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Can David Shrigley’s monster mascot score a late winner for friendly, faded Partick Thistle? Can David Shrigley’s monster mascot score a late winner for friendly, faded Partick Thistle?
(6 days later)
Can David Shrigley do for Partick Thistle what Frank Gehry did for Bilbao? That is, restore the fortunes of a fading, neglected product of the first industrial age – a football club in Shrigley’s case and a great port city in Gehry’s – by an attention-grabbing piece of what Jonathan Jones in the Guardian this week called “real art … reminiscent of the monsters painted and sculpted by the great surrealist Joan Miro”? Can David Shrigley do for Partick Thistle what Frank Gehry did for Bilbao? That is, restore the fortunes of a fading, neglected product of the first industrial age – a football club in Shrigley’s case and a great port city in Gehry’s – by an attention-grabbing piece of what Jonathan Jones in the Guardian this week called “real art … reminiscent of the monsters painted and sculpted by the great surrealist Joan Miro”?
Gehry did it with the Guggenheim gallery, at a cost to the Spanish government of $100m for the building alone, not including the actual art and running costs. Shrigley, nominated for the Turner prize in 2013, might do it with a new club mascot called Kingsley, which (or is it who?) must have cost rather less; exactly how much is unknown, but the mascot is part of a media deal that the club has brokered with a California firm, Kingsford Capital Management, reportedly worth £200,000.Gehry did it with the Guggenheim gallery, at a cost to the Spanish government of $100m for the building alone, not including the actual art and running costs. Shrigley, nominated for the Turner prize in 2013, might do it with a new club mascot called Kingsley, which (or is it who?) must have cost rather less; exactly how much is unknown, but the mascot is part of a media deal that the club has brokered with a California firm, Kingsford Capital Management, reportedly worth £200,000.
Related: Partick Thistle’s grotesque new mascot is art at its best | Jonathan JonesRelated: Partick Thistle’s grotesque new mascot is art at its best | Jonathan Jones
A snip. So far, it has worked brilliantly. Never before has Partick Thistle received so much publicity – not even when they unexpectedly beat Celtic 4-1 in the 1971 League Cup final – and one suspects the same is true for Kingsford. Controversy has erupted. Is the mascot art? Is it not art? (That the question needs to be asked surely makes it the second.) Is it too terrifying? Will it frighten children? Will it make the team a laughing stock? Does it really look like an angry Aztec sun god – or more like Lisa Simpson? Thistle supporters like to look on their world of small expectations through the defensive veil of irony. The unprecedented celebrity is dazzling.A snip. So far, it has worked brilliantly. Never before has Partick Thistle received so much publicity – not even when they unexpectedly beat Celtic 4-1 in the 1971 League Cup final – and one suspects the same is true for Kingsford. Controversy has erupted. Is the mascot art? Is it not art? (That the question needs to be asked surely makes it the second.) Is it too terrifying? Will it frighten children? Will it make the team a laughing stock? Does it really look like an angry Aztec sun god – or more like Lisa Simpson? Thistle supporters like to look on their world of small expectations through the defensive veil of irony. The unprecedented celebrity is dazzling.
The last time I went to see Partick Thistle play was before the age of mascots, so long before that I came by trolleybus – “whispering death” as they called them in Glasgow, for their stealthy habit of catching pedestrians unawares. It hummed quietly up Garscube Road only a tenement street away from a bar called the Tramcar Vaults, where a model tramcar, so old that it was open-topped, stood on rails that projected high over the pavement. One of the cliches about India is that it lives in several centuries at once – bullock carts, mobile phones – and the same was true in Glasgow in the early 1960s to the extent that the past was omnipresent, though unlike in India it was almost entirely from the same period, which, to use Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, was the long 19th century: 1789 to 1914.The last time I went to see Partick Thistle play was before the age of mascots, so long before that I came by trolleybus – “whispering death” as they called them in Glasgow, for their stealthy habit of catching pedestrians unawares. It hummed quietly up Garscube Road only a tenement street away from a bar called the Tramcar Vaults, where a model tramcar, so old that it was open-topped, stood on rails that projected high over the pavement. One of the cliches about India is that it lives in several centuries at once – bullock carts, mobile phones – and the same was true in Glasgow in the early 1960s to the extent that the past was omnipresent, though unlike in India it was almost entirely from the same period, which, to use Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, was the long 19th century: 1789 to 1914.
