“Rook Campbell and Dorit Cypis are colleagues, a professor of sport diplomacy and an artist and mediator, two individuals with different disciplinary codes of reading the world of art and the world of sport. They first met in 2000 at the University of Southern California where Dorit was a professor of Visual Culture in the Art Department and Rook was an undergraduate senior. As Rook was redshirted from athletic competition, forced to sit the remaining competitive season out, she opted for Visual Culture as an elective course, a subject that lastingly shaped and enlivened her political eye, questioning, and
imaginings.

They meet again many years later and continue to engage in the threads of their first conversations, framed this time by “Fútbol: The Beautiful Game,” an art exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art curated by Franklin Sirmans, that juxtaposes art and sport as discourse on life, beauty and ethics – inevitable contradictory ties that bind us together as humans. While Dorit Cypis knows little about the rules of the game of futbol, she reads the rules of the game of art and the artworks as aesthetic codes of cultural representation. While Rook Campbell knows little about the rules of the game of art, she offers socio-political critique on sport code and the international economy of sport that the art works reference. Together Rook and Dorit play with the “rules” of Fútbol: The Beautiful Game to decipher and complicate its representations in Flip, Flop, Foul and Reconciliation.”

Image: Maracanã Stadium, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Updated July 7, 2014