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FIFA, Adidas, and Marina Abramovic

July 11, 2014 by

Above is an Adidas-sponsored re-performance of a collaboration between artists Marina Abramović and Ulay. The original work was part of a long series of experiments in the possibilities of relation-in-performance. Many of those performances had strong durational elements to them: the 1978 performance cited here involved just the two of them moving stones around in buckets. Abramović outsources the work to 11 performers for this contribution to the Adidas World Cup campaign. We watch 11 people engaged in a pointless task. Seems pretty apt.

Folks in the art world are furrowing their brows.

The FIFA/Adidas/Abramović collaboration is grotesque. But I don’t recall art critics frowning when Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno collaborated with Zidane—and Adidas, and La Liga—in their production, Zidane: un portrait du 21e siècle (2006). That work was only possible because Adidas saw it as good publicity. A reminder of this, for me: about five years ago, I tried to develop a program on experimental football cinema to propose to the Nike theater in Hollywood: the project fell apart because the Nike folks saw Zidane as an Adidas film.

I also don’t recall there being much irritation when Kehinde Whiley produced his 2010 advertisements for Puma. LACMA has been using that work all summer to advertise its exhibition Fútbol: The Beautiful Game. You will see this gorgeous ad for Puma’s “Africa Unity” kit on banners across Los Angeles. When male artists work with the commercial structures of football, folks in the art world enjoy the chance to feel like one of the guys. But when a woman does it, she’s whoring herself?

Kehinde Wiley, Samuel Eto'o (2010)

Kehinde Wiley, Samuel Eto’o (2010)

I’m not one to give Abramović a pass. But, excepting the medium (performance-based work v. visual art), I don’t see that she’s doing anything that much more awful than what blue-chip contemporary visual artists do pretty routinely. Why, review FIFA’s expensive special edition art posters. A complete set costs $6,589.99. There you will find an impressive (shameful!) array of artists who have licensed their work to FIFA.

Marina Abramović’s recent collaborations with dumb celebrity annoy most everyone in the neighborhood of performance art. The performance cited here was developed outside the charnel house. Her collaborations with Ulay were intense. In their own way, they could be painfully sincere. The deployment of that performance history and archive (with its serious affect, black and white photography, etc) within the World Cup economy is gross, but it is perhaps no more or less gross than anything else circling this particular drain.

Filed Under: 2014 World Cup, Art Tagged With: ,

Goal Deficit: a note on Brazil’s loss and David Luiz’s tears

July 8, 2014 by

Luiz

The World Cup is an intensely produced spectacle. Each goal is a world-defining event. The televisual audience watching from home, thousands of miles from the stadium, luxuriates in the experience of proximity to the match. We race down the pitch behind an attack, we are inside the goal as the ball hits the back of the net. Players rush across the field to celebrate, a camera suspended from wires flies behind and above them, like a bird. Suddenly, we’ve parachuted into the celebratory huddle. We are as close to the players’ ecstasy as they are to each other. Cut to views of jubilant crowds watching in public parks and in bars across the country. A goal yields a surplus of joy.

But oh, when the event goes sour!

A goal is only pleasurable in an economy of scarcity. In a match like today’s, in which a team is simply annihilated, a surplus of goals ruins the story. One side takes what it wants; the other is helpless.

There is no suspense, there is no release. First there is only shock, and shame. Then we settle into the grim situation. Perhaps a cold curiosity takes over. A team knows that it is lost, and there are still 70 minutes to play. We watch the rest of the match, bearing witness to the humanity of the losing side.

A realism shadows the broadcast. It is the shadow of an alternate world to the World Cup—the shadow cast by the world in which we live.

David Luiz, in a post-match interview, cries openly. (The women in Émile Zola’s novels grow more beautiful as they are beaten by their lovers; something about this scene reminds me of this.)

Through his tears, Luiz apologies. He “wanted to bring joy to the people who suffer so much.” He and his team failed—of course they did. Not even the people running this event—the show runners—believe that the success or the failure of the World Cup rides on any single team’s performance, or even that it will be measured by the quality of the spectator’s pleasure. It will be measured by the seamlessness of the production and the direction of capital flow.

As Luiz cries, he and his teammates are carried away by the tide.

