Football In Polish Art After 1989: From Zbigniew Libera To Marcin Dudek

Maria Anto, "Ulubiona drużyna", 1972, fot. dzięki uprzejmości Muzeum Sportu i Turystyki , default, Ulubiona Drużyna (Favourite Team) by Maria Anto, 1972, photo: courtesy of Muzeum Sportu i Turystyki

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The theme of football has been present in art in independent Poland as early as 1921 – from the very start of the country's national football league. As the years progressed, art about football became a playing field for a critical contest dedicated to the issues of consumption, stereotypes, the cult of celebrity, male constructs, politics, religion, nationalism, and even the aestheticisation of violence.

In the 1920s and 1930s, football appeared in works most often by avant-garde artists such as Leon Chwistek and Karol Hiller, and in works being prepared for the Olympics by artists like Wlastimil Hofman, Paweł Dadlez, and Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz Rogoyska. In 1936, Józef Klukowski was awarded a silver medal for his bas-relief Football at the 11^th Olympic Games in Berlin. At the final competition, held during the 1948 Olympic Games in London, football-themed works were exhibited by Henryk Tomaszewski and Jacek Żuławski, among others. In the following years, football themes again appeared in sports competitions. At the 3^rd International Biennale in Barcelona – 1971’s Sports in Fine Arts – awards were given to Maria Anto for The Favourite Team painting and Aleksandra Turek for The Goalkeeper’s Tragedy lithograph. Maciej Milewski’s lithograph Game for the Medal was awarded at the 4^th Biennale in 1977.

Up until the mid-1970s, football themes appeared in the works of Polish artists mainly to win awards in national and international competitions focussed on the best sports-themed art. Their focal points were purely football elements: team presentation (Hofman, Anto) and the course of matches, concentrating on what transpired on the field (Dadlez, Łunkiewicz, Rogoyska, Hiller, Żuławski), but also the more general motifs of movement, dynamics, and visualisations of the sportsmen’s perfected bodies. Less focus was put on what was happening outside the field – football fans and the media coverage of these sports celebrities. The turning point was Zdzisław Sosnowski’s approach (Goalkeeper, 1975-77). He was one of the first to look at the context off the pitch: the mass media coverage, the relationship between public and private, celebrity cults, and identity constructs.

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Goalkeeper by Zdzisław Sosnowski, 1975, photo: courtesy of the artist / Galeria Piekary

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The change that came in the mid-1970s, spurred by a more in-depth approach to football culture, undoubtedly affected the new social and cultural diagnoses of the phenomenon. In the subsequent years, increased interest in the significance of what was happening off the football field could be observed. More and more often, artists touched on matters such as the aesthetics of fan activities, the reality of consumptionism, the celebrity cult, stereotypes, masculinity constructs, entertainment, politics, critique of propaganda, religion, nationalism and the aesthetisation of violence. Since the fall of communism and the art of the beginning of the 1990s, the phenomenon of football has continued to inspire subsequent generations of contemporary artists and the body of work on this topic is now quite difficult to count and analyse in detail. In view of the artistic nods to football, it is worth taking a closer look at just a few chosen works which are a testimony to artists’ new approach to the sport in the last thirty years. In the 1990s, football motifs were present in critical art (Zbigniew Libera), and in the next decade, in the aesthetics of pop-banalism (Marcin Maciejowski) and the Penerstwo group (Radek Szlaga), as well as in the field of performance art (Laura Palmer, Massimo Furland) and Marcin Dudek’s football fan performance activities.

Football in critical art: the 1990s

In 1977, Zbigniew Libera created a series of works titled Untitled [Footballers], based on transforming toy soldiers into football players. On the packaging, the images of soldiers were repainted to resemble football teams by adding appropriate clothing clothing and covering their rifles. Originally, the names of the groups of soldiers – the ‘Red Devils’ and the ‘Desert Rats’ – were visible on the packaging. In Libera’s work, their meanings were changed to the names of football teams or their nicknames. Manchester United, FC Kaiserslautern, and the Belgium national team are often called the Red Devils. The Desert Rats, in turn, was the name of the British army’s division fighting in North Africa during World War II, but it is worth noting that in the 1950s it also took part in a famous football match against the Afrika Korps.

In Libera’s work, the gestures of the repainted figurines were left unchanged, frozen in a warlike pose. They do not seem, however, to be completely alien to the football spectacle. If one carefully examines how particular footballers celebrate the moment of scoring a goal, connections become apparent: for example, the characteristic motif of Ireland’s Robbie Keane’s ‘rifle’ (he kneels down and imitates shooting a rifle with his hands). Another such act is the famous behaviour of Zyonimir Boban, who kicked a policeman during a match between Dinamo Zagreb and Red Star Belgrade. It was a symbolic gesture at the beginning of Yugoslavia’s civil war in the 1990s. The military conflict between Honduras and Salvador in 1969, described by Ryszard Kapuściński, also started out with a football match. Thus, military operations and football are not as distant as it would seem.

