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During the week a friend of mine, the Sydney painter Olivia Bolton, sent me this link to a very interesting Guardian experiment where they dragooned the paper’s sports desk to become arts correspondents for a day and the arts desk to try their hands at sport.
The test was to determine whether the arts (dahhling) and sport really are completely distinct as cultural experiences as they are made out to be.
“You are the only sports journalist I know,” she wrote, “so I thought you might enjoy the Guardian’s new approach to arts reporting. Somehow I think the arts journalists may have had a tougher time on the sports reports.”
From football writer Kevin McCarra’s painful description of his experience of Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen’s Next of Kin production at Queen Elizabeth Hall, I’m not so sure.
As much as he tried, the poor bloke just couldn’t stop thinking about football. Long-time fans of the world game will be familiar with this malaise. After a while football so completely occupies your every thought that it becomes a social liability.
“It was a surprise to see Avram Grant back in work just hours after Chelsea sacked him,” he begins. “Those doleful features actually belonged to the papier mache head briefly sported by one of the six dancers, but they reminded me of the Israeli football manager.”
Meanwhile, over at Wembley, hunkering down for a performance of Championship football, Hull City versus Bristol City. proceedings were similarly dire for the paper’s visual arts man Jonathan Jones.
As he much he tried, the poor bloke couldn’t help thinking about art.
“Watching football,” he writes, “is, in theory, a bit like looking at art. The view from my seat (which has its own little TV monitor) might be compared to looking down on a vast green abstract canvas laid flat, with dots oscillating about like some 1960s piece of kinetic art. But … throughout the match, I keep trying to concentrate. I can watch the ball go from one player to another, maybe a second, even a third pass … and then my mind starts to wander.
“Frankly, what’s football about? How can so many people get so passionate about a ball? The massed feeling is so intense that it ought to end with heads being torn off and chests opened with sacrificial daggers, like the ancient ball game in pre-Columbian Mexico.”
How can so many people get so passionate about a ball?
I don’t know, Mr Jones, I wish I had the words to explain why football grips me more than a Francis Bacon painting or an evening of Scandinavian jazz, but it invariably does and my hunch is that it’s because, like the three billion other people who are gripped by the peregrinations of the round ball, I’ve never found it difficult to find art in football.
Exhilaration. Beauty. Profundity. Maradona, Pelé, Cruyff, Baggio, Zidane – all were, are, artists of the first order. Regular readers of my columns will also well remember my personal paean to our country’s own under-appreciated genius Nicky Carle.
Is Nicky Australian football’s Vincent van Gogh? Cut your ear off, son, and mail it to Pim.
It’s infinitely harder to find football in art. Literature, yes. Crappy movies, yes. But what I call, for want of a better term, “high art”? For a game that is such a readymade canvas for expression, very slim pickings indeed.
The most recent example I can recall is the pretentious conceptual French flick Zidane: Un Portrait du 21ieme Siecle, which trained 17 cameras on the Les Bleus legend during one of his club matches for Réal Madrid. (As far as I know it never got released here.)
Fortunately, however, for those of us who do believe the two can go together – and moreover, should – the National Football Museum in England recently held a retrospective of football art rather imaginatively called “The Art of Football” and, better still, there was “Artfootball”, a fantastic FIFA-sponsored exhibition of 14 specially commissioned World Cup football posters that I happened to completely miss while at Germany 2006.
As fate would have it I found high-quality prints of the posters in a Sydney gallery a few weeks ago and quickly snapped up a couple. I just love the Luo Brothers’ “A Cup for Your Toy” and Hisashi Tenmyouya’s “Football”.
Anyone who wants to know how and where to get their hands on their own copy can contact me here at The Roar.
For a country so obsessed with sport, it amazes me that there are so little examples of football art in Australia; cricket, arguably our premier obsession, has a pedigree of sorts, being found in the works of Brett Whiteley, and Australian Rules has itself a very good chronicler in the talented young Moonee Ponds artist Martin Tighe.
So let’s hope that once Frank Lowy has finished up making our game the number code and nabbed Australia the 2018 World Cup, he sponsors an Archibald-like competition for people like me who see art in this beautiful game.
If it’s hung on a wall, sceptics like Mr Jones might just be convinced after all.
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