Paris Dispatch: Art Has a Sporting Chance at the Olympics

This week, the 2024 Summer Olympic Games opens in Paris with a ceremony containing a flotilla ferrying 10,500 athletes and delegates down the Seine in a celebration of all things sports. It will be the first time an Olympic ceremony has taken place outside of a stadium, and it aims to attract a larger audience closer to the action. I’ve heard a rumour that the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, and unpopular president, Emmanuel Macron, will literally be in the river.  

Meanwhile, the city’s art foundations, galleries and institutions have responded to the proposition of the Games, offering either complimentary programming with oblique references to sports or thematic exhibitions that address it head-on. Paris was reasonably quiet when I visited, as many of the city’s year-round inhabitants travel south for summer breaks. The spectre of the Olympics seems to have somewhat deterred the regular tourists who would typically fill the streets this time of year. However, there is a mixed atmosphere of excited anticipation and mild frustration amongst those who remain as metal barriers create a firm perimeter around the banks of the Seine, Louvre Museum and Tuileries Gardens.

When I sit down to speak with Suzanne Pagé, the artistic director of Fondation Louis Vuitton, she tells me that artists and athletes have more in common than we might realize, with both occupations requiring discipline and a honing of craft. This notion of producing exceptional feats and scaling new heights appears in the Fondation’s exhibition, ‘The Collection: A Sports Meeting’, mainly Abraham Poincheval’s epic film Marche sur les nuages (Walk on Clouds, 2019), which occupies an entire wall. In the artwork, Poincheval traverses pillowy clouds while exceptionally dangling from a hot air balloon via wires. The show’s standout piece is Olympic Rings (1985), a collaborative work by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. It’s notable here that Warhol’s hand-painted contribution to the canvas is usual in his catalogue as he returned to the brush instead of silkscreen printing in his late career. Basquiat included a bold, mask-like head amidst Warhol’s Olympic rings, referencing African-American athletes like Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis.

It’s clear that contemporary artists and curators are interested in contending with the politics of sports

Matthew Barney’s show at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art addresses prescient ideas of ageing bodies. It contains his recent five-channel film installation, Secondary (2023), and two rooms of videos and sculptures from his ‘Drawing Restraint’ (1987–ongoing) series. The wall text for the former indicates how the film’s participants are primarily older athletes, who appear in sections of the footage to pour liquid bronze into moulds in a workshop environment. Choreographed with movement director David Thomson, the work is an elaborate dance that touches on notions of physical exertion, pressure, consistency, memory, trauma and age – all considerations athletes and artists share. 

The city’s commercial galleries have also responded to the arrival of the Games, with Almine Rech and Gagosian amongst those offering thematic group shows. The former presents ‘Sport and Beyond’, a small exhibition featuring works by Jeff Koons, Laurie Simmons and Hank Willis Thomas; the latter ‘The Art of the Olympics’, a tasteful two-part show organized in association with the Olympic Museum, Lausanne, containing works by Christo, Andreas Gursky and others. Elsewhere, once you’ve negotiated the Cultural Olympiad’s near-impossible-to-use website, there are music festivals, workshops (including one at the Rodin Museum) and dance-related performances programmed into September. 

The Games is a behemoth thing whose arrival and execution are predicated on the assumption that everyone cares about it. Admittedly, many of the people I spoke to were understandably reluctant to disclose the long-term or zoomed-out impact of the event on the city’s art scene. However, it’s clear that contemporary artists and curators are interested in contending with the politics of sports. (I often see themes of masculinity and sexuality in football addressed in art, such as in works by JJ Guest and Gray Wielebinski.) It feels that practitioners can use the art arena to reflect on sports’ social and ideological dimensions in a way that its governing bodies seldom allow. The organizers hope that the energy generated by the Games and its associated events can create a mutual exchange between the disciplines. However, it remains to be seen how much art could influence an audience gathered primarily to watch the athletes. 

From July 25 to August 3, Abraham Poincheval will be inside a bottle for the performance of La Bouteille (The Bottle) near Jardin de l’écluse

‘The Collection: A Sports Meeting’ is Fondation Louis Vuitton until 09 September 

Matthew Barney is at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art until 08 September 

‘The Art of the Olympics’ is Gagosian until 07 September 

‘Sport and Beyond’ is at Almine Rech until 17 August 

^{Main image: Abraham Poincheval, Marche sur les nuages (Walk on Clouds), 2019, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris}