Barrow AFC Digital Residency

Project Summary (3 of 3)

To accompany this, there will be also be an edition of books that will be available to buy from sellers around the ground and from the club shop. Examining the role of printed matter in recording transient events, this will be inspired in terms of its aesthetic by those obsessively encyclopaedic club histories produced by fans. Current favourites include: The Holker St. Greats Pt.2., The Definitive Barrow AFC, and The Colin Cowperthwaite Testimonial Programme. This idea follows on from earlier editions of artist’s books produced as co-founder of Earwig Books, a book arts imprint and studio originally based in London. Publications such as Walks in Leicestershire (2004), The Negative Album (2005) and Census (2006) have all taken specific geographical situations as starting points for investigating themes of locality and memory and how these affect our perceptions of a particular landscape. These works have all been made directly available to the non gallery-going public, being catalogued in public libraries, secreted in park bandstands and sold cheaply in village halls in order to make direct contact with the environment they address.

Similarly, the outcomes of the residency will be presented as a series of events and documents rather than as a traditional exhibition, and will require viewers to become an active participant in the work, whether it requires them to go for a walk around the pitch, play an instrument during a match or knit a scarf.

The results of the Barrow AFC Digital Residency will be presented at Holker St. in late August / early September.

Contact John Hall at [email protected] or Glenn Boulter at: [email protected] for further information.

Project Summary (2 of 3)

The start of the residency coincided with me relocating from Leicester and has come as a welcome introduction to the area. Working from my studio space at the Canteen Arts Centre on Barrow Island and at the Bluebirds Study Centre, the project so far has seen me giving talks about my practice to members of the public and to students at Barrow sixth form College, being interviewed by the North West Evening Mail and running a workshop with children from Thorncliffe Secondary School, making postcard books in which to record the final matches of the season. Though trained as a printmaker, I currently work across a range of media and decided to approach the brief – to create a piece of digital (i.e. non-permanent) art – through a mixture of sound-based work and performance, using publications and print as a way of documenting and complementing this.

The sound pieces will explore the aural environment of the ground from the physical sounds of the game to the emotional response of the crowd as well as the acoustics of the site. These are being produced collaboratively with Midlands-based artist and musician Francis O’ Donnell Smith, with whom I started working during a residency at Leicester’s Haymarket Theatre. This saw us jointly develop a series of multi-media improvisations based around the city’s vanishing industrial architecture and has since led to us performing regular shows with a shifting cast of guest musicians and delivering a series of workshops for Creative Partnerships teaching methods of composition that rely on creating systems and parameters to generate music.

Before starting the project, I was especially keen to get back to working with text and spoken word and have since been looking at early experimental radio dramas with a view to eventually having a piece broadcast on Radio Cumbria during or following their regular match coverage. The written texts will be read by a local actor and will be made up of collaged sponsors’ adverts, transcribed commentary, fixtures and lists of players. Ideas that may feed into this include a composed piece of music based around the team’s history. This involves a series of simple musical motifs derived from past and present league tables, resulting in a compressed musical timeline with each group of notes following league positions for every year of the team’s existence. Another idea will see us recruiting an amateur orchestra (i.e. anyone who owns an instrument – they don’t necessarily have to be able to play it). We will then line up two sets of musicians along opposite sides of the pitch and asking them to make sounds in response to the movements of their team. The emphasis would not be on melody, but on the back and forth motion of the music, with the instruments being selected and/or open-tuned to create a general sound and to avoid ‘virtuoso-ism’.

Project Summary (1 of 3)

As someone whose work in the past has taken inspiration from my local Co-op supermarket, a group of ramblers and a singer in a working men’s club, being chosen for a residency at Barrow AFC Football club has provided a valuable opportunity for me to further develop my interest in localised culture and models of social interaction.

Barrow AFC is a semi-professional football club, based in Barrow In Furness, South Cumbria and playing in the Blue Square Conference North, best described as Division 6 in the football pyramid.
For a club of its size in a town of approx 70,000, the club is very well supported. In a moderately successful season the Bluebirds can expect an average gate of over 1000, double the average for the level at which they play. The project’s theme is Football, Art and Community and is being led by artist and Barrow supporter John Hall with the support of the Arts Council England, Cumbria Arts In Education, Aim Higher, Barrow Borough Council and partner schools across the county. The residency involves researching and developing a piece of work for installation at the start of the 2008-9 season.

