Here’s 5 things we learned at the weekend:

1. We’re shit.

2. I cannot adequately express the rage I experience watching Wayne Rooney try and play football. It is embarrassing. He must know it’s embarrassing. Fuck off m8.

3. I think 1 & 2 covers it.

4. Tom covered it.

5. See 4.

After wrapping up the EPL against Southampton, we have now had our title stripped from us, after the consortium invoked the three strike rule. Knew they ruddy would.

Here’s 5 things us learned, like the true artists we are:

1. Someone needs to have a look at the NHS.

2. Rooney is beyond joke bad now. Like there are no jokes funny enough to warrant his inclusion.

3. Paul Pogba is having a mare.

4. At least Watford now know they can beat Hull and Southampton.

5. See, this is EXACTLY what happens when you leave Rooney out the oh.

6. You sure showed point 2.

My exhibition opens to the public today. It’s not really about football, but it does feature ‘Ka-Powell!’, after it was kindly voted for by people from the football Twitter-sphere.

“How do I it?” (I’m asking on your behalf – you’re welcome!) I use electrical tape to draw with. I started drawing with electrical tape because when I was preparing for my first ever public exhibition – fourteen years ago – I had no money and I just happened to find some laying around. I still have no money, a theme that I’m pleased to say has stuck, and electrical tape is only 62p a roll (my show cost £2.48 and there’s tape leftover for next time). I make this point because I know people think they don’t have the time or money for creative pursuits.

The Exhibition:

People exhibiting are asked to fill out a short questionnaire, that is displayed beside their work. This is mine…

ARTIST’S QUESTIONNAIRE

Why is creativity important to you?

There’s a lot of time when I’m not eating and sleeping – why would I want to waste any of it on things that don’t matter?

 Tell us about your show:

The title is a slightly pretentious way of saying, “some of the stuff of my life”, and is stolen from the lyrics of a song that I’ve been listening to a lot recently, so it fits quite neatly. I draw football things mostly, I hate The Sun newspaper and I love my cat Casey more than she will ever understand.

 Where can we find out more about your work?

I’m a football blogger (who isn’t?) and regularly post new pictures on my site www.bifurcated.co.uk

Here’s some pictures of the exhibition: three drawings spread over the three walls of the space…

(I’m not very good at taking photos)

If you haven’t stalked me here yet, or more likely don’t have the inclination to, you might not know that I’m an artist. Not as if I’d ever be so crass as to refer to myself as such a thing … apart from just then, and when it suits me.

“That’s not art!” You might be screaming at the computer screen. “That’s just stuff done on Paint – really badly!” Or “They look more like terrible football parodies that everyone who thinks they’re funny does?!” All of which are valid observations.

My art work, in all its incarnations (it hasn’t always looked like this) has always been about questioning the way art communicates via its “own” verbal and non-verbal language; about its context, and about its inherent snobbery. The central theme being our relatedness. I’m very interested in how people don’t want to share things; they want things all to themselves. When they do choose to share, it’s with those who already share the same narrow viewpoint.

The parallels between art and football, with regards to language, context, snobbery and relatedness, are why I’m interested in combining the two. Although that’s not to say these parallels are specific to these particular institutions. I have been a student of both for a long time, so feel qualified to express a legitimate opinion on both; that’s my start point.

It’s about football, but it’s not about football. The subject matter could be anything, but the subject matter couldn’t be anything else either. My favourite fable is, The Emporer’s New Clothes. I also believe the pursuit of perceived perfection to be, in general, a narcissistic one.

I can’t guarantee any of the above won’t be sacrificed for the sake of a pun or punchline. What? I’m an Artist – your rules don’t apply.

Below is how the show looks through the medium of  Paint and then in reality.

Please feel free to visit vicariously through your ‘puter (It’s much less awkward than actually turning up in the flesh.)

And look someone has already been to visit! *Cough* Yeah, so what if it’s my girlfriend? I didn’t force her or nothing.

I then added to it…

Where were you when we were sh…sitting there.

This past week me and David, the other half of Bifurcated, had a day out at the Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol to watch a footy double-bill of the Zidane film and the documentary The Referees. We were speculating in the cafe beforehand, upon noticing our tickets were No.15 and No.16 respectively, if the allotted numbers might represent the potential audience in attendance. When we finally entered the auditorium we discovered we had been a long way off … there were two people sat separately and a young father with his two sons. By the mid-point of the first film there was just us left. Curator of the event, and deliverer of a wonderfully articulate opening introduction, Dr Mike O’Mahony, from the University of Bristol, turned to see who was left, and then to us, and uttered, “Just the die-hards left then?!”

