BONIEK!
A One-man Re-enactment of the 1982 Poland-Belgium Football Match by Massimo Furlan, commentary by Tomasz Zimoch
Alone, Swiss performance artist Massimo Furlan re-enacted one of the most spectacular games in the history of the Polish national football team — the Poland-Belgium face-off (3–0) at the 1982 World Cup in Spain, reproducing the choreography of the match’s hero, Zbigniew Boniek, who scored all three goals. The ‘match’ was reported live by Poland’s leading sports commentator, Tomasz Zimoch, and broadcast by Radio Kampus (97.1 FM). Zimoch’s commentary made it possible to picture the action of twenty-five years ago. Furlan’s projects often refer to childhood images and memories, one of which is the voice of a radio commentator coming out of open windows in a deserted city.
Furlan is 42 years old, an age when most professional footballers usually retire. As a teenager, like many of his peers, he dreamed of becoming a football star, replaying famous moves or actions in his room to his own commentary. As he says, he is happy to have had a banal childhood, and the memory he refers to is a common experience for virtually every boy. For many years he subconsciously hoped that the Swiss national coach would call him. Eventually, at the age of 40, he decided to become a self-proclaimed football star. He was daring enough to fulfil his childhood dream by appearing as a celebrated player in a audience-filled stadium. In 2002 in Lausanne, by himself he recreated the 1982 Italy-West Germany World Cup final as a fictional player wearing number 23. In 2006 in Paris, he played Michel Platini from the memorable, and for his team tragic, France-Germany semi-final from the same tournament. The 1982 Poland-Belgium match recreated at the 10th-Anniversary Stadium and the figure of Zbigniew Boniek were selected on advice of Tomasz Zimoch. Furlan chose Boniek, just as Andy Warhol portrayed Franz Beckenbauer, the legendary German footballer and coach, in his pop-star series. Boniek is a highly recognisable figure not only to Polish football fans, but also to Furlan himself, who grew up in Italy in the 1970s. Also important was the fact that the 1982 Poland-Belgium game became Boniek’s ticket to a professional career at Juventus FC, and that it was precisely at that time that the Stadium started falling into ruin. Besides Furlan and Zimoch, the re-enactment also featured the coaches originally present in Barcelona back in 1982. Bogdan Hajdas (the assistant to then national coach Antoni Piechniczek) and Ryszard Kosiński again, after 25 years, oversaw the game.
The figures of star football players, as well as football technique as a strategy, have often fascinated contemporary artists. In his Rules of the Game, Mexican artist Gustavo Artigas had two teams play basketball and two other simultaneously play football on the same field. In 2005, French artist Philippe Parreno and Scot Douglas Gordon made the high-budget film Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, in which seventeen synchronised cameras followed the brilliant footballer’s movements during a Spanish Primera Division match. Their idea was to show a football player at work through close-ups. Unlike Boniek!, though, the player there was extracted from the context. In the end, Furlan’s gesture bears more of an affinity with the strategies of Katarzyna Kozyra in her In Art Dreams Come True series, where she fulfils her childhood dreams by becoming an operatic diva, a go-go dancer, or the mother of psychoanalysis.
The audience also played a key role. The performance was attended by a crowd of 700 people. In keeping with the nature of participatory art, viewers were supposed to co-create the action’s meanings and narratives. Their very active and spontaneous participation (most of the viewers had probably never attended a real football game, but after five minutes they were all cheering and chanting) distorted the distinction between artist and audience, creating a non-hierarchical space of social exchange where the viewer is co-responsible for what happens. The situation in the Stadium was a potential fulfilment of what creator and theoretician of Happenings Allan Kaprow called for in his 1966 essay Notes on the Elimination of the Audience: he sought an experience of daily life through art that would make the viewers unaware of their own role. The ‘elimination’ in the title refers to a situation where the audience, while communing with art, does not know it is an audience. On 14 October, 2007 in Warsaw, at the 10th-Anniversary Stadium, Massimo Furlan was Zbigniew Boniek, Tomasz Zimoch provided the commented for a game in Barcelona on a June day 25 years earlier, and the spectators became football fans, waving Solidarity flags in Spanish stands.
Finissage of Stadium X
A series of Live Art Projects in the Derelict Communist Stadium
The 10-th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-ruined Warsaw. It was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years, by the mid-’80s, the site had stopped being used as a sports venue. It fell into ruin, becoming a post-Communist phantom. In the early 1990s, it was ‘revived’ by Vietnamese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russian traders, pioneers of capitalism who set up camping beds with all sorts of wares on the crown of the Stadium. Jarmark Europa suddenly became the only multicultural site in the city, a storehouse of biographies, equipment, and stories, as well as a major tourist attraction. A place became as an Asian suburb, a primeval forest, a realm of provisionality, controlled chaos and discount shopping, a sports club in demise, a work camp for archaeologists and botanists, the seat of Jehovah’s Witnesses, along with many others. Its different logic, its heterogeneity, its longstanding (non)presence in the middle of the post-Communist city, the invisibility of the Vietnamese minority, the debate around the development of a new National Stadium here for the Euro 2012 football cup, and the lack of a critical debate on Poland’s post-war architectural legacy — all these factors served as the inspiration for the curatorial project Finissage of Stadium X and later for the publication of a Reader: Stadium X-A Place That Never Was.
The 2006 project A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium by Anna Gajewska, Joanna Warsza and Ngo Van Tuong and a series of six ‘episodes’ of the Finissage of Stadium X in 2007–8: Boniek! by Massimo Furlan, On-Site Inspection, The End of Jarmark Europa – a debate, Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio Simulator and backyardradio, Palowanie/Pile Driving by annas kollektiv, and Schengen by Schauplatz International, were subjective excursions undertaken by artists, athletes, and activists into the reality of a Stadium ‘no longer extant’. The result were projects of a participative and semi-documentary nature (a walk, a football match, a Sunday radio station, a spectacle on a building site, an exhibition featuring real people) which touched upon issues of memory, deterioration, the power of imagination, ambiguities, and the future, as well as on the problematic exoticism of the place.
