age, sport is remarkable for its ability to express two apparently contradictory sets of qualities: on the one hand, modernity, abstraction, efficiency, science, concept, and mind; on the other, the past, archaism, worship, emotionality, sex and the body.

—Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics and the Culture of Sport

Professional sport has paralleled the emergence of capitalism, which saw the development of recreational activity into a type of secular religion. Sports is the arena where social and political tensions are played out, often with a nationalist agenda. The language of sports is the colonial language of war, struggle, and conquest. Terms such as offense, defense, and sudden-death overtime, provide evidence of the codified nature of its conflict.

The adoration of the athlete makes sport the sanctioned site for eroticism and idealization of the body. Professional athletes have used the cultural space awarded to them to articulate views on class, race and economic struggle. Obsessive “fan” culture serves as a release for otherwise expressed communal energy in a moment of unpredictability and infinite potential for triumph of the underdog. Sport can be precarious, dangerous and seductive. The historical interconnections between art and sport, make visible society’s idealization of the body and its attendant erotic fetishism. These artworks do not interrogate specific contests or competitions, but rather those subjects within sports that ‘jump the hurdle’ and ‘cross the line’.

John G. Boehme was weaned in the Windansea of La Jolla, California. A product of boarding schools and Carlsbad Army & Navy Academy, his work is often described as ‘trans-disciplinary’, frequently employing performance, video, audio and objects in simultaneity. Boehme is not constrained to any particular creative mode, and therefore utilizes integrated approaches to realize his work. He continues to have exhibitions and screenings, and participate in festivals across Canada, the Americas, Australia, the United Kingdom, Europe and China. Boehme is a continuing faculty member of the Visual Arts Department at Camosun College. More by John Boehme can be viewed here.