Pied La Biche's Refait (2010) reconstructs the last fifteen of a 1982 World Cup semifinal between West Germany and France. The last fifteen minutes of that match were penalty kicks, the worst sort of tournament drama. (The Guardian gives a detailed survey of this historic match here.) For this work, the artists' collective repeats the movements and gestures of all the players, referees and staff - not on a field, but in ordinary urban spaces. The soundtrack cuts back and forth between a broadcast of the 1982 match, and guys talking about their memories of the game.
This is one of the most awesome works of football art I've ever seen - and it isn't Pied La Biche's only football-centered project.
The same collective organized and documented a tournament of three-sided football for the Lyon Biennial this past year. In doing so, they realized a 1964 proposal for an anti-bourgeois and dialectal game, written by the Danish artist Asger Jorn.
Thank you Amelia and Amanda for turning me on to these folks.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
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It's nice to see soccer in it's variety of theoretical, political, esthetical and artistical structures and dimensions, dissolute or dissolving boundaries while used as a ball itself reflecting the game between ideas, histories, cultures, societies, rules, bodies, motion sequences, as a critic of not only being part of a global market according to clearly defined laws.
ReplyDeleterebel:art - connecting art and activism - has a series of soccer related art works, starting with
Van der Art I: Pied la Biche -"Refait".
Van der Art II: Helmut Smits - "Greenscreen",
Van der Art III: Sebastian Errazuriz - "Memorial of a concentration camp",
Van der Art IV: Maider López - "Polder Cup",
Van der Art V: ASCII-WM
Van der Art VI: Max Hattler - "Your Highness".
http://www.rebelart.net/diary/van-der-art-iii-sebastian-errazuriz-memorial-of-a-concentration-camp/005028/
"Refait" does a nice job showing how the abstract frame of the field enables us to project so much onto a match. Just as there are four different fields one can lay on top of video of penalty kicks, one can also argue that a sporting events means this or that. I am reminded of how political newspapers of every stripe saw Zidane's headbutt reflect their worldviews.
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