Waiting for these shows to start, I would restlessly switch between t.v. channels, occasionally passing through the only other television channel available. An image of a young woman appears; a hard stare, a blank look from behind a well-stocked bar, across a century of time. A close-up shot reveals smears of paint in pink, white, and grey. A pan reveals a suggestion of an earring, then a mirror; simultaneously emphatic and banal.

We hear a voice. A man speaking, drawing attention to the painting's surface, encased behind the smooth glass of the television screen – Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère of 1882. Another face appears, this time that of a bearded man: T.J. Clark, art historian. He speaks in a measured way, with a distinct, familiar, Bristolian burr. Despite appearing in close-proximity to the painting, he goes on to suggest that his might not be the only, or most convincing, analysis of it available to us, the viewers of the second programme in the Open University's course A351 Modern Art & Modernism, broadcast on BBC Two in 1983.

This unexpected introduction to modern art's relationship to modernity was a glimpse across the chasms of class and educational opportunity. Other programmes in the series would argue for artists' political engagement with their world, with a 'peasant materialism', promoting a history of art that would not tear the art and artist from their world, could not wrest them from their time and place.

All this coincided with my disenchantment with football, it's organized terrace racism, and its stadium tragedies. Almost overnight, it seemed, my attention was drawn to politics, to culture, to metropolitan things; to the things I couldn't — or wasn't yet able to — discern on the pitch and terraces of lower league English football. I stopped watching football; and I stopped playing.

This project is an attempt to bring these things back together, to see what happens when football is read through art and its theories, to start playing again, and to see whether my interests in each of them was – all along – based on the same impulse.

Opening titles from ITV's football programme.

Now, we're familiar with how artists inhabit football's fan culture, or claim it for themselves, whether to explore national or personal identities, contemporary folk culture, and so on. The possibilities are endless, with every cultural, theoretical, and stylistic “turn”.

What I'm interested in here, and will make the first stab at, is something different: whether the schism that I felt back in 1883 had any foundation. What I mean by this is whether the work of T.J. Clark and his fellow "new art historians", with their social and materialist approaches to history, could offer an analysis of what was happening on and around the pitch. What might have happened if I'd kept football and 'the new” art history' in the same conversation? What kind of practice might I have developed? A practice-led art history perhaps? Or a materialist football practice?

My hunch is that this project will constantly oscillate between art and football, in the sense that its concern will always be those of how artists grapple with the time in which they live, its politics, its cultural twists and turns but will look at how this works both metaphorically and practically in football. It might inhabit the particular historical conventions of art history and art as a way to revisit T.J. Clark's speculations on why modernism in art failed to break modernity's grip at the point of its emergence, and why it failed to give us much to work with now. Given that I'm in the habit of leading my research through practice, there's a strong chance that it will involve playing football as a practical way to explore these artistic questions. Maybe even a "farewell" to art practice altogether, in favour of playing football?

At this point, this is very speculative and – as the title of this project states – entirely experimental. This is a live and ongoing project, and we'll see how it unfolds…

Perhaps the lens that I was introduced to in 1982/3 through art and art history would emphasise the to-and-fro between opponents as a dialectic. The motor of the game, the event, by which possession of the ball changes, when winning and losing happens. This movement doesn't stop at the final whistle; the next match, the home or away fixture, continues this cycle of winning and losing and persists even if an opponent leave the league through promotion or relegation, over the years.

Is this where the attention should be? What happens to the analysis over time when such a crude dialectic no longer adequately accounts for how history unfolds. What goes a game of football look like when we move beyond the dialect as the primary mode of analysis, as a way to identify the “motor” of history's unfolding?

Equally in this project, the question is: what if we do stick to the dialectic, focusing on how it operates during the game? (Or when it is expressed is probably a better way to put it.)

Returning to the events that prompted this enquiry in the first place, I used footage of a First Division game – the equivalent of a Premier League – with which to work. Liverpool vs Arsenal was broadcast September 1981 and features some of the players that were well known to me at the time: Kenny Dalglish, Sammy Lee, Terry McDermott, and Ray Kennedy (after his move from The Gunners) at the tail-end the 1977-81 period which was the time when I was watching and playing football at every opportunity. Gone were Keegan, Heighway, Toshack, and Clemence, who I'd watched on TV a few years before.

