Jock Art

Move over Peter Max! The New York Art World is now at the forefront of Jock Art, a bizarro movement in which a Jugs Football Machine becomes performance art! No one ever figured fielding punts could be so outre:

Last Sunday, Tim Laun crouched down behind his Jugs Football Machine, a large blue metal tripod with two whirling white tires on top, and loaded a National Football League-size Wilson ball into the breach. With a single swift motion and sudden thwap, the ball was arcing over the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens: a perfect imitation of the trajectory of an N.F.L. punt. Four and a half seconds later, the ball thudded onto a square of freshly sodded grass painted with hash marks, like a swatch from a football field, as a group of neighborhood kids watched in perplexed wonder.

Tim Laun with his “Hang Time,” a performance-art piece.

“I love seeing that perfect arc and perfect spiral,” Mr. Laun said a little dreamily, as he loaded another Wilson into the machine.

Though the act of firing footballs with a Jugs machine takes place routinely on the practice fields of America as a way of training punt returners, his project is not a mundane part of preseason practice. To hear Mr. Laun, a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan from Wisconsin and an adjunct professor of art at Hunter College, tell it, it is a work of art: one with a specific title: “Hang Time.” As part of an exhibition called “Sport” at the sculpture park, Mr. Laun is firing football after football into the blue sky with the Empire State Building and the East River in the background. Those willing to sign a waiver can attempt to catch the machine-generated punts. But if no one is around, Mr. Laun is content to fire his footballs to no one at all.

“It’s that suspended moment in the game when no one can touch the ball,” Mr. Laun said as another ball sailed skyward. “And that person waiting and looking for the ball, they look like the depictions of rapture in Renaissance paintings.”