On Thursday 6 February , South Australian artist, Monte Masi, led a participatory-guided tour of artworks at The Incinerator Gallery. As part of the Exhibition Supporters Group participants barracked for art, like they were at the footy, or the cricket, or the tennis. Gallery attendees were invited to respond to artworks using forms of spectatorship common to the sporting match, teasing out some of the more productive resemblances between sport, art, work, and leisure. Participants were also provided with a snack and a certificate of participation at the end of the tour.

Exhibition Supporters Group reflects on two distinct social forms: the spectatorship of sporting contests and the group critique session that is common in art education. Both these processes of looking involve both viewing and speaking, and produce meaning through shared perception and critical dialogue. These kinds of ‘collective looking’ involve significant labour and are acts of community support and encouragement. These forms work to establish what is present and respond to what is present: the development of a perspective as a form of work. In this sense, this shared looking is connected to commentary, documentary, and history. Fans and teammates support their club through the watching of games and the vocalising of opinions, and the art school critique is seen as an important step in an artist’s development as they receive critical responses from an audience of peers.

Sports have traditionally been positioned as having the potential to create political agency, but also encouraged complicity in existing systems of inequality. As communication itself is increasingly colonised under a paradigm of cognitive capitalism, how can we find a space within which we can come together and truly exercise our own criticality and subjectivity? Can looking at this history of sports - alongside the critical project of contemporary art - help us to envision an expanded, more fantastical notion of what critique actually is, or could be?