The style of play in these highlights strike me as typical of the time: lots of long balls lumped down the park, the dominance of centre backs and centre forwards with odd flashes of midfield brilliance. This style could be attributed to the state of the pitches at the time, maintained to different standards with different technology than currently used. The patchiness, bobbliness, and muddiness all have their effects on the game.

As a consequence, when we look for moments when possession change from one team to the other – when the internal contradictions of the game are apparent and in the process of resolution – this often takes place in the air: a contested header from a long ball from defence; or from a keeper's drop-kick deep into the opponent's half. If on the ground it might come from a struggle to make a good first touch on a rough surface, the ball bobbling around, bouncing off players' shins.

Using a simple edit at the point when the ball changes hands (so to speak) I was able to isolate the touch at which possession was lost, switiching to the other team, I ignored this touch if the ball only briefly touched the opposing player without possession changing. Attention is drawn to this dialectical pivot-point by a two second freeze-frame – just enough time to notice the arrested movement. This creates a rhythm for a game – or should I say, the video recording of the game – which time-stretches the dialectical events but also allows play to continue otherwise unchanged. This new punctuation is irregular but constant throughout the game.

With a shift towards statistical analysis of the game these points are recorded officially – though only as one of the many dimensions to the game that are processed (such as pass- and shooting-success rates, percentage of the game held in possession by one team or the other, etc.). Along with 'heat maps' for each player, they provide a comprehensive statistical picture to be drawn of the game. Yet they are too comprehensive for our purposes.

Our dialectical analysis is mainly focused on the perpetual motion that comes from switches in possession, a forward motion that propels the game towards its conclusion. Even goal-scoring appears as a secondary characteristic, one device among many for enabling the dialectic and a switch of possession. In a sense, scoring is not the aim of the game under this anlysis, with any other cause of a possession-change accorded equal status – a foul, a tackle, a throw-in, corner, etc.

What would the consequences be for playing the game? All focus would be the forcing a turn-over of possession…) A more crudely materialist analysis would focus not on the change in possession, which is largely a symbolic, superstructural event, but on the social relations produced by economic relations within the game, (e.g. Bain et al (2020)).

Here, I tend to shy away from such an analysis which risks missing the material effects apparent to the player in other contexts.

What might be interesting here is how playing the game enables a negotiation of base relations, through manipulating symbolic superstructural ones.. Here, football as a cultural activity enables us to rehearse and actually put into practice instances where economic relations and power differentials are worked-out between players in public.

As we can see in anthropological work such as Nuno Domingos's Football and colonialism: body and popular culture in urban Mozambique (2017) this can be through interpreting the rules differently, or extending the array of physical actions performed on the pitch – intimidation, covert fouling etc.

This suggests that there is a place for innovation on the field also – beyond an alysis – where transformation can be effected by players, which have a material dimension, although which are ultimately held within the symbolic realm in terms of their wider impact or significance.

This suggests a focus on the 'everyday' (as opposed to 'proper') way of doing things as a mode of practice in football. In some sense, "passages of great beauty” are another way to confront propriety in the game; moments of supreme skill which change our understanding of what's expected, and what is possible, and (apparently) within the rules.

But its important here not to fall into the 'genius' model of art/history in our reading of this aspect of football. Innovation may also be at the level of the social – in how players work together as 'units' of three or four, or as an entire team – to achieve the extrordinary.

I started playing football again after forty years. Forty years without taking any notice, any notice at all, of the game. No idea or care about who was winning which World Cup, FA Cup, of how many teams were in the league, or what the leagues were called. I missed out on the rise of the several footballing stars who now dominate children’s imaginations and aspirations. I couldn’t name the tricks that they learn, the salaries that they covet, or the agents that take their 40%.

In art, as some of us will know, the forty year rule determines what can and cannot be done. I first heard of this rule from a Flemish art historian, and once you hear about it, everything about the art that you see in art museums and galleries makes sense. The forty year rule states that everything made more than forty years ago is valid fodder for art history. Beyond that time-frame, artists – if still alive – are less concerned with maintaining the narratives that give their work coherence, or prescience, timeliness. And more importantly, those with a vested interest in promoting their work into the canon are long gone – or so the argument goes. This older work is no longer vying for attention, or validation; and if it has stood the test of time, it has earned its right to enter the art historical canon. Artists also use the same rule, reaching back in time, to base their own work on prior practice made ‘before things sucked’ (Hickey, 2021).

For Hickey, this is also tied to an idea of ‘standard practice’ or practice that follows the rules of what’s expected of whatever chosen art historical antecedent. This results in recognizably artistic work, which, even while meeting all the requirements, ultimately becomes invisible – in that it is indistinguishable from all other artistic work. Here’s an example of how Hickey’s idea would work in the context of this project: harking back to Bruce Nauman’s early work – as archetypal “post-minimalist conceptualist” artworks and a baseline from which all subsequent artists’ work is made – enables us to ask the question: “what are the bare requirements of artistic production?” In Nauman’s case, this results in a series of performances-for-film, with the artist in their studio, moving systematically around the floorspace in precise and predetermined ways.

What would a ‘standard practice’ rendering of this idea look like for this project? We might use Nauman’s techniques to explore the “minimum requirements” of football perhaps? Rather like in Nauman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), we could focus on the body of the footballer and a ball, moving within a designated space – perhaps the cone-delimited space that we regularly find on a training ground used for performing a rondo, in which a group of players around the perimeter of the coned-off square pass the ball to each other while other players, whose movement is restricted to the inside of the box, try to nick the ball from them.

In Toronto there is a culture of “pay to play” in football, especially when it comes to young childrens' involvement with the sport. Under this model it costs upward of $2,500 to play per year (with two seasons per year), plus additional amounts for extra training. This will be a familiar model to those who play other sports in North America, (and where for sports such as hockey, there is an additional financial overhead of equipment purchase and higher fees). Contrast this with the Premier League’s free weekly Kicks sessions in England, or an average of £160 ($280) per year for training and league matches, or the equivalent of only $120/year for weekly training-only, and you get a feel for how pricing can exclude young players from certain socio-economic groups.

Layout for Free Association club shirt.

As a relative newcomer to Canada, coming from a country where fees for playing are either much less, or there are more opportunities for to improvise games without further cost, this “pay to play” principle seems diametrically at odds with “sport for all” and accessibility agendas that I grew up with. I am not the only one to have noticed this: the F2 football freestylers shot a documentary for Youtube Originals ask this question when they visited L.A. In recent years, puzzling over the consequences for participation of “pay to play” for the professional game in the USA – especially when coupled with hostility to playing football in the street or public spaces.

Living on Toronto Island, I'm lucky enough to have a sports field near me that, albeit unmarked, has a couple of goals (built a while ago, by a local resident). Since 1971 there has been a community game played each Sunday, played without a fee as the field falls outside of City permitting restrictions.

Although we have perhaps become used to a subscription model for everything from mobile/cell phone use, to internet access, to video streaming, “free at the point of use or access” traditions still hold sway in some sectors, in some countries.

Without official endorsement or planning permission, our options are to improvise. What can be done with what’s at hand? Football is ordinarily played on a regularly shaped and proportioned pitch. Whether played on a synthetic 3G surface, grass, old-fashion astroturf, clay, mud, or sand, one goal faces the other and the ball goes out of play if it crosses any of the lines that define the pitch’s perimeter.

Real Tennis court, Canford, England

This places a constraint on where a pitch could be sited. But experience tells us that a game of football can be played anywhere, on any surface. Often the default set-up is one goal, which each teams takes turns to attack. One alternative would be to define a pitch with two goals, but using the irregular space as-is, marking goals in appropriate places and in whatever orientation works for that location.

Irregular-shaped football pitch, Thailand

The game of Real Tennis presents a model for how irregularly- and asymmetrically-shaped buildings surrounding the court/pitch can eventually become the standard for playing-grounds; and the Thai pitch (pictured here), that features in The F2 Freestylers show, presents another example of how a football pitch can be accommodated within irregular spaces, but in this case, with goals facing each other.

