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Municipal de Fútbol is a collaborative edition about amateur soccer in Los Angeles—the everyday experience of playing in pick-up games, weekend and night park leagues. Jennifer Doyle, a contributor to frieze and author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire, has contributed two essays to the books, both with Spanish translation. Housed in an embossed green clothbound box with black ribbon pulls, the edition includes two clothbound books (one of which studies the game as it is played throughout Los Angeles, on hijacked baseball fields, back lots and public squares, and the other of which focuses on one field in particular, the ultra-scrappy and always animated Lafayette Park); one poster; artist lithographs by As-Found, Roderick Buchanan, Mari Eastman, General Idea, Jakob Kolding, Jonathan Monk, Arthur Ou, Peter Piller and Michael Wells; and a European National team adidas fútbol jersey with a “Municipal de Fútbol/Los Angeles Recreation and Parks” embroidered patch and a reflective silk-screened number. The edition is designed by Jonathan Maghen and photography is by Michael Wells.

“Fútbol bubbles up from the ground. It rains down on parks and leaks through walls. It rises like an irrepressible tide, and recedes only when everybody has to go earn some money for themselves and their families. Nobody playing here thinks it’s going to make them rich. Or famoso. It is what happens instead of work.” — Jennifer Doyle

Featuring: Lawrence Luhring, Will Adler, Michael Marcelle, Kris Chatterson, Mercedes Maidana, Curtis Mann, John Luke, Mark Mahaney, and a free friction moment with Derek Hynd.

WAX is a bi-annual print publication exploring the intersection of art, culture and surfing in and around New York City. We believe that beauty and meaning can be found on sidewalks, boardwalks, skyscrapers and beaches alike. We’re interested in exploring the rich history of New York surfing, its beaches and residents and in finding a pathway of cultural creativity on and off the break. WAX shares the stories of area surfers who are also artists, designers, authors and auteurs. Each issue is organized around a unique theme, debuting with WAX Magazine 1, Dialogues in Spring 2012.

Some words on, and images of, eis (ice).

A Curious Catalogue is a skateboard product catalogue of pencil drawn anti-graphics, spin-art wheels, and slalom gemstones. It was designed to take a romantic and fantastic vision of a skateboard company and make it ‘real’. Michael Leon was inspired by the naïve wonder he experienced as a young skateboarder, which he juxtaposes with an elegant, yet dry, catalogue sales format. The result is a carefree and poetic narrative carried by a range of imagined products.

Michael Leon was raised in late 80s, early 90s skateboard culture. His work lives in a unique place between the worlds of art and art direction. He often uses the language of graphic design to create meaning through sculpture, paintings, videos, and editions. While still in high school, Michael designed his first pro model skateboard for New Deal Skateboards. 19 years later, he continues to design for his skateboard company Stacks, as well as creating artwork and art directing collaborative projects.

Totaalvoetbal is a tactical system in football in which any outfield player can take over the role of any other player on a team. It was developed by Rinus Michels, a Dutch football coach (of both Ajax and the Netherlands national team), in the late 60s and early 70s.

The tactical success of Totaalvoetbal depends largely on the adaptability of each footballer within the team, in particular the ability to quickly change positions depending on the on-field situation. The strategy requires players to be comfortable playing multiple positions; hence, placing high technical and physical demands on them. Totaalvoetbal was widely and successfully adopted by both club and national teams in winning tournaments (including the World Cup), though it ultimately (and ironically) failed to deliver a World Cup title to the Dutch national football team. Also see Catenaccio.

Catenaccio is a tactical system in football with an emphasis on defense. In Italian, catenaccio means “lock”, emphasizing a highly organized and effective defense which is intended to prevent goals. The key innovation of Catenaccio was the introduction of the role of a libero, or sweeper, a player positioned behind the line of defenders. The sweeper’s role is to recover loose balls, nullify the opponent’s striker and double-mark when necessary.

Catenaccio has been criticised for reducing the quality of football games as a spectacle; it became synonymous with “negative football” as it is focused primarily on defending. In the last thirty years Catenaccio has been largely abandoned for other, more balanced tactical approaches; Totaalvoetbal (Total Football), a tactical system created by Rinus Michels in the 1970s, eventually rendered Helenio Herrera’s version of Catenaccio obsolete.

Issue 105 includes feature contributions from Ray Cronin on Graeme Patterson, and Elizabeth Matheson and Emelie Chhangur on Humberto Vélez; Karlyn De Jongh interviews Teching Hsieh, Kaitlin Till-Landry interviews Martha Wilson, and Deborah Root examines the performance interventions of Lorena Wolffer; with book and exhibition reviews from Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York and Basel; artist project by Patrick Krzyzanowski.

A mix of Socialist mausoleum, Aztec temple, and bunker system with a network of small gardens, along with a grid structure of endless market stalls — here is one of possible pictures of Socialist Realist ruin –- the 10th-Anniversary Stadium and the Jarmark Europa open-​air market surounding it. After twenty years of a phantom-like existence in the middle of Warsaw, this expanse in 2008 became the construction site of a new national stadium. The book offers a selection of texts pre­sent ing a multi-faceted picture of that site’s deterioration and its bizarre existence as a ‘city within a city’. It pictures the area as a Land-Art piece and picturesque ruin, a primeval forest, a realm of precariousness and discount shopping, a work camp for archaeologists and botanists, a ‘Vietnamtown,’ a sonic phenomenon or architec­tural splendor. The reader also documents the series of site-​specific art projects entitled The Finis sage of Stadium X curated by Joanna Warsza and provides them with a theoretical context.

The Stadium was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated, and was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being at the same time ‘revived’ by Vietnamese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russian traders, pioneers of capital­ism. Jarmark Europa suddenly became the only multicultural site in the city, a storehouse of biographies and urban legends, as well as a major tourist attraction. The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-​standing (non)presence in the middle of Warsaw brought about the series of art projects, and later this reader.

Over the course of time, the 10-th Anniversary Stadium which is now being erased form the map of Warsaw will likely become some distant planet, while the present publication, with the brilliant contributions from its authors, will attain — per­haps — the status of an unreal story about a place that, after all, never was.

—Daniel Miller, Frieze

At the beginning of the 1995 soccer season, Hans van der Meer set out to take photographs of the game that dodged the cliched traditions of modern sports photography. In an attempt to record the sport in its original form — a field, two goals and 22 players — he sought matches at the bottom end of the amateur leagues. He avoided tight telescopic details and the hyperbole of action photography, pulled back from the central subject of the pitch, and set the playing field and its unfolding action in the context of local elements. Over the last 10 years, Van der Meer has continued this project across the playing fields of Europe, traveling to every country with a significant history of the game. The Netherlands yielded 1998’s Dutch Fields, and the odyssey that brings forth European Fields has since taken him from Bihariain, Romania to Bjàrkà, Sweden, from Torp, Norway to Als*àrs, Hungary, from Bartkowo, Poland to Beire, Portugal, and to urban and suburban Greece, Finland, England, France, Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, Slovakia, Denmark, Ireland, Wales, Belgium, Spain and Italy. Van der Meer’s understated observations of the poetry and absurdity of human behavior on the field use soccer to consider–and provoke a laugh at–the human condition.