Despite its unquestioned status as a beacon of masculinity, if you really think about it, football is kind of gay. 22 men chasing after a ball all hot and sweaty, jumping on each other when they score? Sounds gay to me.
Coincidentally, it also sounds pretty gay to JJ Guest, too. “The first football-focused work I made was in response to coming across an image of two players celebrating by passionately kissing one another,” says the visual artist. “I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I was so angry. How was it okay for them to do that, with no fear, when I was terrified to even look at another man in public?” Guest channelled this frustration into his practice, one that explores the underlying homoeroticism present in the beautiful game. The artist’s first solo exhibition, The Other Team, has just opened in London, with Guest bringing his signature brand of on-pitch, homoerotic exploration to Tottenham’s Oof Gallery.
For the exhibition, the lines between the football world and gay life are intentionally blurred. Is the giant bathtub on display part of a football dressing room or is it a gay sauna? Its presence is intentionally ambiguous, and when the tiles behind the bath are doused in water an image is revealed in disappearing ink of the 1966 Everton team sharing a communal bath. Another installation shows the infamous kiss between Manchester United players Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, when the latter scored a winning goal against Man City in the 2010/11 season. Guest has spliced the image into different sections that conjoin when viewed from a specific angle, doing so as “a way of exploring space and how perspective changes when we navigate it.”
Elsewhere, an image of England player Geoff Hurst scoring in the 1966 World Cup final is reconstituted as a glory hole, the space where the football would be removed to make room for the cut-out circle (the work is cheekily titled Glory ‘66). Moving through the exhibition, one might expect that football fans could find Guest’s work sacrilegious, or that he’s intentionally provoking them by transforming their hallowed icons into unabashedly queer art. “While frustration might be at the core of my work, I’m not coming from a place of attacking anyone or calling anyone out,” the artist says in response. “It’s all about trying to create a middle ground for us to talk and ask questions, and hold space for one another, even if it’s a little uncomfortable at first.”
JJ Guest: The Other Team is at Oof Gallery, Warmington House, 744 High Road, London N17 0AP until December 23, 2023.
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