The sketch below is a draft for a pitch, in a parking-lot, underneath a bridge in downtown Toronto.

It was 11th April 1979. Exeter City against Swindon Town in a Division Three match, under the lights at St. James Park on a rainy Wednesday night. We were in the stands that night, in the Cow Shed. The pitch was glistening in the rain, under the blue-white floodlights. During an attack on the home supporters’ end, the now muddy Mitre ball skimmed over the bar, a rocket launched from the edge of the box with full-power. All eyes were on a white Burberry mac, worn by a fan stood half-way up the terrace directly behind the goal. There's an audible, collective, intake of breath as the ball pelted towards them, striking this elegant investment full-on, leaving an immaculate print of the ball on the pristine white canvas. The crowd gasped at the tragedy, then laughed at the hubris of whoever risked wearing a pricey coat such as this on such a filthy West Country night. The link between pitch and terrace was complete. We had as much say in the proceedings as the players. This was reception theory in action. Our reading meant everything at this point, and the action shifted from the footballers on the pitch to the terrace.

Exeter City FC V Swindon Town match programme (1979)

Have a look at Jacques Tati and Sophie Tatischeff’s film Forza Bastia (1978) and you see a celebration of every action other than those of the players: the child attempting, and failing, to spin a wooden rattle; a parade of cars, over-loaded with fans waving flags and shouting their support; an old woman scrawling the local team’s name onto a wall in marker pen; ground staff repeatedly sweeping flood-water into a bucket before kick-off; and fans swivelling their heads this way and that as they follow the game from the terraces.

This switch of emphasis, from what the footballers are doing on the pitch during the game to the actions of everyone else otherwise considered to be the audience or supporting act, is typical of Tati’s late films. Parade does the same with a circus performance, with the manual dexterity of set-makers becoming a feat of juggling, and audience participation gradually shifting from sight-gags to becoming full-on and centre-stage when a couple of kids, playing on stage at the end of the show, become the main act, capturing the camera’s full attention.

This radical shift in emphasis on where we should look for the main action in any artwork prefigures the shift in contemporary art that was more widely explored in the period when I was establishing my practice. It became pretty easy to acknowledge a wider network of actors in the production of artwork after Howard S. Becker’s Art Worlds (1984), and the various degrees of responsibility and participation, distributed among artist and others, detailed in Suzanne Lacy’s Leaving Art (2010); and we could discern active participation in what had been considered merely “spectatorship” in Jacques Ranciere’s The Emancipated Spectator (2009).

We saw this tendency in artist Jeremy Deller’s work in the mid-2000s for example, with popular and fan culture given prominence. Where football entered the frame of contemporary art, it was as part of this turn: we can think of Mark Wallinger holding a banner within a crowd of England football fans (1995); or Mark Leckey’s invocation of 80s terrace casuals in Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); or as a way to explore personal politics of identity tested against performance of masculinity within football fan culture. In a sense, this work is about choosing an alternative canon, and not so much about shifting the standard practice. So, we’ve seen a lot of terrace culture in our art galleries, and a lot of nostalgia for the 1980s. It’s what we, most likely, will recognize as art without much of a struggle: videos in darkened rooms; photographic prints on walls; clothing-brand interventions.

I was there in the 1980s, and I have a fond nostalgia for that time too: for not buying a copy of The Young National Front's Bulldog 'zine, and turning a blind-eye to the twitchy soul boys with their over-priced blond-hightlights and mid-career Tarby golf sweaters. But I’m also full of regret about that time. The things that turned me away from football were intrinsic to playing the game. What was happening on the terrace and the pitch were one and the same. The feeling of being in a crowd steaming through town, and of being in a team lost in the action of the game, were equal. But where is the game in contemporary art? Forget changing the canon. Could the practice of football present a challenge to standard practice in art? What would it mean to return to the field, to be in touch with the ball again, to play in a team again, as artistic practice?

As a first step, I began playing again – three or four times a week; and as a second, I now watch the City – from behind the goal on the Big Bank if possible, in the spot where my 14 year old self once stood, gleaning whatever I could from the players on the field to plough back into my game.

Ticket for ECFC home game (2025)