{"id":266,"date":"2005-06-20T09:36:37","date_gmt":"2005-06-20T17:36:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/06\/jock_art.html"},"modified":"2005-06-20T09:36:37","modified_gmt":"2005-06-20T17:36:37","slug":"jock_art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/06\/jock_art.html","title":{"rendered":"Jock Art"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Move over Peter Max! The New York Art World is now at the forefront of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/06\/19\/fashion\/sundaystyles\/19SPORT.html?ex=1276833600&#038;en=594ab56bda7b1b22&#038;ei=5090&#038;partner=rssuserland&#038;emc=rss\">Jock Art<\/a>, a bizarro movement in which a Jugs Football Machine becomes performance art! No one ever figured fielding punts could be so outre:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>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.<\/p>\n<p>Tim Laun with his &#8220;Hang Time,&#8221; a performance-art piece.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I love seeing that perfect arc and perfect spiral,&#8221; Mr. Laun said a little dreamily, as he loaded another Wilson into the machine.<\/p>\n<p>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: &#8220;Hang Time.&#8221; As part of an exhibition called &#8220;Sport&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s that suspended moment in the game when no one can touch the ball,&#8221; Mr. Laun said as another ball sailed skyward. &#8220;And that person waiting and looking for the ball, they look like the depictions of rapture in Renaissance paintings.&#8221;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sliding_into_the_abyss_of_elitism_pretentiousness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}