Trolleybuses, introduced as late as 1949, were almost symbols of modernity. Like most British football clubs, Partick Thistle belongs to the second half of that time and like another, more successful one, Arsenal, it moved long ago from the place in its name. Partick, which faraway proofreaders sometimes mistake as a typo for Ireland’s patron saint, is an ancient place with a name that may derive from a Brythonic word for “thicket” or “bush”. By the time of the club’s foundation in 1876, however, its land was given over mainly to shipbuilding and housing for a working class that had begun to adopt football as a spectator sport. The club moved along the banks of the Clyde restlessly, from ground to ground, until in 1909 it finally settled a mile or two away in another industrial suburb, Maryhill, where a stadium named Firhill was built next to the locks and basins of the Union Canal. Trolleybuses, introduced as late as 1949, were almost symbols of modernity. Like most British football clubs, Partick Thistle belongs to the second half of that time and like another, more successful one, Arsenal, it moved long ago from the place in its name. Partick, which faraway proofreaders sometimes mistake as a typo for Ireland’s patron saint, is an ancient place with a name that may derive from a Brythonic word for “thicket” or “bush”. By the time of the club’s foundation in 1876, however, its land was given over mainly to shipbuilding and housing for a working class that had begun to adopt football as a spectator sport. The club moved along the banks of the Clyde restlessly, from ground to ground, until in 1909 it finally settled a mile or two away in another industrial suburb, Maryhill, where a stadium named Firhill was built next to the locks and basins of the Forth & Clyde Canal.
As I had done before, I went to see them play my home team, Dunfermline Athletic. I can’t remember much about the game itself, not even the score. The lasting impression is of the venue: the approach down a street of tall, black tenements, then through the turnstiles and up the bank to terracing that looked south across the city, a vista of roofs, spires and chimneys under the scudding clouds of a spring afternoon. No other football stadium in Glasgow had such a fine view, and there were more of them then, with Clyde and Third Lanark as well as Queen’s Park and Thistle to moderate the idea that football in Glasgow was simply a hateful duopoly of Rangers and Celtic. Then six city teams became four and Thistle was left as the only secular alternative to the big two, at least in terms of the professional sides (Queen’s Park has always been amateur).As I had done before, I went to see them play my home team, Dunfermline Athletic. I can’t remember much about the game itself, not even the score. The lasting impression is of the venue: the approach down a street of tall, black tenements, then through the turnstiles and up the bank to terracing that looked south across the city, a vista of roofs, spires and chimneys under the scudding clouds of a spring afternoon. No other football stadium in Glasgow had such a fine view, and there were more of them then, with Clyde and Third Lanark as well as Queen’s Park and Thistle to moderate the idea that football in Glasgow was simply a hateful duopoly of Rangers and Celtic. Then six city teams became four and Thistle was left as the only secular alternative to the big two, at least in terms of the professional sides (Queen’s Park has always been amateur).
The club was already thought of fondly. Even people who knew it only from the football pools would smile at the name, and it was blessed to have among its supporters a sportswriter, Malky Munro, who in the pages of the Evening Citizen coined the team’s description as the Maryhill Magyars, an endearing thought at a time when Hungary was playing the world’s best football and yet could only manage to beat Scotland 4-2, with two Thistle players in the national side. The club was already thought of fondly. Even people who knew it only from the football pools would smile at the name, and it was blessed to have among its supporters a sportswriter, Malky Munro, who in the pages of the Evening Citizen coined the team’s description as the Maryhill Magyars, an endearing thought at a time when Hungary was playing the world’s best football and yet could only manage to beat Scotland 4-2, with two Thistle players in the national side.
