‘Men With Balls:The Art of the 2010 World Cup’

Curated by Simon Critchley, a football-centric show ‘Men With Balls:The Art of the 2010 World Cup’ at Church Street, New York includes work by artists like Miguel Calderon, Hellmuth Costard, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Mark Leckey, Maria Marshall, Santo Tolone, and Uri Tzaig.

The World Cup is a spectacle in the strictly Situationist sense. It is a shiny display of nations in symbolic, atavistic national combat adorned with multiple layers of commodification, sponsorship and the seemingly infinite commercialization. It's an image of our age at its worst and most gaudy. But it'is also something more, something bound up with difficult and recalcitrant questions of conflict, memory, history, place, social class, masculinity, violence, national identity, tribe, and group.

The hope of the exhibition courtesy Apexart is to construct a unique situation where these questions can be ruminated on collectively. The aim is to produce with this show some experience of being together with others in a group, watching a game, waiting for something marvelous, unexpected, and possibly magical to happen. And it will happen!

A press release says: “Football, a working-class ballet, an experience of enchantment, this game is a temporal rupture with routine of the everyday: ecstatic, evanescent, and, most importantly, shared. At its best, football is about shifts in the intensity of experience. And stories will multiply from that experience, stories of heroes and villains, of triumph, and a gnawing sense of the injustice of defeat.

"It’s about ever-shifting floors of memory and the complexity of personal and national identity. But most of all it is about grace. has grace: an unforced bodily containment and elegance of movement, a kind of discipline where long periods of inactivity can suddenly accelerate and time takes on a different dimension in bursts of controlled power. When someone like Pelé, like Johan Cruyff, like Maradonna, like Zidane does this alone, the effect is beautiful; when four or five players do this in
concert, it is breathtaking. "

The central drama of this show will unfurl, its curator Simon Critchley notes, as we watch games together. There will be heroes and villains. There will be triumph for a very few and righteous injustice and pain of defeat for the rest of us. This show looks to enact some experience of being together with others in a group, watching a game, waiting for something marvelous, unexpected, and possibly magical to happen. And there will hopefully be grace.