ARTISTS TALKING

Marc Renshaw's The sporting league is an apparently fictional table of football results that has been running since 1985. Updated regularly, sometimes even daily, the project appears in blog format with no explanation or contextual information. In this interview Marc discuses how the League came about, it's status as a blog, its relationship to truth, drawing, and the 'unfunny' joke.

AB: It is possible to mistake your virtual, fictional League for an actual one. How do you think the relationship between reality and fiction functions in the work?

MR: I aim to orchestrate a degree of puzzlement in the first instance in order to create a brief moment where one might ask, 'is this league real? Is it sincere? Is it out of its correct context?'

I question, 'Is it the fact that it's not real which conversely makes it more real?'  I feel a sense of comfortable predictability and regularity whilst working on the panels of statistics and find myself inwardly recreating matches taking place between the Sporting League teams, during which I routinely identify, track and relay the results and post match analysis that takes place between the fictional pundits such as Pundit X, Pundit Y and Pundit L.

AB: One of the things I enjoy most about the League is the striking imbalance between the emotional intensity of a live football match, its baroque aesthetic, and the paired-down minimalism of the League.

MR: The debates that underscore the game translate via my practice in inventive and discursive terms that reference the various communication channels, the excitement generated from commentators, media, pundits and the murky world of advertising and commercialism.

Anticipation, the familiar sharp intake of breath, the adrenaline, the sound of the crowd, the great mass, the noise outside silently interiorized. Feelings invoked whilst imagining match progress are interjected with snippets of ad hoc commentary provided by the fictional pundits. Much of this emotion is absent in my material output as I take on the role of a dehumanised archivist - rendering the text using biro on paper with the dryness of a statistician. In this way I can make parallels with the seriality of Sol Le Witt's work where the idea surpasses the tangible artwork itself.

The sense of relentlessness is a conscious choice that I make. It's also a purposeful decision to make my Artists Talking blog an artwork in its own right - by doing this I'm aware that it may differ from a lot of other blogs because of its fictional and conceptual status.

AB: The Sporting League is a rich world full of teams, characters and dramas that have the feeling of having been developed over time. How and when did The League get started?

MR: I recall playing football at primary school when I was about eight years old. I remember being an average player on the pitch during games lessons, but during break times I excelled. That was my domain, where I became the number one player for my first fictional team: Reds. I was the captain; top scorer and living a dream akin to the great European cup spring nights spent following Liverpool's exploits in the early to mid-nineteen eighties.

The project draws on an element of nostalgia for lost youth. It's also a metaphor for imagination, hopes, dreams, highs and lows of culture and collective experience; all of which I feel football fulfils.

1985 signified a transitional time for me - the move from primary to secondary education. It also represented an end of Reds and the 'The Parkish League' (which continued but was later re-named The Colbreck league), at which time my super team Reds disbanded.

During that year the Sporting world formed. It was a place that existed outside the Parkish league in which I'd played something of a noteworthy role. Teams that I'd become aware of in my imagination came to the fore to form a 'Super league' - The Sporting League. Tranquilayers, Bayerns, Athletico and Novia to name a few, originally  from separate divisions, states, zones and locations amalgamated to create within me a parallel existence, with Bayerns taking the first Sporting crown in 1986.

AB: Though the League seems at first quite dry, it is actually very funny, both as a whole and in its detail. How dos humour function in the work?

MR: The work is consciously deadpan. Derrida once said that: 'There's nothing beyond the touchline.' To pass the ball is like a form of drawing - an invisible line is drawn from one player to the next until it rolls off the pitch. I'm interested in self-perpetuity and relentlessness; the broken record with a repetitive sensibility.

It's a selfish indulgence to crack the 'same old joke' that was perhaps never really funny in the first place. I find it gratifying to blur the border between humour and sincerity, and to recycle a pun doggedly; devoid of irony and indiscriminately unheeding towards the passage of time or circumstance.  Consquently, I can relate, to say, Bruce Nauman's jumping 'no, no, no' clown.

AB: How does the League fit into your practice as a whole?

MR: Drawing forms the core of my practice of which The Sporting League project plays an integral role. In fact, it could be argued that The Sporting League exists outside of my practice and in turn becomes the practice itself. There are references within the project that allude to early exposure to the effects of mental illness and the fine line between a healthy imagination and an obsessive inner world. Similarly present in Outsider art, is a sense of hovering on the fringes of what's real and unreal.

The text filled panels appear as a homogenised mass that looks like texture from a distance but only reveal themselves fully when the viewer gets closer to study the work in more detail. I can relate to the idea that Tom Friedman talks about with his image titled: 'Everything', where the artist wrote all the words in the English dictionary. He has stated the following:'...the piece unfolded. How it began as a seemingly inconspicuous textures paper, the texture becomes words, the words represent a total system, the fullness and emptiness.'

My own work appears with no contextual information because I want the project to evolve quietly - allowing the viewer to draw their own conclusions without too much of a preamble.

We are forever bombarded by the mechanics of a continual over-saturation of media and this is something that I feel the work could reference. I'm also fascinated by the relationship between drawing, its broad application as a tool for communication and its ability to resonate on an intuitive level.

I'm a frequent listener to the radio and find myself immersed in the day to day developments in the world of football. I find listening takes me to another space. I think it's a form of escapism. I'm attentive to the fickle nature of the media and the swiftness with which luck and grace can change in the sporting, celebrity and the wider world at large.

Marc Renshaw is an artist living in North Lincolnshire. The culmination of The Sporting League will feature in a solo show at The Ropewalk in Barton Upon Humber, North Lincolnshire from 29 October - 27 November 2011.

You can view The sporting league blog here or go to Marc Renshaw's website.

First published: a-n.co.uk September 2011