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Choice blogs - Elizabeth Holdsworth selects Marc Renshaw
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Marc Renshaw, 'Sporting League: Game 37 Table', Pen.
The selection I have made for this month's Choice Blog, Marc Renshaw's The Sporting League, may seem an unexpected choice considering my usual lack of enthusiasm its subject matter. A self-confessed vilifier of all things sporting, perhaps for the most part through my own physical ineptitude, I am the enemy of ball, turf and whistle; the foe of track and field; the adversary of statistics, rackets and any kind of functional footwear. Anything which requires accurate timings to anything less than the nearest whole minute is rarely worth the effort.
Since the age of 11, in what appears to be the longest ongoing artist's project covered by an Artists talking blog, Marc Renshaw has devised, embellished and honed an imaginary world of sports. The fictional league, with teams, a city and a whole host of player and pundit characters, is meticulously documented in an archive of statistical information, supplemented with Renshaw's illustration and handmade props. Demonstrating a fanatical attention to the creation of this world in its most minute detail, Renshaw has built and sustained a repository of his own boyish imagination. This almost obsessional and childlike delight in the constant stream of league statistics - wins, losses, goals scored etc - is further highlighted by their presentation in a handwritten scrawl.
In a procedure which defines our way of producing and retaining factual knowledge, Renshaw appropriates and transforms the historical document into a cultural fantasy based upon that spark of childhood imagination which we all at some point shared. Converted to the cause of this particular fantasy sporting world, I cannot help but remain attentive and interested in the future wins and losses of teams such as Bayerns, Novia and Athletico - from the safety and comfort of my desk, that is.
Elizabeth Holdsworth is a writer based in Leeds. She is co-founder of Millpond, an online contemporary arts journal, and the current curatorial intern at South Square Gallery, Bradford.
Go to Marc Renshaw's blog
First published: a-n.co.uk May 2011
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