Exploring Melbourne's Connection to Sport (Through Bondage)

In the NGV’s Great Hall five figures are suspended by ropes, forming a strangely familiar tableau. Some may recognise the figures as Aussie rules footballers. Some may recognise the tableau they’re pulled into it’s a famous mark from a particular AFL game. And some may recognise that the five figures are bound in ropes using techniques borrowed from the BDSM community.

This is Still Lives: Melbourne a performance artwork series from Luke George and Daniel Kok. We caught up with the artists to discuss how their work explores Melbourne’s connection to sport, and football’s difficult relationship with queerness.

How did you come to be interested in working with rope?

George: Daniel and I met in 2014. We were brought into an arranged artistic collaboration, like a blind date. We thought it would be fun to learn something together, so we went to a weekend rope bondage class. We were terrible at it, but it was interesting to think about rope as a medium to explore the relationships and the tensions between people: between artists, and between the person tying and the person being tied. What does it mean to watch someone tying someone else up? Is the spectator part of the bondage in a way?

Kok: It’s not just an intimate thing between two people – it’s its own subculture that’s often performed. We were intrigued by this. When you watch something that’s intimate between two people, what are you really invited to see? When a person is tied up, you see the person differently. They’re almost like a parcel or a gift, to be looked at. This subject/object is a little confused.

The name Still Lives is from painting an arrangement of still objects – but often it’s about what the painter imbues into the object. You might be discussing religion and morality through a painting of fruit in a bowl, or a bunch of flowers. We’re exploring what happens when you turn somebody or some object into symbols or icons, indicative of the place or time you’re in. What you’re tying up isn’t just the person.

How did you land on footy as a subject?
George: With the Still Lives series we always refer back to the city, the context, the place, the time we’re working in. In Venice we worked with gondolas, and their relationship to rope. It’s a cultural symbol that means a lot to the place. For Melbourne, it’s about what the footy means to Melburnians, and what it says about the social politics of people in Melbourne. You can connect the dots across the city in so many ways. Whether you like football or not, you’re connected to it in this place.

I went to a couple of games last year, and it’s incredible. The feeling of being there in a packed stadium... there’s nothing like it. Time is a big part of it. It’s a very fast game. In just one second you feel the whole stadium gasp in that moment of the mark. That moment is fleeting. Everyone understands it. We want to play with that, to suspend time, to reproduce that fleeting moment.

What was it like crossing over from the art world into football culture?

George: As a queer person I have a distant, almost traumatic relationship with AFL. I don’t follow it, but I have a connection through family, and an appreciation for the game. But I don’t have a team. I’m agnostic.

Kok: I’ve been to Australia a lot [Kok lives in Singapore], but I’m not even agnostic. I know nothing about it. We’re trying to use the fact that we don’t know much.

George: It’s quite personally challenging going into AFL players’ spaces. How do I talk to this person? It’s a different culture, a different language. But there are many queers who love football, and many that play, in pub footy, amateur league, and women’s football. Those were our entry points.

There’s this moment in football around racism, sexism and homophobia in the game. People really want it to change, and it’s changing slowly. We’re working with [former Yarra Glen player] Jason Ball [both a consultant and a performer]. He was the first guy to come out in the culture, and is now an activist.

I feel like AFLW has dragged that aspect of the sport into the present. It’s not even an issue in AFLW. But there is not a single out male AFL player.

It’s important to remember that [the players we’re working with] aren’t just guns for hire. They’re humans with stories and agency. It’s a collaboration. They have to want to be involved. So we have eased into it. The players have taught me how to kick. And I slowly introduced them to the idea of being tied up.

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