Remember summers filled with sno-cones and going to the pool and games of Wiffle Hurling and Straightjacket Softball? If you say yes you are a liar because Tom Russotti made them up. Equipped with a room filled with “uniforms” and a trunk full of hula-hoop adorned bike helmets, the Brooklyn-based artist is the founder of the Institute of Aesthletics. This is just a fancy way of saying he makes up new sports that don’t bring up old issues of getting picked last for kickball teams or beat up by muscular assholes. And there’s no roid raging or campus murder, so it’s basically a sports utopia. Tom and I caught up on the last leg of his cross-country road trip, destination: the Lab, a San Francisco alternative art space where he will have a four-week residency full of fantastical games. It starts tomorrow.
