Johan Huizinga’s phrase “magic circle” circumscribes cultural fields whose logic manifests itself in rules and rituals that mark a distance from normative societal orders. At the same time, the economic and political realities surrounding the “magic circle” act upon it, are renegotiated within it, and sometimes result in rule changes of the sort that this issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST scrutinizes by comparing two of the practices that Huizing approaches with his concept: art and sports. The following observations and reflections examine a variety of historical moments and cultural phenomena, including Impressionism’s revolt against the academic disciplining of art; physical-performance-focused artistic practices that dismantle misogynistic traditions; platform capitalism’s effects on the politics of the body supported by digital technology; and the use of technically generated imagery to enforce fairness in sports competition.

Taking guidance from a series of additional terms that unpack aspects of the phenomena outlined by Huizinga, we drew up a match plan for the 139th round of TZK. Orit Gat and Lucas Edward Plazek were on hand with advice; our gratitude goes to them, as well as to all the ­contributors, who kept the ball rolling from the first training session to the concluding analysis:

TRAINING (Florentina Holzinger with Caroline Lillian Schopp) – Florentina Holzinger’s artistic work may be undisciplined in the sense that it refuses to be shoehorned into any single genre, but it builds on rigorous physical as well as conceptual preparations. The intensity of her ensemble’s performances would be impossible to sustain without purposeful training. Similarly, Holzinger’s feminist critique of misogynistic tropes could not hit home if her engagement with sources from the history of art and culture, on which her works are based, were merely a recontextualizing rehash.

FAIR PLAY (Andrea Bowers and Gabriel Kuhn) – Values that are central to modern sports such as respect and fairness have made an enthusiasm for sports compatible with leftist political convictions. Still, as a European civilizational project, competitive athleticism remains imbued with its colonial, capitalist, and ­heteropatriarchal history. As CJ Jones and Travers note in their preface to “The Sports Issue” (May 2023) of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, it is therefore hardly surprising that the bodies of trans women athletes are among the foremost targets of right-wing forces. Andrea Bowers has long made art – her series #sweetjane (2014) is a characteristic example – to counter misogynistic arguments and actions that continue to define the athletic field, and that are still socially sanctioned off the pitch as well.

FOUL (Gertrud Koch, Max-Jacob Ost, and Volker Schürmann, with Leonie Huber) – Fair conditions must be ensured for all entrants: This bedrock principle of athletic contests entails the egalitarian enforcement of rules and penalization of infractions. With the introduction of video review systems, the corresponding decision-­making in tennis, rugby, and cricket – and, since 2018, in football – has increasingly been ­supported by technology. Visual data is evaluated to mitigate the fallibility of human judgment in verdicts about instances of foul play, offsides, or handballs, shifting the locus of evidence, which is central to the game’s affective dimension, from the observation of the live action on the field to the analysis of these technical images.

RISK (Jules Pelta Feldman) – Rules of the game in sports do not necessarily preclude brutality; on the contrary, in disciplines like American football, brute force is a key element. Having been exposed to the dangers of the gridiron when he was a teenager, Matthew Barney has repeatedly engaged with the violent sport in his decades-long career. His artistic approach to the risk of sports injuries presents an opportunity to reconsider the correlation between performance art and athletics as potentially precarious uses of the body.

GOAL (Harmon Siegel) – Historically, artistic disciplines were guided by evaluation criteria and objectives that were just as clearly defined and authoritatively enforced as those of athletic disciplines. In the latter, protest can quickly result in disqualification; in the arts, by contrast, modernism established comparable rule-breaking as a way for a competitor to secure their place in the avant-garde. And unlike on a racecourse, the creative vanguard’s trajectory can always be determined only in retrospect: If Édouard Manet’s Les Courses à Longchamp (1866) may have looked unfinished to contemporary ­beholders, art historians today tally it as a stage win for ­modernist painting.

TRACKING (Georgina Voss) – The ­numerical recording and digital processing of physical exertions and processes has long ceased to be accessible only to professional athletes. ­Millions of people now use apps like Strava to track their hobbyist fitness regimes. The body of data molded by digital aggregation and evaluation in turn affects physical realities. US soldiers going for runs, for example, have revealed the ­locations of secret military sites. And when a user’s understanding of their own body is shaped by virtual technology, that opens the door to new forms of heteronomy, as the debate around period-tracking apps in light of restrictive ­abortion laws illustrates.

ANALYSIS (Peter L’Official) – In art criticism, the impassioned public presentation of ­arguments has been on the wane; sports journalists and commentators, by contrast, show little restraint in making bold judgment. And sports vouchsafe what is increasingly a rare feat in art: a ­collective experience. A conjunction of the two fields, ­however, as in a project by LJ Rader, reveals surprising analogies. On his social media accounts under the handle @ArtButMakeItSports, Rader presents pairs of images that provide art historical commentary on current sporting events or bring out formal parallels to prompt a comparative reflection on the social dimensions of both fields.

Despite continual capitalist co-optation and neoliberal self-optimization, art and sports, as the thesis of this issue argues, preserve the potential to reframe perspectives on body, identity, and society through performative, aesthetic, and affective modes of expression.

Leonie Huber, Antonia Kölbl, and Anna Sinofzik

Translation: Gerrit Jackson