John Gill, 'Introduction'
In: Offside! Contemporary Artists and Football. Edited by Tim Wilcox. Manchester: Manchester City Art Galleries in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, pp. 6-19.
During the 1950s the Arts Council mounted a football exhibition which comprised figurative paintings by many leading twentieth century artists of matches in progress and portraits of celebrated players. Offside! presents a markedly different aspect of the same national obsession. Though football continues as a source of ideas and imagery for contemporary artists, few now choose to approach the subject in such a direct and unquestioning way. It is not simply that they seek to problematize their experience of football, but that they are aware of the multiplicity of debates which underscore the game, and that current visual arts practice frees them to approach the subject in new, inventive and perhaps more challenging ways.
This exhibition comprises newly commissioned and recent work by thirteen artists from Argentina, Britain, Colombia and Mexico. The selection procedure included and advertised opportunity for artists to enter proposals for new commissions. Though several artists enjoying international reputations presented an obvious and valuable source of exhibition material, both curator and organisers were concerned to access other artists who were interested in working with the show's ideas and who might not have exhibited widely. The open submission enjoyed a popular and enthusiastic response and several of the proposals which were received have been realised for the exhibition. Using photography, video, painting and installation the exhibiting artists reference the imagery and text of football to explore the cultural environment of the game; the works identify the football stadium as an arena for the public display of national aspirations and anxieties, and the players as focuses of individual and national fantasy.
Roderick Buchanan's Work in Progress, previously shown at Tramway and the Lisson Gallery, is a display of 39 laminated photo-portraits taken in Glasgow, his home city, during 1993-1994. Visiting local five-a-side football pitches in a van with a portable, make-shift studio, Buchanan photographed players wearing Milanese shirts. At this exhibition he will field Glaswegian teams in the blue and black, and red and black of A C Milan and Inter Milan. In its effect on the visitor, this is probably the most immediately arresting and confusing work in the show; confronted with the familiar - players posed for publicity shots and presented together as a team - the spectator is at ease with the installation until the realisation that these are not Italian men. What city or nation do they represent if not Milan? After searching the physiognomy of the group for clues, for national characteristics etched in bone, and failing, we scrutinise the shirt and realise that apparel is only a fleeting indicator of preference and loyalty, to be worn with pride and to be discarded in a moment. We are reminded of this by Nick Waplington who has created four large scale photographs based on team portraits available to the mass market as collectable stickers. The subjects of Best of British are foreign nationals in British teams. The photographic process used here corrupts and remakes the image, and offers multiple choices fo the representation of the team player. In a sporting culture which facilitates the purchase of city clubs by other cities, as in States' basketball, and where players move between clubs nationally and internationally, these two sets of photographs are a portentous reminder of the transience and ambivalence of loyalties.
For Buchanan's new work, Ten in a Million, the seventh short video in a series which has included Budapest, Nantes, Glasgow, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam, he filmed the environment of 10 amateur pitches in Manchester from the central circle with a video camera on a slow revolve. Shown together the works are hypnotic and compelling; the silent, empty pitches at the heart of parkland or wasteland, housing or industrial estates, demolition and building sites, are impassively recorded under leaden skies or bright sunlight. Martin Vincent and David Mackintosh present a contrasting view of game sites, more particularly stadia, which dominate their environments by physical scale an by he roar of the crowd. During March, the collaborative artists, who recently worked on Video Positive 1995, made a brief but hectic visit to Germany to film each of the German first division stadia. Bundesliga (One World Cup and Two World Wars...) is a newly commissioned video made by hand-held camera from a moving car. The artists keep up a dialogue during the filming, discussing the team they are visiting, German football, English and German culture, and much else. Bundesliga visits the sites of cultural exchange; because of Bayern and United, the distance between Munich and Manchester is less than European geography indicates.
In an attempt to realise the British conceit that war is simply another game, Crispin Jones presents a simple photograph of one of the footballs which Capt. W P Nevill used at the Battle of the Somme, and provides a brief eyewitness account. Nevill brought four footballs, one for each of his platoons, and offered a prize to the first platoon to kick its ball up to the German trenches during the first wave of the assault near Montaubon: 'As the gun-fire died away I saw an infantry man climb onto the parapet into no-man's-land, beckoning others to follow. As he did so he kicked off a football; a good kick, the ball rose and travelled well towards the German lines. That seemed to be the signal to attack' (Pte. L S Price quoted in M Middlebrook The First Day on the Somme, New York 1972). Jones has photographed Captain Nevill's football which is now in the collection of The Queen's Royal Surrey Regimental Museum, Guildford, and reproduced large scale it achieves an iconic power.
Ultras, the installation of 66 canvasses by Adam Beebee, represents the banners of Italian football fans. Like other artists in the exhibition Beebee is an ardent football supporter and was drawn to Italian fans as the most 'passionate, frenzied and colourful'. Italian football clubs have up to five fan groups called Ultras ('utmost'); each group has its own name, often chosen to signify strength and danger, such as Hooligans, Skins, Furiosi and Bad Boys. The groups are loosely federated, have a monthly magazine, Supertifo and are usually twinned, different Ultra groups standing together at matches against the opposing team. Only the Juventus Ultras stand alone! In these circumstances the Ultras' colours acquire a strategic importance in the display of support and opposition. The work reproduces the flags or standards of the 66 dominant groups associated with Italy's 23 leading teams. The designs are based on team badges and team colours, and represent for example Juventus' Vikings, Lazio's Eagles, and Milan's Commandos. The canvasses were conceived as a single installation and are shown closely grouped and in the order the supported teams finished in the Italian League in the 1994-95 season.
