Imagine someone waving these collages by Jos Houweling back and forth for a moment, from five metres away, so that you can barely register what’s on them. You would still see, no, feel in a millisecond what the subject is. You hear yelling. You smell grass. However nothing remotely like this will ever be seen on a football pitch. Conifers grow on the field, players swap limbs as if it was a card game, shirts run about that no national team ever wore. Yet despite the fact that sausages, cacti, old sandwiches, high heels or handguns have no business being there, the brain still says: FOOTBALL. 

Jos Houweling, who has been making photo series and collages since the 1970s, started with a simple rule: he would go in search of green—seamless green—with which to make abstract collages. And the most beautiful green is that of the grass on a well-maintained, freshly mown football pitch. It made him look at soccer matches on television in a new way, with an extra eye. Waiting for the moment when the grass was nothing but grass. Then he would take a photo of the television screen. 

The game of soccer is not a popular subject in art. Too familiar, too visually obtrusive perhaps. The green field, the white lines and the players form such a strong image between them that there is little room left for an artist. One of the few successful football artworks in Dutch art is the painting Footballers (1950) by Pyke Koch, showing three players in the snow. The grass has been carefully whited out, otherwise we’d no doubt fail to notice the dramatic beauty of the three figures suffering from cold, their legs turning blue. 

JOS HOUWELING is a Dutch artist. He taught at the Rietveld Academie (1976­1998), and directed the Sandberg Instituut (1999­2010). His photobook celebrating Amsterdam’s 700 years of history, 700 Centenboek (1975), was bought by the Centre Pompidou in Paris and became part of a large retrospective on his work. He is the initiator of The One Minutes, a worldwide platform for videos of exactly 60 seconds. In 2018, Jos published three photobooks in collaboration with Voetnoot, Antwerp. 

SACHA BRONWASSER is an art historian, author, moderator and curator. She writes and talks about contemporary art and film for several (international) platforms and she is editor and host of the controversial Amsterdam live art talk show Stampa. From 1998-2018 she worked as an art critic for the newspaper The Volkskrant. She also curated exhibitions and film programs. In 2011 her book of artist portraits Zo werken wij came out. Sacha’s first novel Niets is gelogen is published by Ambo Anthos in October 2019.