Artistic and athletic achievement may have much in common

Last weekend I had the opportunity to join a group of athletes taking on 13 Peaks, the challenge designed by SA trail-running superstar Ryan Sandes.

This band of hardy souls, representing investment platform Easy Equities, covered more than 100km of mountainous terrain across the Cape Peninsula in four days. I was lucky to get just a little taster, sampling three peaks with them.

Conversation on the trail is wide-ranging, from practical considerations to deeply personal disclosures; over a few cold beers once you’re down from the slopes, things take a philosophical turn. Combine this with the fatigue that follows thousands of metres of ascent and descent — along with a general sense of astonishment and wonder at Sandes’s ability to do all this and more without breaking a sweat — and it’s hardly surprising that some members of our group found ourselves musing over the aesthetics of watching him skip over boulders as if these were pebbles.

When it was revealed that I have a moonlighting career as an arts columnist, I had to answer the question: “Is Ryan Sandes an artist?”

The answer depends on whether you think of art in terms of intention and process (an artist identifying what they do as making art) or in terms of interpretation and effect (an observer finding meaning or beauty in what someone else is making or has made). And, of course, there is lots of room for ambiguity here.

Phenomenologically, the experiences of artistic and athletic achievement — that is to say, what it “feels like” to be or to watch, by turns, an artist and a sportsperson at work — may have much in common. But sport and art are often presented as opposing categories of human activity.

Both carry unearned stigma, and both are unfairly placed into narrow social boxes: the tired playground clichés of “jocks” and “nerds”, of “sporty types” and “creative types”, projected into life beyond school where they are reinforced as marketable tropes that inform consumer (and thus citizen) behaviour.

It was a desire to resolve my internalised adolescent sense of this manufactured conflict that led me, in 2010, to commission and edit a collection of essays under the title Sport versus Art: A South African Contest. The contributors to this volume tackled the topic from various angles, but it was difficult to get to the nub of the matter. At any rate, the book was drowned out by the noise that came with hosting the Fifa World Cup —a fate that befell all artistic and literary endeavour that year.

Indeed, broadly speaking, it is a fate suffered by almost any arts initiative trying to compete with sport for the attention of sponsors, the government and the public at large. Though it may be appealing for the reasons I sketched above to include them under the same banner, as ostensibly happens in our national department of sport, arts & culture, the reality is that state ineptitude and indifference punish the arts much harder than almost any sporting code.

This reinscription of material asymmetry between sport and the arts starts at the top, with the failings of the minister, Nathi Mthethwa; it spreads all the way through provincial and regional structures, statutory bodies and individual rotten-egg deployments. Corporate sponsors and media attention provide some oversight — again, far more often with sport than with the arts — but many of the most egregious transgressions are not caught in the spotlight, or are so insidious that they don’t make headlines.

A recent exception to this rule is the act of piracy committed by the Northern Cape department of sport, arts & culture: an episode that has been covered by numerous publications, as well as being widely circulated on social media, but only because author Sabata-mpho Mokae protested vocally and persistently. Mokae’s novel Moletlo wa Manong was photocopied for official distribution because someone at the department was either ignorant of or simply ignored basic principles of intellectual property.

Incidents like this are compounded by concern over the drafting of SA’s updated copyright laws, which provide little protection for writers and artists. They are underscored, however, by sustained neglect on the part of the dreaded department of sport, arts & culture.

Sadly, the question “Is Ryan Sandes an artist?” is best answered by asking another question: “Is he treated like a poor cousin?”