WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FOURTH?

We’ve seen lots of amazing images of the Paris Olympics in the past week and a bit. The Games does lend itself to great pictures. Yet some of the finest Olympic imagery ever conceived is right here in Sydney – and all but forgotten and not on display. I’m talking about Tracey Moffatt’s 26 screen prints in the series titled Fourth. And the criminally missed opportunity to get them out of mothballs and onto a museum’s walls for a new generation to see and marvel at.

You may or may not know that during the 2000 Sydney Olympics, artist-filmmaker Moffatt was busy photographing events as they happened. Was she a sports nut? Not really. She explained that in 1997 she learned that the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Committee was inquiring about whether she might be interested in being an official photographer for the Games. As with so many bright ideas, nothing came of it, but it planted a seed.

Lara Strongman, of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) has described what happened next.

“It got her thinking: what if she were to be the official photographer? What would be her take on it if she decided to go ahead anyway and photograph the losers?”

Wow. The losers – the ones who missed out on a medal by fractions of a second or a couple of millimeters. What about them? Whoever thinks about them?

That was the inspiration behind Fourth. It’s 26 silkscreen prints of those forgotten ones. Moffatt photographed the winning/losing moments live – but from her television screen! It gave the images a curious mix of artificial and real, particularly as she then faded out the medal winners and enhanced the ones who'd failed in their life's ambition. And when the prints were exhibited at Roslyn Oxley’s gallery in 2001, they proved to be unforgettable.

As reported by Strongman, the artist said: “My photo series Fourth is no great document of the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I think I'm trying to say something grand about competition in general. That it's beautiful to try. That to reach a final at an Olympic Games is a great achievement. To even be invited to participate in the Olympic Games is a great achievement. Even to be athletic in general is a great achievement. To get yourself up and walk down the street is a great achievement. To wake up and face another hideous day [is a great achievement]. To even think about what you're going to do in the next hour, that's a great achievement too.”

Sadly the 26 works have never been exhibited again together and it’s difficult to track down even individual prints on the ‘net. And even sadder, that no one thought about an Olympic celebration here in Sydney – an homage to art and athletics and a nod to Paris. Anyone got a spare couple of walls any time soon?