While the game, at first blush, looked like lacrosse for sociopathic 9-year-olds, whiffle hurling, Russotti said, constitutes art because its smirky costumes (ruffled collars, Indian dhotis) and team names (St Brendan’s Reformatory for Incorrigible Self-Knowing) subvert the conventions of sportsdom. And by throwing artists and stockbrokers on the same field, he said, both are forced to explore new identities.
“If you go to a gallery show, there will be the artist in the corner and the rich financier people, but they don’t have to deal with each other,” he said. In a game, “their personalities come out really quickly.”
He is surprised by how Type-A stock traders enthusiastically tap their inner surrealist and hit the field in uniforms with sombreros or Pele-era short shorts. Conversely, mild-mannered artists can turn cutthroat. One player, an animation artist, is “the prototypical vegetarian Williamsburg hipster,” Russotti said, “but when you put him out on the field, he goes berserk.”
As players swung their bats like medieval maces, the air filled with the thwack of plastic on plastic, and plastic on flesh. Unlike most art, the risks in art-sports are physical, not emotional, said one participant, Martha Clippinger, 26, a painter and sculptor in Brooklyn.
Still, there are limits. “With no health care,” she added, “I’m being a little more careful with my dives these days.”
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