Kicker

In play, we completely engage the adult or child spectator – whether ignorant of educated, it matters not – a situation is created and draws attention that doesn’t rely on knowledge but on surprise, movement, and provocation.

- Joël Stein [1]

Kicker is an early 2000s sculpture by the artist duo Sabina Lang (b. Bern, Switzerland, 1972) and Daniel Baumann (b. San Francisco, United States, 1967) who, since 1990, have collaborated as Lang/Baumann (L/B). Taking the form of a giant football table, the work exemplifies a recurring strategy in L/B’s practice whereby games are deployed as metaphors through which to challenge art’s rules of engagement. While works such as Dynamo Kiev and Wankdorf (2001) achieve this literally by turning the lines on a football pitch into works of abstraction, Kicker’s polished brass surface and imposing scale invites viewers to imagine themselves as active players rather than spectators in L/B’s practice.

L/B’s exploration of the role of play in art draws on participatory practices of the 1960s and 1970s, which regarded the viewer’s physical and perceptual experience as being part of the work. Kicker’s cultural symbolism gestures towards the same historical moment; table football, commonly referred to as kicker in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and elsewhere as baby-foot, as in France, or foosball, as in North America, became popularised in the postwar years as it proliferated in bars, cafes, and pool halls across Europe, Britain, and the United States. Transformed into sculpture, the game acts as a vehicle for L/B to incorporate the expansion of freedoms that characterised this period back into their own practice.

L/B’s interest in the viewer’s experience and participation extends into their engagement with postmodern developments in architecture and design. Most notably, the pair’s application of bold, coloured patterns to interior and exterior surfaces in series including Beautiful Walls, Beautiful Steps, and Beautiful Carpets derives its logic from Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s application of typographic concepts such as legibility in her innovative use of supergraphics to transform how architectural spaces were read and navigated. L/B’s work takes this logic into the realm of art, as a way to enhance the viewer’s sensitivity to the spatial dimensions in which it is encountered.

As such, Kicker epitomises ideas that are recurrent in L/B’s practice; over the span of their career, the artists have revived the experimental and recreational impulses of the 1960s and 70s in a variety of ways. In doing so, they been able to critically examine the spirit of optimism which fuelled Western cultural, social, and economic reconstruction during the postwar period, simultaneously harnessing its generative potential to produce installations which challenge established conditions of perception and upend conventional modes of spectatorship.

[1] Joël Stein was a French kinetic painter and proponent of the Op art movement. He was a founding member of GRAV (Visual Art Research Group) and drew on ideas presented by Johan Huizinga in his 1938 text, Homo Ludens to explore the role of interaction, games, and play in art. Quote sourced from https://www.xippas.com/exhibitions/joel-stein-joel-stein-and-the-grav/.