Basic HTML Version
Street Art
ANGELENOS TURN RUSH-HOUR RACKET INTO A CITYWIDE SYMPHONY
BILBAO, SPAIN
GAME CHANGER
The art world gives soccer players
a new goal to shoot for
With a hexagonal soccer field spread
out before him, Rafael Alkorta eyes both
possible goals as he traps a pass fromone
of his four teammates. As two other teams
advance in tandem to block his kick, he
considers which players are his momen-
tary allies and which he will betray. Then
he makes his move.
The retired Spanish pro isn’t imagining
things. He’s merely playing a very unusual
game: three-sided soccer. And while it
seems new (and, yes, a bit incomprehensi-
ble), it’s actually been years in the making.
In 2009, using theoretical rules laid out
in Danish avant-garde painter Asger Jorn’s
1962 treatise,
The Natural Order,
a French
art collective created a three-sided soccer
game it called “triolectique.” Jorn’s drawing
of a six-sided fieldwas meant to inspire
freshways of thinking about relation-
ships and cooperationwithin sport and
society—and inspire it did. Before long, the
French artists passed the idea on to the
philosophicallyminded Bilbao players at
the 2009 Lyon Biennale.
In the game, the winner is determined
not by howmany goals are scored but by
howmany are conceded. With three teams
and three goals, “you choose the way you
want to win,” says Galder Reguera, activi-
ties director for the Athletic Club of Bilbao.
This month the Bilbao club will partner
with the local Guggenheimmuseum to
formally introduce three-sided soccer to
the world as part of “Thinking Football,”
a series of talks and events that highlight
soccer’s relationship tomodern society.
Whether fans will embrace the new
sport remains to be seen, but one thing
will certainly take some ge ing used
to: no long-standing rivalries. “In this
game,” Reguera says, “you don’t have to be
enemies for life.” Just until the next goal is
scored.
—BRITTANY SHOOT
LOS ANGELES
Barry Belkin parks in front of his home in L.A.’sMar Vista neighbor-
hood, clutches his iPhone andwaits. At exactly 6 p.m., he hits play
and commences honking the horn of his 2009 Audi in time with
a five-minute-long musical score. In a parking garage at UCLA,
Hilary White joins in with a series of short honks, then a long
one, on her 2005 Subaru. Meanwhile, Shamim Momin taps her
horn while navigating her way through traffic in Atwater Village.
These are just three of the 1,000 Los Angeles drivers who
volunteered to participate in a countywide car-horn symphony.
The piece, which took months to arrange, is the brainchild of
New York artist Zefrey Throwell. Mystified by the isolation of
car-centric life in L.A., Throwell set out to bring drivers together
to “create a symphony that is a song of Los Angeles, played by
Angelenos, on the instrument of their city,” he says.
Throwell used variousmedia outlets to recruit the participants,
who, after emailing him their car make andmodel, were assigned
an MP3 recording to follow based on the pitch of their horn. “I
split the tones into five different parts,” he says. “TheHonda Civic,
for example, has a piercing, shrill high end.”
On the day of the performance, as rush hour tightened its grip
on the county, Throwell parked his Chevy Malibu rental on a
hilltop near Dodger Stadium and honked the first note. Drivers
across town followed their assigned parts, bringing the collec-
tive composition to life. “My symphony allowed a large number
of strangers to connect on both a sonic and conceptual level,”
he says.
One of those strangers, as it turned out, was none other than
Barack Obama. An Obama aide confirmed to Throwell that,
while driving through SantaMonica, the presidential motorcade
joined in. “He’s got a large custom Cadillac,” Throwell says, “so
I assigned him the lowest note.”
—NICOLE PAJER
22
MAY 2012
•
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
THEWORLD
||
Dispatches