The issue of small and big boys’ games, where ‘war’ becomes reworked into ‘football’, presents a space that is typical of a man’s world. Libera also reminds us that the phenomenon of modern sports has its roots in military adaptation and the military training of youth. On the other hand, in the language of contemporary pop culture, football matches are often described as war – or even as a ‘holy war’ in regards to some particular matches. Libera wrote that this paramilitary view of the football phenomenon into the ‘toy art’ form which is characteristic to his work – they are activities that clash that which is serious, mature and violent with the form of toys, associated with levity, security, and creativity. In the clash between football, war and games, one can discover the patterns of society’s expectations towards children, whose personality is shaped by pop culture. Other works by Libera from the mid-1990s were made in the same vein, including the famous Correcting Devices and Lego Concentration Camp.

Football & pop-banalism

In the late 1990s, football themes appeared in Marcin Maciejowski’s early art in his first major exhibitions, titled Wembley Szaleje, Wembley Faluje (editor’s translation: Wembley Goes Wild, Wembley Makes a Wave) in Kraków’s Koło’s Gallery (1999) and Sport and Bodystyling in Kraków’s Zderzak Gallery (2000). At the time, Maciejowski dabbled in the so-called pop-banalism aesthetic, already embraced by painters from the Ładnie Group, who painted themes inspired by everyday life, the TV screen, radio, colour magazines, and adverts. In this vein, the Kraków-based artist painted language-based football radio broadcasts, and also the painting The Young Don’t Want to Study or Work (2000), in which a player from Kraków’s Cracovia team is stood next to a Polish martial artist and a hostess.

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Misiek, Kibic Wisły Kraków (Misiek, Kraków Wisła supporter) by Marcin Maciejowski, 2004, photo: Raster Gallery

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Marcin Maciejowski, "Misiek, kibic Wisły Kraków", 2004, fot. Galeria Raster

Everyday life in Kraków was – and still is – clearly dominated by the quarrel between the fans of two famous clubs: Wisła and Cracovia, as well as Hutnik, whose colours can be seen in the 2001 painting No Need to Fear the Colours. In one interview, Maciejowski emphasised how much the world of hooligans inspired his early output:

I never went to the matches, but the sports environment fascinated me with its picturesqueness, emotions, and aggression. I read fanzines and football fan websites. I also juxtaposed the team colours – red, white, blue. When painting a tracksuit, I thought about the abstract, about the pattern of this tracksuit.

The matter of the artistic meaning of football club colours raised by Maciejowski was simultaneously touched upon in a series of works by Kamil Kuskowski (2003-2004). They presented the situation of a fan’s fascination with the team, in which he acquires a new identity connected to the abstract team colours. In turn, the football fan themes used by Maciejowski originated in the style of the aforementioned fanzines, giving them a new meaning in the exhibitions and galleries. The 2004 painting titled Wisła Kraków Fan is worth a closer look in this context. The Kraków-based artist captured the effigy of the most recognisable hooligan in Poland – Paweł Michalski (‘Misiek’), who injured Italian footballer Dino Baggio with a knife during a game between Wisła and AC Parma in 1998. Because of this incident, the Kraków team was banned from international games for several years. In spite of this, Misiek gained great respect in the community of Wisła fans and his name was often chanted during the matches.

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Młodzi Nie Chcą Się Uczyć Ani Pracować (Young People Don't Want To Learn Nor Work) by Marcin Maciejowski, 2000, oil on canvas, 112.5 x 125.5 cm, photo: Fundacji Sztuki Polskiej ING

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Marcin Maciejowski, "Młodzi nie chcą się uczyć ani pracować", 2000, olej, płótno, 112,5 x 125,5 cm, fot. Fundacji Sztuki Polskiej ING

The main goal of the football fan themes in Maciejowski’s art is to bring attention to the mechanisms of creating popularity by the media, both underground and official. Thanks to the mainstream interest of TV and magazines, the before-unknown Misiek became the most famous hooligan in Poland – the embodiment of events not strictly related to football. In Maciejowski’s painting, his effigy emerges from the smoke of lit flares and towers above the football field like a star footballer. The problem suggested by the Kraków-based artist is an important issue even now and presents the phenomenon of crowning hooligans and criminals – and not footballers – heroes of the football world.