Despite not being a football supporter and having never attended a match as an adult, I was nonetheless interested in exploring objectively the idea of the game as a form of performance with its own attendant set of rituals. The Holker Street ground with its array of textured concrete surfaces, layers of royal blue paint and walls topped with broken glass, has a strong physical presence. Geographically situated at one of the town’s highest points, it looks out over the Duddon estuary, across to Black Combe fell and takes in housing estates, a cemetery and an Asda supermarket to its rear. Though relatively small compared to many football clubs, it is clearly an integral part of the community. This became clear from an early stage when myself and other short-listed candidates were invited to watch Barrow vs. Gainsborough Trinity (Barrow won 4-1) before being interviewed at the ground the following afternoon. Since beginning the residency at the end of January, I have regularly donned extra layers of clothing and journeyed to Holker Street on Tuesday nights and Saturday afternoons to see Barrow play, with the players often battling against fierce coastal winds and driving rain. As the season has progressed and the weather improved, I’ve gradually watched the crowds swell from 500 to almost 3,000, culminating in an open top bus parade through the town centre that celebrated the team’s promotion into the Blue Square Premier League earlier this month.

Every Man His Own Football (pt.2)

A comprehensive selection of dramatically titled, fan-produced books on the team can be found in Barrow reference library. These range from simple photocopied and stapled books to the more luxurious hard bound (in a uniform royal blue). Highlights include:
– The Definitive Barrow FC. This one has a list of every player ever to play for the team.
– The Holker St. Greats Pt.2. Brilliantly concise statements summing up each player, such as: ‘Steve Brooks always gave 100%’, ‘Peter McDonnell, always a crowd favourite’, ‘Mick Richmond a popular attacking full back’, ‘Kevin Thomas the Jolly Juggler’ etc.
– Wembley 1990 FA Trophy Final – spiral bound scrapbook.
– The Colin Cowperthwaite Testimonial Programme
– A Dream Weekend
– Barrow AFC: In the Beginning There Was the End
– BAFC: The Postwar Years abounds with dramatic chapter headings:
The Saddest Season Ever, We Battle On, Pitch Ultimatum from League, Hughes Lasts 24 hrs Before McManus Steps in, 3,500 Witness City Thriller, Bring on the Wolves, Cup Dream Shattered, Two Out of Three In, Another Woeful Season, Gillingham’s Nightmare on Holker St., Vickers Steps in With Financial Help.

Another current influence is The Unfortunates by B.S Johnson.

"A sports journalist, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the railway station and attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a football match."

The book is contained in a box, with twenty seven sections presented, unbound, to be shuffled and read in whichever random order the reader happens to take them.

“And what would the ‘bleeding librarians” do to The Unfortunates, Johnson wondered. “Would they bind it up like a Proper Book, the sods?” Some did of course.’
Quote from ‘Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text’ by Alan Bartram (British Library, 2005)

Other miscellaneous ideas:
– Produce a book printed on a series of microfiche films so that people have to go to the reference library in order to read it.
– Get fans and small children to draw portraits of every player who ever played for the team from imagination and compile them into sticker album.
– Make a special edition of the programme that is written entirely hand written / hand drawn.

Every Man His Own Football (pt.1)

Another outcome of the project is to be an edition of books that will be available to buy from the club shop. This may take the form of a book/CD/DVD package that straightforwardly documents the work made during the residency or it may constitute a piece of work in itself. Examining the role of printed matter in recording transient events (such as a football match), this will be partly inspired in terms of its aesthetic and content by pre-existing fan-written histories and biographies of the club and its players and partly by the ethos of early avant garde publications such as Mayakovsky and Burliuk’s A Slap in the Face of Public Taste with it’s sackcloth binding and hand-stencilled lettering.

The contents will include a mixture of written texts, visual scores and photographs. These may be bound in separate sections and held together in a hard jacket similar to a library-bound musical score. Other possible formats include that of a broadsheet newspaper to be handed out at matches, following in the foot steps of the little-known journal Jedermann Sein Eigner Fussball (Every Man his Own Football)… 'Walter Mehring claimed to be responsible for the unusual distribution methods used for ‘Jedermann Sein Eigner Fussball’, dated 15th Feb. 1919, costing 30 Pfennigs… “We hired a char-a-banc… and also a little band, complete with frock coats and top hats, ho used to play at ex-servicemen’s funerals. We, the editorial staff, paced behind, six strong, bearing bundles of Jedermann instead of wreaths. In the sophisticated west end of the city we earned more taunts than pennies, but our sales mounted sharply as we entered the lower-middle class districts of North and East Berlin.”

This combined the ambition of a newspaper with the niche marketing of an artists’ book. However, it was surpressed immediately and remaining copies destroyed.'
From ‘Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text’ by Alan Bartram (British Library, 2005)