This is the first occasion on which the Argentinian artist Rosana Fuertes, has shown in Britain. She showed her vast installation Pasión de multitudes, imaginary football shirt designs on small, shaped boards, at the Havana Biennale in 1994. Though the work's monumentality impresses, it is the particularity of reference within each piece which preoccupies the observer. There are ironical political allusions, and also highly personal and tender homages to painters and friends. This 'codex of reminiscence', to use Gustavo Buntinx's description, moves across a range of decorative reference from heraldic to comic. Reproduced on the printed page, the shirts resemble mail-order advertisements for team strips, but your choice of purchase will not be a purely aesthetic decision. Fuertes presents a 'codex' of personal reference which you may buy into, but your preference will be informed by entirely individual preoccupations and separate cultural histories. The Glaswegian players in Buchanan's photographs choose to wear the shirts of Italian football clubs because of the associations vividly signified by the blue and red stripes and the team badges. A field of colour, Fuertes' small shirts may appear merely decorative, and the regular template may harmonise the whole, but constituent parts insist on discovery and the observer is inevitably drawn into the search.
Lucy Gunning remade her video The Footballers at Manchester City Art Galleries in the space which accommodates Offside! shortly before the exhibition opened. The film, shown on a surveillance monitor outside the main exhibition space, shows two women kicking a football around the deserted gallery interior. In this, as in other videos by Gunning, women occupy spaces by participating in unfamiliar activities. They are wearing white coats, like doctors or medical attendants, and present a curious aspect to passers-by. Such illicit pleasures, presented as if accidentally for the scrutiny of gallery visitors, fascinate but are uneasily witnessed; similarly popular culture has, in the past, been excluded from positive relationships with 'high art'. For many the notion of football as a subject for fine art may be legitimised by the presence of respected artists in major public galleries, but for others the 'passion of the multitude' will never find appropriate expression in the protected sanctuaries of national culture. Just as other works in the exhibition point to the pitch as a highly charged and defended space, occupied by the privileged few and observed by the many, so Gunning's short video precipitates a sense of outrage at the desecration of the gallery space and of envy of these unknown women who have access and opportunity.
Gabriel Kuri made commemorative pieces on previous occasions. He is fascinated by the emotional build up to major sports events and all the attendant hype. Kuri ironises the transience of the event in temporary structures which resemble market stalls. He collects discarded fruit boxes from the neighborhood of the gallery and constructs stands which display phoney merchandise. The 'stock' is labelled with the imaginary logo of a future international football championship in place of the usual brand and country of origin. His last structure was laden with 80 coconuts, and Manchester's improvised stall includes locally available produce. With similar wit and considerable style the Colombian artist, Freddy Contreras, has assembled a collection of Vivienne Westwood shoes and has fitted each pair with a set of aluminium football studs . Stud, present eleven pairs of identical, red, patent leather, three-strap stiletto-heeled shoes. Contreras' controversial and highly fetished new work, manipulates the relationships of sport and fashion, art and advertising, and the division of sexuality and gender.
Simon Patterson is represented by two pieces from 1990, The Last Supper arranged according to the Flat Back Four Formation (Jesus Christ in Goal), and The Last Supper arranged according to the Sweeper Formation (Jesus Christ in Goal) which were first shown together at the Aperto of the 1993 Venice Biennale. The works, two rival teams, are painted directly onto the gallery walls. Patterson has used football as a metaphor in other works, notably General Assembly for the Chisenhale Gallery. The Last Suppers, inspired by the 1990 World Cup at Manchester, installed in opposition at the gallery entrance immediately engage the visitor with the wit and subtlety of the artist's use of football imagery and text and invite many interpretations. Patricia Bickers points to 'the fundamentally different approaches to the games represented by the two teams drawn up against each other; the open game plan of the Europeans gives free play to Judas and St Peter; England's dogmatic adherence to the flat back four formation condemns them to sit it out on the substitutes bench'.
Mark Wallinger, an artist who has regularly used football and racing in his work, uses many media and varied approaches to the realisation of his ideas. Taking as a source of imagery the back page action photographs from newspapers, Wallinger has used carbon paper to create a series of 22 drawings which are a fastidious reworking of captured moments from recent games. Using black and blue carbon paper to trace and identify each team player, he embarked upon a self-conscious regression to the obsessive and adoring pleasure of his youth and has created an installation which will find immediate appeal to many visitors who are similarly rapt.
Bet I Finish My Sticker Book Before You, a new commission from Natalie Turner, also makes a foray into the nostalgia of youth and shared pleasures. She has recently been exploring football in a fine art context and is particularly interested in the ephemera and merchandising of football, and the marketing and status of the players. During past months she has been drawing the players and reserves selected for the European Football Championships. Her four-metre installation of over 300 tiny portraits, D-I-Y stickers drawn with felt tip on self-adhesive labels, is an obsessive tribute to the dedication of the fan, and contrasts the mass produced multiples of merchandising with the singular high-value icon of the drawn portrait.
Many of the works in the exhibition complement one another, working together with differing approaches technically and conceptually, and there are resonances between them which will repay a leisurely visit. Waplington's players enter into a tense dialogue with Buchanan's photos of local lads, and Fuertes' imaginary club strips take the field before Beebee's Ultra banners. Buchanan's quiet videos present a view from the centre of the amateur's deserted pitch, whilst the imposing architecture of the Bundesliga stadia in Vincent and Mackintosh's video diary both excites and excludes us. And Captain Nevill's football provides a disquieting punctuation in a visual narrative of subtle humour.