Filed Under: 2014 World Cup, FIFA, Football Tagged With: , ,

The Last Minute

July 2, 2014 by
Godfried Donkor, SANTO MARADONNA vs SIX OPPONENTS, 2006

Godfried Donkor, SANTO MARADONNA vs SIX OPPONENTS, 2006

At the knock-out stage of the World Cup we march through 90-minute deserts, or we are teased with the possibility of another world only to have those hopes dashed by a victory which asserts the relentless stability of the order of things.

A match may take the form of a siege. Opponents wear each other down with a negative effort. Play feels slowed down or sluggish. As one gets deeper into a tournament the fear of losing overcomes the desire to win until, finally, the latter asserts itself in the form of a late substitution (Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku, in the 91st minute, against the US) or cynical play (Netherland’s Arjen Robben, in the 94th, against Mexico). Did Argentina and Switzerland play a match? It was hard to tell.

The conservative smothers the creative. Is this why the stadium was nearly silent as Brazil sank into a quagmire of anxiety? For the host country, even fans are done in by this particular form of dread—the misery of the winner who is really a loser, the most spectacular loser of them all, afraid the world will suddenly discover this ugly truth. What do we do with the fact that Brazil advanced not on the back of its play, but by virtue of being the luckier party in a Russian roulette penalty shoot-out? Even the one point they scored during the match was negative: although attributed to Luiz, it was at least partially an own-goal, having been deflected by poor Jara (who would miss his penalty and thereby sacrifice Chile to the Order).

If we are lucky, we see action in the form of the save. A team strikes at the goalie, over and over again. This excites us but it also distracts us. After we relaxed into the delusion that Tim Howard’s goal line is a wall (perhaps because it is past the point at which the match should have ended)—a new player pops onto the field and shows us that all along his team was only toying with us. We—by which I mean not the players so much as the fans—were always cannon fodder. Our delusions, food for the television camera.

Filed Under: 2014 World Cup, Art, Football Tagged With: , ,

The Cannibal

June 25, 2014 by

Yolanda de Sousa, Uruguay - Italy

Yolanda de Sousa, Uruguay – Italy

“The cannibal, as we know, has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond.” — Sigmund Freud

Luis Suárez’s biting is a tactic. The bite is a gesture of infantile and intimate aggression. It’s child-like and animal-like. It is the gesture of the figure outside of society and the impulse of the cannibal. (The cannibal—a colonial expression of desire/fear as a fantasy of eating/being eaten by the Other.)

All sports play with social structures, and a dialogic team sport like soccer plays with the social contract—the founding agreements struck between and within communities which allow those communities to exist in a more or less stable order. The “Laws of the Game” don’t just regulate a match, they are a part of the game (e.g. debate about offside, goal-line technology, replay – the sense that the subjective nature of the referee’s calls is necessary to the game’s spirit).

One of the agreements made between teams, players, referees and spectators involves a promise to not harm each other, a willingness to address and prevent injury. When you are playing an opponent who violates that agreement so intensely and so deliberately—it throws you completely out of the organizing structures of play. It is no longer play. The victim of this violence is momentarily exiled from the social order. A game that plays with violence (and football does) is only possible if all of its participants resist the impulse to brutality.

Results hinge on how teams bear up under the strain of 90 minutes, the stress of the match. Deciding goals are scored in the 89th, 90th, 94th minute by teams with the capacity to exploit a moment of distraction, an error made from weariness. In this case, a goal was scored against a team that was left bewildered. Suárez has made an art of creating this state of confusion; team management know perfectly well that if he can score a goal, he can also goad and shock and disgust an opponent in a campaign to force them to surrender not the match, but the game itself.

Filed Under: 2014 World Cup, Queer Sport Spectacles Tagged With: ,

Mexico 17 – Brazil 0

June 17, 2014 by
Miguel Calderón, Mexico vs Brazil (2004).

Miguel Calderón, Mexico vs Brazil (2004).

Miguel Calderón watched hours and hours of football matches; he pulled footage of Mexico and Brazil matches to compile an imaginary world in which Mexico wins 17-0. Calderón’s 90-minute video was originally installed on a television in a sports bar in Brazil. Hopefully, someone has thought to install this work in a bar or two – a little World Cup static.

Filed Under: 2014 World Cup, Art, Football Tagged With: , ,

Pregnant with Ball

June 14, 2014 by

 

Yrsa Roca Fannberg, Resurrection (watercolour on paper, 2009)

Joel Campbell’s goal celebration belongs to a genre – Yrsa Roca Fannberg is the only artist I know to have honored that genre in paint.

 

Filed Under: Art, Football, Queer Sport Spectacles Tagged With: , ,
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