Thursday, August 5, 2010

Pied La Biche's reenactment of the 1982 World Cup semifinal between West Germany and France

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.

2 comments:

  1. 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.

    rebel: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/

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  2. "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.

    ReplyDelete

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