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)
