On the same night that Paris saw red smoke coming from the headless neck of Marie Antoinette and a painted blue body unsettled a Last Supper, ‘Happy’ musician and Louis Vuitton creative director Pharrell Williams had social media on fire: he was advocating for a medaled arts competition to be returned to the contemporary Olympic games.
People of most ages were surprised to hear that such a thing had existed from 1912 to 1948. White South Africa could still participate in the Olympics then and garnered no less than two silver medals. A bronze went to artist Walter Battiss. One of the silver medals went to a certain art collector and poet, Ernst van Heerden. Slightly inspiring is that van Heerden was an openly gay man and professor emeritus at Wits University. Both aspects of his identity would surely have been an irritant to the white governing hetero-norm of the time.
The Olympic arts competition was hotly debated then and now, by public and stakeholders alike. How does one award medals to the solitary act of making art without the in-body observation of a critical crowd or judge? This was but one of many panicked arguments in opposition. Eventually, the art competitions were ended in 1948 because in those days…artists were considered professionals and Olympic athletes were not.
A South African artist who lived in the time of the controversial Olympic arts competitions is my elder and mentor, abstract artist Nel Erasmus. She is now 95, and I am thus respectful of the dismissive hand gestures she makes when I ask her about it. She holds onto my arm as we shuffle to her studio. “The straight line is direct and fast, and the curve’s journey is longer, and therefore slower”, she says, pointing at relevant work about sport around us.
Nel Erasmus. Hooves dancing with Stones.
In Energy Cricket Pattern I she painted batters and fielders exploded into wisps, mere memories of their solid selves and in perpetual motion with their playing field. After the cricket players, gymnasts and ballet dancers followed, with horses racing in their wake. In Hooves dancing with Stones horse bodies were opened up, their background pushing and winding through them. “I have broken open the object but not destroyed it like the abstract artists of the 1950s had. This enables the activation of space in my work, making space an active partner. When space can flow through the object and the object likewise can penetrate space, there is an equal dance.” This interdependence feels spiritual to her and carries a message about life.
This year the Olympics came to me through the cartwheels of my ten-year-old daughter who has been doing handstands and backflips in front of the TV for weeks. We watched a documentary about superstar gymnast Simone Biles and her journey from setbacks at the Tokyo Olympics to aiming for Paris 2024. In a house obsessed with art, our only motivation to subscribe to a platform that would stream the Olympics was to find the completion of the Biles story for her. The reward landed much deeper. Together we saw the first all-black Olympic gymnastics podium in history with Jordan Chiles and Simone Biles from the USA bowing playfully to gold winner Rebeca Andrade from Brazil. Holding hands with uplifted arms, medals gleaming and glinting and dangling from their bodies, their joys were tangible, and multiple. For my daughter, the joy lay in seeing black girls, like herself, conquer the world.
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Ceremony, 2020
I showed my child the gymnasts in the paintings of artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, who was born in New York and is of South African descent. Athletes in celebratory or connecting moments beyond the full flex of their sport are Nkosi’s signature. She paints the tender experiences of black athletes in structures that have historical white supremacist values. Last year she received the Helgaard Steyn Prize for her work Ceremony, a painting where five young black gymnasts embrace in a huddle. Simple shapes depict the tension of their hair pulled tightly into buns on top of their heads. The light touch of their brown hands connect their bodies offered in tones of pastel orange. They lean towards one another gently. “When I’m painting I’m aware of the possibilities that lie in reimagining history, whether this is my own history or larger global stories and events. Sometimes, I will paint an alternate version of history or a world I would like to see in the future. Other times, I’m simply reflecting on real historical moments that are usually overlooked. In all of these cases, I’m interested in the relationship between storytelling, image-making and the historical imagination. I have a sense that there is transformative, even concrete power in these acts of picturing and sharing a world you want to see,” says Nkosi.
To my daughter, I pointed out how Nkosi’s gymnastics series shows the connection between people. Just as Erasmus advocates for the agency of the background in painting, the space where Nkosi’s figures occur shows up as platforms of historic oppression, but also transforms in front of our eyes by virtue of the loving or pained energy of the black athletes that have come to occupy them.
Exhibition Match. Curated by Phokeng Setai and Alex Richards.
Phokeng Setai and Alex Richards, creators and curators of the project ‘Exhibition Match’, take the art space and its players a step further into motion. This includes actual games between stakeholders in the artosphere. Setai and Richards talk about their love for soccer and how people often discuss sport at opening nights as a way to reconnect before getting into the business of the art at hand. The games attempt to create a connection beyond the pretentious pressures of exhibition openings and fairs.
“It’s the politics at play in sport that has always interested me. With this year’s Olympics, we witnessed the ongoing tension between the French and Argentine football sides, caused by a viral incident of Argentina’s Copa America-winning side last month, singling out France’s players of African heritage. And then the subsequent ‘revenge’ inflicted on them by France beating them in a rough encounter in the quarter-final of the Olympics. But while watching this and other contentious moments at this event, near my TV I have a Thenjiwe Nkosi print depicting a gymnast mid-routine. Seeing this image at the same time as watching the two Americans (Biles and Chiles) celebrating the Brazilian gymnast (Andrade) on the podium felt like many Nkosi paintings, which suggest the potential healing and camaraderie brought through sport”, Richards says.
A bleary-eyed Setai in transit at Addis airport on his way to Lagos wrote: “Whether it’s the creation of a masterpiece or the execution of a flawless performance, both art and sport offer a stage where the best and worst of the human condition are laid bare. When I watch the Olympics or any other sporting event, whether local or international, I am reminded of the power of human free will. The way athletes push each other to greater heights—how iron sharpens iron—resonates deeply with the creative process in the arts. In both, we witness the extraordinary, moments when humans surpass expectations and thrive beyond the reach of nefarious powers. Without sports and the arts, we would lose a crucial understanding of our potential. They show us what it means to be human, to push against our limits, and to strive for something greater. They remind us, in the most vivid ways, of the heights we can reach when we pursue our passions with all our might.”
The Olympic Museum started the Olympian Artists Programme in 2018, wherein Olympic and Paralympic athletes create and present new works and contribute to special Olympic-inspired projects. For 2024 the Museum in collaboration with the City of Paris invited eight Olympians and one Paralympian artist to participate in a community programme in the social centre of the city. Five of the ‘art athletes’ took up residence in Paris for a week during the games to implement collaborative art projects.
Luc Abalo paints
Olympian artist Luc Abalo, who won the Olympic gold in 2008, 2012 and 2020, wanted to be an artist before he became a world-champion handball player. About the Paris programme, he said: “We arrived here with our canvases, paintings and pictures and produced some beautiful works. They were so happy, it really touched me. You shouldn’t be afraid to do things and at the end of the day, you’re pleased with yourself when you’ve done it. So I was delighted to see people who were afraid to paint, express themselves.” I could not help but laugh happily when I read that like any other artist, he always continued to practice his painting whenever he had the time.
For myself, who like most artists and athletes spends more time in practice than reaping any glory, I loved the words of Chinese diver and Olympian artist Min Gao who paints calligraphy. Gao won gold in Seoul in 1988 and Barcelona in 1992. “In 2018, I brought together more than 130 Olympic champions to create the Star Power Charity Foundation in Beijing. We go to schools all over the country to promote our mantra: ‘Be your own champion’. Real sporting spirit comes from failure, which takes more courage than winning. Sport cultivates our attitude towards failure and gives us the courage to persevere.”