More recently it has become a cult, attracting football fans with a distaste for sectarianism who want to demonstrate their secular credentials. Its more famous supporters include the actor Robert Carlyle, the historian Niall Ferguson and Westminster’s youngest MP, 20-year-old Mhairi Black, who has just graduated from Glasgow University with a first in politics. Black first caught public attention when a newspaper dug out an old tweet of hers: “I really fucking hate Celtic”. These words might have damaged her electoral prospects in Paisley had they been typed by a Rangers supporter, but when her real loyalties transpired, all was forgiven.More recently it has become a cult, attracting football fans with a distaste for sectarianism who want to demonstrate their secular credentials. Its more famous supporters include the actor Robert Carlyle, the historian Niall Ferguson and Westminster’s youngest MP, 20-year-old Mhairi Black, who has just graduated from Glasgow University with a first in politics. Black first caught public attention when a newspaper dug out an old tweet of hers: “I really fucking hate Celtic”. These words might have damaged her electoral prospects in Paisley had they been typed by a Rangers supporter, but when her real loyalties transpired, all was forgiven.
To hear a Glasgow atheist talk, you would think Thistle these days is skippered by Richard Dawkins, but the truth is that the club and its supporters are essentially herbivorous: “ … nice people … / They’ve got such nice habits / They keep rabbits / But got no money at all”, as Flanagan and Allen used to sing. And there are so few of them. If the football map of Scotland could be redrawn to match the country’s present religious or irreligious demographics, then Partick Thistle would be a big club and Rangers and Celtic much smaller ones; if it could be redrawn to reflect prosperity by region, then sides from eastern Scotland would monopolise every trophy. But football in Scotland obeys an older order. Unless the opposition is Celtic, the crowd at Firhill rarely exceeds 4,000. They can easily fit into one stand. Other parts of the stadium have become dilapidated and rural. The Thistle fans I know don’t seem to mind too much: the team is about to start its third successive season in the top division, which isn’t somewhere it has always been, and they are, after all, nice people. But the club itself is a different question: its management, apparently, has been attending evening classes in machismo. Shrigley’s angry mascot is only one part of the makeover. The club’s website has a slogan in capitals, NOT SO CUDDLY ANYMORE, beside a grainy monochrome image of a grim male face that looks as if it has just survived trench warfare. In other words, Partick Thistle is trying to join the carnivores. Sadly, comically, it wants to be feared. To hear a Glasgow atheist talk, you would think Thistle these days is skippered by Richard Dawkins, but the truth is that the club and its supporters are essentially herbivorous: “ … nice people … / They’ve got such nice habits / They keep rabbits / But got no money at all”, as Flanagan and Allen used to sing. And there are so few of them. If the football map of Scotland could be redrawn to match the country’s present religious or irreligious demographics, then Partick Thistle would be a big club and Rangers and Celtic much smaller ones; if it could be redrawn to reflect prosperity by region, then sides from eastern Scotland would monopolise every trophy. But football in Scotland obeys an older order. Unless the opposition is Celtic, the crowd at Firhill rarely exceeds 4,000. They can easily fit into one stand. Other parts of the stadium have become dilapidated and rural. The Thistle fans I know don’t seem to mind too much: the team is about to start its third successive season in the top division, which isn’t somewhere it has always been, and they are, after all, nice people. But the club itself is a different question: its management, apparently, has been attending evening classes in machismo. Shrigley’s angry mascot is only one part of the makeover. The club’s website has a slogan in capitals, NOT SO CUDDLY ANYMORE, beside a grainy monochrome image of a grim male face that looks as if it has just survived trench warfare. In other words, Partick Thistle is trying to join the carnivores. Sadly, comically, it wants to be feared.
• This article was amended on 2 July 2015. An earlier version referred to Firhill as having been built next to the locks and basins of the Union, rather than Forth & Clyde, Canal.