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Jason Keats 's artwork confounds traditional cultural stereotypes of male embodiment. The artist achieves this through of himself as inadequate, susceptible, and/or receptive (to pain). He represents the male body as malleable and open, in an articulation of differing and changing 'masculinities'.1 Keats explores these ideas in video, video projection, sound and the live body. His performances Ball (1998) and Bag (1998) engaged the performative character of Australian Rules football within the sporting arena. In both performances the male body was presented, in effect, as 'passive' or incapable.
Performed at the Whitten Oval, Footscray Ball focused upon the pervasive nature of football within
Australian culture. Like his father, Keats had played football for a number of years. He was intrigued by the sound and behaviour of figures in the sporting arena and how the space implicitly sanctions aggressive behaviour (a regard for architectural space as a determining factor in defining social identity).2 In many respects football is diametrically opposed, as a category, to art. By bringing together the 'sport' and 'art', Keats created a dialogue in which both cultural institutions interacted and, ultimately, critiqued one another. The male body oscillated within this space, a space marked by the Western bulldog 's heritage (oval, uniform and tradition) and the expectation of artistic expression. There was, however, no display of physical prowess or heroic action (except ironically in the footy cards available after the event where the artist was captured in a variety of 'winning' poses). As a result the image of the Australian Rules footballer, an archetypal sporting hard 'body', was problematised.
This complicated articulation of the body and subjectivity was performed in the change rooms and on the oval. After