Artists Luke George and Daniel Kok work with rope as a metaphor for social relations. At the NGV on Sunday, they re-created a famous mark from AFL history by suspending five football players from ropes attached to the ceiling in the Great Hall.
To create Still Lives: Making a Mark, they pored through every AFL Mark of the Year over the decades as well as asking footballers for their input. In the end, they chose to depict Andrew Krakouer’s Mark of the Year from 2011.
The suspended football players in the Great Hall of the NGV on Sunday. Credit:Luis Ascui
“It’s a pack mark, a whole group of players mushed together. Krakouer is doing a hanger, and jumped off another player’s shoulders. It looked like a historical sculpture or painting,” says George, adding he and Kok were also drawn to Krakouer himself and his narrative with footy, which is “really complex and really inspiring”.
Krakouer, a Minang and Inggarda man, appeared as a guest of honour at the show. The artists were keen for him “to witness what his legacy means” and were commissioned to create the work as part of the Rising festival.
By tying people and objects up in different places, the artists aim to reveal the relationships between them and inspire conversation. Kok, from Singapore, and George, a Melburnian, met in 2014 at an art residency in Sydney. They liked the idea of rope as a medium that speaks about social bonds, human connections and tensions. “There’s a lot of puns that come with rope tying, rope porn,” quips Kok.
Andrew Krakoeur and Leon Davis during their time at Collingwood.Credit:Sebastian Constanzo
In Venice, in 2017, they tied up a gondola and a gondolier over three hours, to an accompanying soundtrack of love songs. “Still Lives Melbourne is us taking this idea forward, really thinking about the AFL as an iconic emblem of the city of Melbourne,” Kok says. “And how everyone whether or not they are a fan has something to say about it.“
The Melbourne work explores what each of the players identifies with in the game and what underpins their relationship to it. The players suspended were Annie Mack, Jason Ball, Jasper Pittard, Jim Marks and Simona Castricum, all of whom have played Australian rules at one level or another, be it AFL or community level, and have different perspectives on the game.
Running alongside the human sculpture, video portraits showed them speaking about issues such as homophobia in the game, sexism, transphobia, environmental activism and Indigenous representation.
“All these different lines of connection and relationship are revealed,” says Kok. “We’re also thinking about how people are brought together in the space of the NGV. Each of the players brings their own teammates. [There’s an] art audience which doesn’t intersect with the sports world, rope people and people from the queer community.”
George says neither artist knew much about rope bondage initally; they learnt the process together. It became a narrative to explore the body and consent and intimacy. For him, it’s an ongoing conversation. Of all the projects he’s ever done, this has probably been the easiest to explain.
“People get it straight away; it sparks their curiosity and inspires them in some way,” he says. “For us as two queer artists who have almost nothing to do with football, to use it to bridge a gap, that is the big, interesting challenge of this project.”
Kok says there is an enlightening conversation that comes with the piece. “We get a real sense of how culture is defined specifically in Melbourne. People don’t come and watch football with the explicit intention of celebrating Melbourne culture, but it becomes clear that it is a very, very meaningful relationship.”
Viewers might wonder whether being tied up like the footballers would hurt, he says.
“They are probably trying to sense what the experience is like. It’s not just a visual experience but also one of empathy.”
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