Football in Radek Szlaga’s works

While Maciejowski, in the early 2000s, painted specific football fan motifs taken out of the pages of fanzines and specific effigies of hooligans in the pop-banalism aesthetic, Radek Szlaga approached the subject with the issue of the aestheticisation of the so-called margins of society in mind. In the second part of the decade, he was a member of the Penerstwo group and created many works under the name Freedom Club, which was a nod to the organisation led by an American terrorist of Polish descent – Ted Kaczynski, a follower of anarcho-primitivism. Szlaga’s Club became a home for the underclass, characters of the lesser sort: hobos, degenerates, primitives, dwarfs, black people from the ghetto, and Jews, as well as white Polish peasants and American rednecks. In his paintings and installations, these characters often appear inscribed in the shape of football club pennants, rendering the meaning of the Freedom Club as a metaphor and allegory of a ‘hobo’ football club – FC for short.

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Teamgeist by Radek Szlaga, 2008, wood, plasticine & paint, photo: press materials

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Radek Szlaga, "Teamgeist", 2008, drewno, plastelina, farba, fot. materiały prasowe

Specific football motifs often appear in the space of Szlaga’s Freedom Club. The wooden and plasticine Teamgeist sculpture (2008) depicted black football players clad in the shirts of the Germany national team. The nearly identical faces of the three footballers bring to mind the effigies of the famous African sculpture from the Degenarate Art (Entartete Kunst) propaganda exhibition organised by the Nazis in Munich in 1937. The Nazis, in their struggle against ‘degeneration’ as understood by their ideology, wanted to use the exhibition to show society that the degeneration of art, that is the avant-garde currents inspired by primitivism and an anarchistic stance, was equal to the degeneration of race. Szlaga’s silhouettes of black football players wearing the German national colours are far from the image of the ideal body based on the ‘beautiful bodies of Ancient Olympians’, as seen in antique sculptures such as Myron’s Discobolus and later depicted in Leni Riefenstahl’s films.

The very title Teamgeist, meaning ‘team spirit’, includes the term ‘spirit’ characteristic of the German philosophy, romanticism, and nationalism invoked by the Nazis fighting for the purity of race and ethnicity. In the 2007 painting Jealousy, Szlaga ironically painted a portrait of the German national team bearing the colours of the German flag, which is comprised only of players of different nationalities and races which are not ‘true Germans’: Poles, Turks, and Africans. By using Polish characters, the artist deliberately misrepresents their names and uses names made up by Polish hooligans to insult Miroslav Klose (‘Klozet’ – ‘the loo’) and Lukas Podolski (‘Pedalski’ – ‘Faggot’). The latter was born in Szlaga’s home town, Gliwice, which is also run by the fans of Piast Gliwice football club, whose German name appears in the upper-right corner of the painting. The German national team, comprised of ‘second-class’ nationalities, is finally juxtaposed with the effigies of pigs and the Gothic-style ‘polnische’ signature, which further emphasises Polish-German animosity and the lack of mutual respect.

Neither work lacks perversity and irony. They draw from the style of one of the most important Afro-American artists – Jean-Michel Basquiat. In his works, he emphasised the significance of racial prejudices, pinpointing, among other things, the stereotypical image of Afro-American sportsmen seen ‘white America’. He expressed it, for example, in his works titled Famous Negro Athletes (1981), in which the deformed and identical faces of black baseball players have nothing in common with the Aryan and ‘Olympian’ heroes of Leni Riefenstahl, but are the faces of people from the margins, the ghetto, and the places in which they originated. It would seem that the German players from the paintings Teamgeist and Jealousy were presented in the same style. In the latter, the famous crown – Basquiat’s trademark – also appears. Both works pinpoint the problem of stereotyping and the stigmatisation of backgrounds that don’t fit into the canons of beauty dictated by white culture.

Football in performance art: Boniek!

In the second part of the 2000s, Poland and Ukraine were named hosts of the UEFA European Championship in 2012. One decision that was made after this was the demolition of the 10^th-Anniversary Stadium and the construction of the National Stadium in its place. Since the 1990s, the stadium in Warsaw had been a huge bazaar and a cultural melting pot, full of merchants and food vendors from Asia and Africa. Just before construction of the modern national stadium commenced, the Laura Palmer foundation led by Joanna Warsza, in cooperation with Bęc Zmiana Foundation, organised a series of artistic actions under the name 10^th-Anniversary Stadium and Europe Market’s Closing Day. One of them was the Boniek! performance, performed by Swiss artist Massimo Furlana. He carried out a solo re-enactment of the memorable Poland-Belgium game in which Zbigniew Boniek scored a hat-trick, paving Poland’s road to third place at the World Cup in 1982. While impersonating the Polish football star, he created a 90-minute performance in the 10^th-Anniversary Stadium thanks to which the derelict stadium and nostalgia for the sporting achievements of Poland under the communist regime could come to life once more.