The Arnolfini in Bristol does have a reputation for being a bit ‘stuffy’  (other people’s words, not mine). Without being archaic it certainly has an ‘old-fashioned’, almost obsolete, vision of contemporary art at times, stuck in a cliche almost. However, this still for me felt like contemporary art inviting football in to its home just for the opportunity to humiliate it. “But we’re full of examples of artistry” says Football. Art just replies by searching its pockets. “I’ve got something for you”, Art says, before unfolding its hand to reveal a one finger salute, which it shoves in Football’s face, while blowing a raspberry. “Jog on” says Art, “and don’t darken my door again”.

Terry is forever having his portrait done…

A.C Grayling believes that “‘Art might by our language’s most controversially difficult word to define” and I’d agree: it’s subjective. We don’t live in times where writers, the likes of Clement Greenburg, tell us what to like, we do our thinking for ourselves, for the most part. Although we are inevitably influenced by our interior and exterior history and by the ‘market society’ we find ourselves in, what we think of as art may, in a lot of cases, be relatively ambiguous, but it is very personal to us.

Within football I can clearly see the creativity and artistry apparent in almost every game Stoke don’t play and I’m also moved by it, but I don’t see it as ‘art’. As football has, as we all know, become commodified, its true, pure, artistic expression, artistic endeavour, has been all but swallowed up by the rapacious nature of the monster it now exists as. The same perhaps can be said of much of  mainstream art. Art created primarily for material gain, for me is not art. That’s not to say I think this is the fault of art or the artist. As Lewis Hyde observes in his book ‘The Gift’, “[…] the exploitation of the arts which we find in the twentieth century is without precedent”.  I’m a purist in many ways although of course art and indeed football challenges my preconceptions all the time. And that’s the way I like it.

Jody Craddock an artist on and off the field.

Not long into my art degree a tutor told me that I would soon realise that there weren’t actually that many ideas in art, which at the time felt uncomfortably pretentious. The further I progressed/regressed I came to realise he’d exaggerated wildly and that in fact there was only one idea in art; identity. The more time I spend on the planet, the more I’ve come to realise that in fact I was guilty of embellishment too. It wasn’t just the only idea in art, identity was the only idea in everything ever.

This is a little plug for my friend Matt from University (Click on the picture for more)

People have an in built propensity to fight for the ownership of a given subject or interest and they keep it so tightly clasped to their chest that no one else can share it with them, apart from the select few they believe to be of kindred spirit who reinforce their own persuasions. This is certainly true in my own experience within the spheres of football; and without question art. It’s no surprise that this happens with our personal interests because we all need an identity. When intellectualising football, art, whatever, by giving it its own special language, its own code, we define it, we give it its meaning which gives us our meaning and defines us. Our identities (our lives) are defined by the meaning we try and give to them. It’s a shame that we find that in some cases the most effective way of protecting our identity is in the form of thinly veiled bullying through snobbery, inverse or straight forward, or more commonly through a form of passive aggression.

Perversely, sharing, engaging with and discussing our interests with someone not of our ilk (perceived equal intellectual level, social strata, postcode etc), whose views appear in direct opposition to our own individual sensibilities on the subject would ultimately provide a much more enriching experience for everyone involved.

If you can work out how to do that successfully then please let me know.

Martin Creed has a personal message for United fans

p.s. Below is an example for me of when art is good…

An Oak Tree by Michael Craig-Martin in simple physical terms is a glass of water on a shelf with an accompanying text (an intrinsic part of the piece) explaining what the artist has achieved.

Here’s an edited version, highlighting the main points, I got off of Wikipedia (where else)…

“[…]I have changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree. I didn’t change its appearance. The actual oak tree is physically present, but in the form of a glass of water.It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter the fact that it is an oak tree”

The artist and spectator have to both invest belief equally in it for it to be successful and in that respect the message is universal, transcending the boundaries of the art institution, speaking to us all.

Another way of looking at it, if you’re not a fan of conceptual art, is with absolute disdain. You decide.

Who’s bad?

I stopped sulking just in time to watch both England games this past week after a self imposed exile that stretches back to when the F.A, Capello, or whoever, reinstated John Terry as captain after he’d not actually apologised for all the bad stuff he’d done back in March of this year. I hadn’t missed much in those few halcyon months. Players and managers come and go, England remain the same.

