Matej Andraž Vogrinčič: Sports and Chess

4 September - 5 October 2014
Museum plaza in front of +MSUM

Curator: Igor Španjol

You are kindly invited to attend the opening of Matej Andraž Vogrinčič's project Sports and Chess on Thursday 4 September at 8 p.m. in the plaza outside the +MSUM.

Since the early 1990s, Vogrinčič (b. 1970 in Ljubljana) has been carrying out site-specific interventions in urban and natural environments. He has won international recognition with installations that take into account local specificities, tradition, and history, filling ordinary or degraded spaces with mundane objects. The fundamental point of departure in Vogrinčič?s approach is always a site that allows him to change his concept during the process of the work. Works often refer directly to the local context and communities that become actively involved in the realization of the project(s), or rather, the transformation of the site(s).

Sports and Chess, installed over some 300 square meters of the plaza in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM), is formally a sequel to the ambivalent incision into a landscape that Vogrinčič and Vuk Ćosić carried out in 2008, in their project of reconstructing the floor plan of architect Jože Plečnik's house of birth for Moderna galerija's exhibition Museum in the Streets. The current work brings to the fore the visual instrumentarium of multi-purpose sports courts in a special intervention: unlike usual courts, where the lines are painted in different colors directly on the ground, the outlines of courts for football, basketball, volleyball, handball, and badminton are here three-dimensional and made of shiny aluminum - not to be used for sports, but just to be observed.

Despite the proverbial incompatibility of art and sport and the stereotypes surrounding the two, there is a great deal of both the creative and the irrational in sport, and a lot of timing and strategy in art. A larger part of sports-related and artistic activities occur outside the mainstream. When analyzing the two - especially from the vantage point of both the leisure industry and the media - engaging in a pleasurable activity is intermingled with a critical analysis of the system: neither sport nor art can be separated from its production conditions nor the context of reproduction for the viewer/spectator. According to Norbert Elias every sport is a group sport, because it is always about competition between individuals or some form of interpersonal relationship. Seeing sport as a self-contained, self-sufficient cathartic activity would be naive, and the same goes for art production. Contemporary art consists of myriad phenomena that discursively form an integral part of the broader social sphere.

Stressing the significance of the intensity of a match above and beyond victory and the final score has its equivalent in art when the process is given prominence above and beyond the end product. In sports, the encounter must observe prescribed rules; artistic production likewise follows the laws of the art system. On the surface, the rules of the game seem to change over time: in the 19th century the same terms used today (football, painting) were conceived quite differently. On the other hand these changes are merely a matter of form, when, blinded by what we see, we may miss the main point entirely. Essentially, the rules remain the same, because it is the overriding laws that legitimize the activity and shape its very identity.