Insight - Sports Science Volume 1 Issue 1 | 2019 | 1 Post Modern Art in Relation to Sport Daniel Shorkend Wizo-Ner Bloomenfeld School of Design, Israel Abstract: In this article, I develop the implications of the Post Modern "language turn" first for art and then applied to sport. The combined idea of ineffability and meaninglessness seems to pervade art and post-modern sports. There is a sense of heightened body culture in contemporary sports that draws from a philosophical and art-aesthetic her-itage. I then end with a model that suggests the dialectic between art and sport that i believe could be a sub section or parralell the better known relationship, namely that between sport and science or sports science. Keywords: Postmodernism, Art, Sport, Aesthetics, Meaninglessness, Inclusivity, Dialectic If one takes as a starting point the post structural shift marked by the “language turn” that meaning is de- centred, de-ferred, mere traces rather than locate the meaning of the word (or image for that matter) as corre- sponding with a particular referent or interpretation, then culture begins to reflect that in terms of plurality of dis- courses and narra-tives, detotalising, inclusivity and at the same time a relativism, and a lack of core identity. The “language turn” has implications as far as art (theory and practice) is concerned within postmodern culture, namely the duality of, on the one hand, detotalising crea- tive play and ineffability, and/or, on the other hand, a potential sense of meaninglessness. Sport, as one in- stance of postmodern culture, likewise can be viewed via the lens of the “language turn”, especially as it, like art, is not necessarily an “authentic” expression, a natural and innocent game (an original point), but is embedded in a culture where commodification, consumerism and idealistic image-construction is the order of the day. Nevertheless, sport may offer much in the way of articu- lating bonds between people over-and-above native tongue. Consequently, as with art, one may discern the place of sport in postmodern culture as engendering the dual aspects of 1) ineffability and/or 2) meaninglessness. I shall explicate these concerns below using specific sports to make things clearer and take as an axiom that art whose handmaiden is often philosophy also exhibits these features or more precisely because it does it is no surprise that other cultural expressions do so likewise. 1. Postmodern art The “language turn” and Derrida‟s postulate of the “other” of language, means that the postmodern paradigm un- der-mines notions of the “grand narrative” or a me- ta-narrative. In this light Connor (1992:120) writes: “Postmodernism rejects foundationalism, essentialism and transcendentalism…truth as correspondence and representational knowledge…they reject realism, final vocabulary and canonical descriptions”. Thus, this deto- talising means that what is significant about art and in- deed the very reason art serves a useful function that need not be reinterpreted and translated “back” and “into” language, is precisely because of a quality that cannot be articulated, namely its ineffability. In this respect one can also speak art as eliciting metaphorical language (1). In addition, there is a certain freedom and “play” (2) that this “spatial other” allows, in a sense, that signs and symbols now function within a framework that is not centred in a definitive language or a system of “given signification” or as a description of an already theorized “reality”. Finally, the “play” (struggle) of language and its “other” means that postmodern art and culture seek to restore imbalances, rather than the valorisation of one term to the exclusion of another, and so seek the “voice” of the silenced “other” and an agenda of inclusivity (3). These three notions will be developed below as aspects of the “other” or in verbal terms, the ineffable. 2. Methods and results Copyright © 2019 Daniel Shorkend doi: 10.18282/iss.v1i1.179 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.