I have always supported England since watching Bryan Robson tear around the pitch (and himself apart) with all the other considered best players from English football, Peter Beardsley, Gary Crisps and Glenn Hoddle during the World Cup in ’86 – one of my first real memories of watching a huge football event on telly.  However, during a few seconds of weakness, whilst watching the John Terry press conference I viewed the national team, via the F.A, without the aid of my usual footy filter … The countless missed opportunities by the F.A to make examples of players and staff who bring the game in to disrepute. The governing bodies general inability to govern effectively. Why aren’t THEY capping wages? Why aren’t THEY policing the investment in clubs? Why aren’t THEY limiting the impact on smaller clubs? Why do THEY allow the likes of The Daily Mail and The Sun to stamp their brand of fascism all over the game, ban them from the press conference and grounds. Ban them from covering matches. What are THEY doing! Careerists THE LOT OF EM! The corporate sponsorship adorning the walls – Mars, McDonald’s, Budweiser, the gambling adverts, Aaarrrggghh! And that was that. I’d had enough.

For one year I was a ‘Big’ England fan. Here I am then with an old friend, Matt. I’m the one on the right complete with ginger hair dye(!!!!)and curtains (I don’t know why). This was taken in a photo booth just after the England vs Scotland qualifier for Euro 2000 (exactly 12 years ago to this day, November 17th). What a tool. Previous to this delightful pictoral contraceptive, I was a fat Northerner on a fine-art course in a little southern city drowning in a small pond of  peers who all had pretentions of making it in London. I’d needed an identity and after losing about three stone one summer, I came back to University a new man (well, just the same really but painfully thin and with ginger hair dye). My new housemate Matt was a big footy fan, although he hid that behind his support of Southend United (Get on board, the jokes don’t get any better than this). He was the first proper footy fan I’d met in Bristol, a kindred spirit of sorts. Admittedly, Matt’s love of England trumped mine, he wasn’t a thug, but I excused a lot of people for presuming he was. I cringe to think of us drunkenly slurring chants in packed quiet bars and rampaging down leafy suburban streets waving an England flag from the pound shop. At the time though it provided me with something valuable, something comforting.

I moved out of the house with Matt the next year and into a shared house with some of those pretentious peers. I definitely didn’t become one of them, but the nights of re-editing the England team before all night PlayStation, with a couple of boxes of Carlsberg, were replaced by Connect 4, some film with no proper ending, and Hummus. Wait a minute … am I just retelling the James McAvoy film Starter For Ten? Of course I continued to watch England games with Matt, but not in the same way.

The difference between me and Matt is a simple one, Matt is proud to be English. I am in some respects proud of individual achievements by various fellow country folk and I am very proud of many aspects of our culture. I am definitely English. But proud in the true sense, no. I am embarrassed by the way in which our country has behaved historically, not to say I carry that burden with me throughout my daily life, there’s more important things to worry about like why my cat Casey has started doing really wet mess in her litter tray, or what’s on the telly later. That’s also not to say I think our country is any worse than any others. Saying I’m proud just isn’t something I would say. As is always the case someone has summed up my feelings better than I ever could, this time Neil Hannon off of the Divine Comedy in the song Sunshine…

I feel very strongly that the ills of football are very detached from my own relationship with it. I like football for the reasons I have always liked it. My heroes beating the villains. Triumph in the face of adversity. Happy Endings. Goals. Fun. The comfort of it’s different language. My friendships that  have formed through it and more importantly sharing it over and over again with those friends. The magic. It’s just footy isn’t it?

David Platt?

So, I sat there watching England on Tuesday with my best friend Rob just enjoying watching an England game with my best friend Rob. Enjoying making stupid comments on the scarcity of the arm tattoo and repeating the in-jokes we share during most matches we watch together. Supporting England like I’ve always done, occasionally looking the other way and whistling.

Armed with two (TWO!) sheets of graph paper, a permanent marker (Yes I said permanent. This study will be a PERMANENT record. You can not erase it.) and our wits we embarked on a 2 minute study of the main Man City lot.

The results are bewilderingly astounding and prove conclusively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, with absolutely no need for recourse, that Owen Hargreaves just doesn’t and will not fit in.

See for yourself. We have included the results of the study below for your perusal…

Part 1: As you can see the main body of the squad are 'Baddies'.

Part 2: As City continue to be 'Baddies', Hargreaves quite clearly is shown to be a goody.

The conclusion from the results we drew was that despite the fact that the move is really, really unfair *best said fighting back tears and stamping both feet on the ground, whilst adding “I’m not crying, you’re crying”*, in being a goody Hargreaves is mathematically predisposed to fail if he moves there. Throughout football history we have examples of ‘goodies’ moving to ‘baddies’ teams and it not working out. Look it up if you like.

