A series of posters, entitled Official Art Poster Edition 2010 Fifa World Cup South Africa, involving 17 contemporary artists makes a gentle suggestion that football and art are bedfellows.
At first glance the connection might appear tenuous, but that is until you gape in wonder at an exceptional player executing an improbable stunt. It’s not just hyperbole when outstanding players are described as artists.
The artists in the official Fifa poster series include seven South Africans (among them William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas). The 17 artists were commissioned to produce works of art that carry a football motif, and 2010 copies of the artworks have been produced for each of the 17 posters.
Kay Hassan from South Africa has a poster called Swanker Ball, depicting a bespectacled, hatted man, one trouser leg raised to reveal striped socks and black slip-on patent leather shoes. Near him is an old leather football, popular in the 1980s but not manufactured any more. Two aesthetics are at work: the swanky and ostentatious look and — sitting uneasily alongside that — the idea of football as a street culture, embodied in the tacky leather of the aging ball.
Football is a man’s game, this poster seems to suggest. Despite endless attempts to move football into the mainstream (read: promote the sport among women), it remains a space for the alpha male to measure his testosterone count. The attempts by the game’s administrators, mostly aging males, to make women’s football more popular are laughable, if not outright sexist.
“Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball,” Sepp Blatter, Fifa’s president, said a few years ago. “They could, for example, have tighter shorts.” Cue outraged feminists descending on the Fifa bureaucrat.
In an interview with the Mail & Guardian, Hassan said his poster is part of a larger project he’s working on. Swanking, he said, is akin to “contemporary stick fighting in the urban area”. Rather than duke it out with sticks like the Ngunis used to do, “they are now fighting with their clothes”. It’s competition, he says, but it’s also entertainment.
Given the sport’s status among men, the series has its fair share of images of the male body. There’s Tokyo artist Yamaguchi Akira’s poster based on the Q Taro, a manga comic book hero, a ghost who’s afraid of dogs. It features a sprinkling of rather sturdy men, athletic, feet wide astride. Then there’s South African Robert Slingsby’s The Midas Touch, a sketch, in golden tones, of a footballer turned upside, balancing a ball on the back of his neck.
Sudanese artist Hassan Musa, exiled in the south of France, in his poster The Good Game, fuses biblical myth with football and Afro-print fabric aesthetics. In the biblical narrative, Jacob sustained a broken hip after his night duel with an angel. Musa’s poster features a man on whose back is the number 10, the most iconic number in football and worn by the two greatest players ever — former Brazilian star Pelé and Argentine genius Diego Maradona. The number 10 (which other player could be trusted to fight an angel?) is locked in battle with the angel.
The fighting metaphor shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who were watching as Egypt and Algeria battled for a 2010 World Cup berth, first in Algiers, then in Cairo and, ultimately, in Khartoum about a fortnight ago. Algeria emerged victorious, the aftermath of the Islamic Derby was broken glass, debris and an icy diplomatic stand-off between the two nations that required Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to grandstand as a conciliator.
The greatest Liverpool manager, the late Bill Shankly, would have nodded sagely and repeated his throwaway line: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”
Chinese artist Zhong Biao’s poster, Football Miracle, uses a graphic art aesthetic. It features a player executing a bicycle kick — the move, also known as the acrobatic kick, is easily the most sublime and artistic of all football stunts. In the bicycle kick athleticism meets mathematical precision and timing.
Indeed, William Kentridge’s poster, Bicycle Kick, is a painting of a footballer in midair over a melange of map fragments of the city of Johannesburg, text, diagrams and a stadium. Biao’s footballer is suspended above a collage of receding skyscrapers, dripping paint and other nondescript objects.
This setting would have blended easily with the laconic musings of Frenchman and former Manchester United captain Eric Cantona, the subject of the recent film Looking for Eric. Once he said: “I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.”
Included in the collection of world artists is Dumas, now based in the Netherlands, with a painting of the expansive face of a footballer, perhaps after scoring or saving a penalty.
Kendell Geers, South Africa’s A-list conceptualist based in Belgium (known to some as a “modern-day alchemist”), has titled his poster Free Balling. It’s an untidy, muddy collage of footballs.
Another overseas-based South African, Isolde Krams (who lives in Berlin), has done a sculpture of a red elephant. Fifa has already bought one of her latex, rubber and mixed-media sculptures for its Zurich headquarters.
Peter Eastman, a Cape Town-based artist, has done a night view from his studio balcony of the Green Point Stadium, construction in progress.
“For me, this view creates an atmosphere of expectation and transformation.” Eastman says, “the transformation of the stadium, reinforced by the transformation of the time of day. This is also my experience so far of the World Cup, this mammoth stadium being built, glimpsed through different landscapes as one drives around Cape Town.”
Also included are Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu, Cameroon’s Barthélémy Toguo, Senegalese artist Soly Cissé, Brazil’s Romero Britto and the United States’s Charles Fazzino.
In an interview with the M&G from Germany, project originator Renate Bauer said this is the second time that she has worked with Fifa. As in Germany 2006, the idea was to showcase “works originating from the host country or continent” by world-class or “excellent emerging artists”, she said.
There were other concerns too: “An edition with works on football somehow needs to be sufficiently figurative — purely abstract works will be difficult to understand in this context and setting of a Fifa World Cup,” said Bauer, a philosopher by training.
“Art is as much a global phenomenon that speaks a universal language as football. Both also somehow originate from enthusiasm: both can be pursued only with uncompromising passion, talent and effort,” she said.