COLLECTIVE FAILURE

Forget the beautiful game, Collective Failure is an exhibition about football’s ugly truth. The world’s most popular sport is full of nationalism, fanaticism, violence, bigotry, classism and vitriol – as well as the heart-warming togetherness that keeps the whole thing tied together. The artists in this show take a particularly critical approach to football and what it tells us about contemporary English society.

Guy Oliver co-opts the nastiest of football chants, removing them from the terraces to expose the undercurrents of hatred and bigotry that course through football stadiums. Ashley Holmes ask questions of exploitation and institutional racism in English society through representations of the English national team’s black footballers (here represented by Sol Campbell, Paul Ince and Raheem Sterling). All have been both used and abused, deified and scorned.

Rob McNally, meanwhile, uses his vertiginous skill to create multi-layered drawings filled with mythology and unapologetically complicated references to popular culture, history and class. The works here are filled with grotesque, surreal allusions to football (that LB on Martin Luther’s underpants stands for Luther Blissett, the rest is up to you to figure out).

Shown on the pub TV, when the football’s not on, is Mark Leckey’s Turner Prize-winning film ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’, a powerful paean to working class England and life’s moments of leisure. It alternates with Mark E Smith reading the football results, because we like it. Next to that, Roddy Buchanan’s unassuming photo is the result of time spent in Corby meeting second and third-generation Scottish immigrants who moved to England to find work in the steel insdustry. They are now united not just by poverty, but by a passion for the teams of their home country. This work is from a series of photographs that Buchanan presented to pubs in the area.

In the next room are two phones. One shows a constantly repeating Vine of three brutal tackles by Tottenham’s Eric Dier against Chelsea. The other shows clip after clip of football violence, each chosen for its aesthetic, sonic and historical impact. The real life documentation that affirms the emotions in the art around you.

The final work in the show acts as a summary of the exhibition’s intentions. Julie Henry and Debbie Bragg’s immersive two-screen video installation ‘Going Down’ is a study of both the home and away fans during a game between Crystal Palace and Coventry City in 1998. On one side, euphoric joy as a vital goal is scored. On the other, anger and crushing heartbreak. It’s a theatre of countless human emotions that demands multiple viewings. Football may not be beautiful, but looks aren’t everything.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Collective Failure presented by OOF at J HAMMOND PROJECTS, London 20 June - 21 July 2018