We have no need to concern ourselves with this whatsoever. We can quite happily return to putting our fingers in our ears and humming while City harp on about this and other nonsense.

Yah!

With a knowing smile and a lackadaisical shrug Dimitar handed him the Champions League trophy and as he triumphantly hoisted it skywards the stadium erupted. He caught a glimpse of himself against the silver plate and pulled the trophy in tight to his chest as a solitary tear ran down his weary face. The camera from its position tightly focused on the tear panned away capturing the United players as they drenched each other in victory champagne. Pulling away further the camera revealed the United faithful as they continued their celebrations unabashed. Pulling away now even sharper the camera climbed to a height, skimming past the blimp, continuing its trajectory to face the unfathomable darkness of the night sky…

“And … CUT!!”

“Great job guys!!”

Robert Pattinson who had been playing Owen Hargreaves and Andy Garcia (Dimitar Berbatov) high-fived, Yeah-ed and Whoop-ed before shuffling away discussing where to go grab a bite to eat.

Just off set a lone figure seemingly oblivious to the fork-lift trucks removing the set all about him began to weep. Ron Howard played by Richie Cunningham from Happy Days, who had been directing the film, approached.

“Hey Owen, Owen? You okay maan?”

“Yeah, Ich bin sorted ta … just denken about zie awesome journey I’ve been on dude.”

After reading a fictional web blog post about how his life had been turned in to a movie in the future based on the true events that occurred as a result of reading said web blog post (this one, keep up) Owen Hargreaves whole existence had been turned on its head in the most unlikely of ways…

The phone hadn’t rung for weeks. Owen had been released by the club he owed so much to and his heart was heavy. The days became nights and nights became days. He muddled through somehow. Lost. Adrift. Alone.

Towards the end of July 2010 he received a text message from his old team mate and good friend Dimitar Berbatov;

Hi I Gt new deal lol waz sez u shd c dis http://176.32.230.16/bifurcated.co.uk xoxox

Although pleased for his good friend Dimitar, Owen wasn’t interested in seeing a picture of Wazza’s bald patch or more photos of Kai. He replied, ‘Gr8!! lol xox’ and rolled back into the duvet while throwing his mobile out the window. He soon drifted away, the only respite from the torture, sleep.

Die am I, dude?

Three weeks later after almost two months without venturing from his bedroom, Owen dragged himself to the garden for some fresh air and a quick cigarette (his new aid to pass the time). Once outside he took a minute to survey his kingdom. The numerous diamond encrusted cars in the platinum paved drive, the gold leaf fascade of his country getaway and the bronzed ‘friends’ who had been living in the Jacuzzi throughout the summer. He didn’t even know who they were. He didn’t even know himself anymore. He felt the bile in his stomach begin to rise.

“Get out! Get out!! Get OUT!!! SCHNELL, SCHNELL! GET OUT NOWWWW!”

With a look of horror and disgust on their faces the revellers hurriedly gathered their belongings, jumped in their cars and sped off down the driveway.

Owen calmly finished his cigarette and made his way back to the house.

Laying on the path as he made his way inside was a discarded tennis ball. With an almighty thwack, he blasted it into the wall. An old familiar feeling coursed through his veins. He repeated it again and again and again. He played until the daylight faded. With grass stained knees and sweat pouring from his tousled locks he suddenly felt alive again.

Ich love footy.

As he headed indoors again, this time to switch on the floodlights he spied the phone he had discarded all those weeks ago. He knelt down to retrieve it from its muddy grave. The message from Dimitar was still on the screen. His curiosity peeked, he ran inside and logged on to the mysterious site…

“Scheiße … I nicht know these dudes loved me so much, that’s top das ist” Owen said to himself as he scrolled down through the thousands of tributes…

For the rest of the story… of how Owen returned to United, insisting on playing for free and turning his back on the ‘system’. How he burned his belongings during a controversial talk at the following year’s ‘Marxism 2012′ in London and became a working class icon. How he endlessly and successfully campaigned to have Rupert Murdoch imprisoned for his fraudulent dealings and how in a landmark case he refused to allow Sky to profit from his image rights and forced them to paste an avatar of Richard Keys in stockings and suspenders over him during their coverage of United games during the 2011/12 season … I’m afraid you will have to wait for the movie.

So, this is the bit where you come in:

For the above scenario to play out in its entirety culminating in us winning the Champions League, you need to post your personal tributes to Owen Hargreaves below as a comment.

If Owen Hargreaves doesn’t return to United then it’s your fault. Do you want that on your conscience? No? I didn’t think so.

You may begin…