Akcja "Boniek!" - Nagroda publiczności Wdechy 2007!!!

This amusing performance was not the first one in which a football player’s actions entered the field of art. One more example worth mentioning is Zbigniew Warpechowski’s Football performed in Wrocław’s BWA in 1974. The Polish artist, impersonating a Śląsk Wrocław football player, played a solo game during the opening of Kajetan Sosnowski’s exhibition. The act of abstracting the football player from the game itself and focusing on the individual sportsman was reminiscent of Hellmuth Costard in the film about George Best titled Fussball Wie Noch Nie (1971) and in Douglas Gordon’s and Philippe Pareno’s 2006 film about Zidane. All these projects not only aestheticised the actions of just one player but also turned the attention to issues of iconicity and the stardom of footballers, created with the use of pop-culture means of manufacturing idols.

Football in Marcin Dudek’s most recent works

While Warpechowski and Furlan impersonated football players both in the gallery and the stadium, Marcin Dudek incorporates the actions of football fans off the pitch into his works. By recreating riots and hooligan actions in the gallery space, he analyses aspects of crowd psychology. Dudek uses various means of expression, such as video art, sculptures, installations, and collages. With his own experiences of hooligans in mind (he was once a member of the Cracovia Kraków fan club), he explicitly concentrates on motifs not strictly connected to the football pitch and emphasises the unpredictability of the behaviour of an out-of-control crowd.In the Steps and Marches project, which has already been under development for a few years, Dudek writes his personal, singular experience into the universal historical-political reception of stadium events. In this vein, in the Brussels-based Harlan Levy gallery, he created a replica of the stadium stands from which the viewer could observe a large photograph depicting Zyonimir Boban’s famous kick, taken during the stadium riots in Zagreb. This iconic picture indicated the symbolic beginning of the Yugoslavian war. In Steps and Marches, a series of football-themed collages appear next to a replica of the stadium, together with the artist’s private photographs in which he is captured as a participant of the hooligan riots of the 1990s.

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Steps And Marches by Marcin Dudek, installation at Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels, 2017, photo: courtesy of the artist

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Following the trail of reconstructing non-sports events and clashing of the universal and personal experience, Dudek recently recreated Górka – the famous following of Arka Gdynia football club. He based it on a photograph from the 1997’s Arka–Lechia derby, in which he is seen as a participant in a crowd of masked hooligans. The action took place during his most recent exhibition Sovereign Heads (2018) in the Singapore-based YeoWorkshop gallery. While recreating the Gdynia section, which is actually a normal hill devoid of any architectural structures, he wanted to emphasise the natural, primal, and wild character of this terrain. In this aspect, he exhibited casts of the balaclavas of hooligans in the gallery interior, turning them into silicon masks. By pinpointing the social roles and functions of putting on masks, he emphasised the issue of changing one’s identity present in the rituals of both primitive peoples and football fans. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of collages on the topic of stadiums and a video-collage titled Terrace Cult, in which amateur recordings from the 1977 Arka–Lechia game were juxtaposed with photographs of hooligan groups from Indonesia – Persija Jakarta and PSIM Yokyakarta. Instead of a catalogue with reproductions of the exhibited works, the Singapore-based exhibition was accompanied by a special zine made just for this occasion, in which Dudek traced back the history of balaclavas, which were first used by the British army during the 1853-56 Crimea war. He also added visual content depicting iconic masked wrestlers and the changing logo of Crimea’s FC Sevastopol. Sovereign Heads and Steps and Marches complement each other, combining an in-depth reflection on that which is singular with that which is universal, giving new perspective to the phenomenon of football hooligans and the aestheticisation of violence unleashed during a football game.

The multitude of meanings analysed in this text clearly shows the importance of football as a phenomenon in our culture. It is an activity so common that it permeates many areas of human life. Football in art is no longer connected only to the sport itself, and the works by Polish artists explicitly sanction its presence in the area of cultural and social determinants, often becoming an important reflection and a critical view of the contemporary times. These works also serve as a validation – the presence of football in Polish art is by no means marginal. A closer inspection of the football world allows to understand complex issues, often reaching far beyond the sports aspect which was so apparent in the works of Polish artists on the topic of football up until the 1970s.

Written by Przemysław Strożek, Jun 2018, translated by PG, Jun 2018

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