Playoff

The point of departure for Playoff was a poor quality home video – a recording of a scuffle of football hooligans – which Hubert Czerepok had found on the Internet. In terms of the form, the artist completely “reprocessed” the material though his creative invention had caused no major changes to the quality of the original. The characters of the fight are now shown only by means of white contours, and the whole situation is presented very generally, though it is still easily recognizable as an arragned fight of hooligans.

The artist has resorted here to one of his more frequently applied artistic strategies of the so-called found footage. The practice entails the use of a ready made film or video footage, which is then creatively processed or quoted literally, often in detachment from the actual context in which it had been recorded. The recording of the scuffle was just such a film ready-made, a finished object subject to transformation.

The subject matter of Playoff belongs to the catalgoue of Czerepok’s main interests. The artist has for a long time been interested in the issue of violence, next to the question of disasters and the end of the world. Violence is a frequent subject of drawings from the series of Seances that Czerepok has been working on for a number of years now. The animated film is close in form to the series: the common denominator is the modest though nervous line, a simplified picture which perfectly describes the entire event. The artist’s interpretation of the recording from the Internet makes the whole piece a universal one. It is no longer a specific event but instead it becomes a general image of hooligan fights. The lack of details does not matter – Czerepok’s work suggestively evokes images known from media reports: a deserted place, a growing aggression, the stereotypical image of hooligans in tracksuits and hoods.

Playoff provokes many questions, thus revealing the critical aspect of the work. One of the questions is about violence as such, about its origins, forms and presence in social life. The other is about its ubiquitousness in the media, and in particular in the anonymous world of the Internet. The uploaded recording, which is actually a proof of violence, is treated in the Internet as any other video.

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