Football team formation by divine inspiration

SIMON Patterson is usually good at guessing who will be nominated for the Tate's annual - and ritually controversial - Turner Prize. But this year, the 29 year old London artist was caught off guard when he was told that he was one of the four nominees for the £20,000 award.

He had a stiff brandy before getting down to the business of preparing work for the prize's exhibition which runs at the Tate from fate October to January. The prize winner will be announced on November 28th.

Patterson currently has work in a group show in the Context Gallery in Derry. While installing his exhibit there earlier this month, he took time out to sit on the city's walls and, to the accompanying drone of an army helicopter, discussed the work which, has made him the youngest nominee for this year's Turner Prize.

Patterson has contributed two wall paintings inspired by the Italia 1990 World Cup to the Context show, called Goal, which has football as its theme.

They consist of the names of Jesus and his 12 disciples painted in black poster paint on opposite walls in the football formations favoured by the English and Italian football teams at the world championship.

The English formation is a tight defensive one called the flat back four, while the more stylish "sweeper formation" in which a spare player at the rear is free to be expressive is favoured by the Italians.

Patterson, a self confessed fair weather football fan, has created two rival teams of apostles in these humorous works, called The Last Supper Arranged According to the Flat Back Four Formation (Jesus Christ in Goal) and The Last Supper Arranged According to die Sweeper Formation (Jesus Christ in Goal).

WHILE gently sending up their own conceptual art style, these modern frescos, which were first exhibited together at the 1993 Venice Biennale, tackle the competing dogmas that divide Catholic from Protestant, nowhere more acutely than in Northern Ireland.

The formations also contrast the Catholic belief in transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood - with the more abstract Protestant doctrine of the sacrament of Communion.

When the viewer stands in the middle of these two works, they exist, says Patterson, somewhere between what is painted on the walls and their titles. In fact, he believes the title is an integral part of the work itself - the abstracted forms can only be understood when the viewer understands that they represent a tactical scheme in football.

By including such a scheme, these early pieces are quite typical of Patterson's more recent work which covers a variety of media including sculpture, installation and printed matter.

He regularly takes familiar systems which we rely on to categorise and define the world - such as maps, diagrams, constellations or taxonomies - dismantles them, and then invites viewers to give them new meanings.

In his lithograph based on the London underground map, The Great Bear, Patterson woos viewers with the instantly recognisable abstract design. But he denies them the comfort of using the map as a map because he has renamed the stops after film actors, philosophers, explorers, saints, musicians and Italian artists who all jostle for position in the labyrinthine network.

Not only does this Pop Artish piece subvert the received rationale of the underground scheme, it also suspends the human instinct to make sense of the world by imposing a known order or structure on it.

But it is not just iconoclasm for its own sake, because the work shows how the information systems by which we live can take on new, equally legitimate, if more random or personal meanings.

Patterson says the work, "isn't simply trying to pull the rug out from under the viewer's feet. It's turning it into something else, giving it a different use".

He intends to include the work in the forthcoming Tate show "partly because when non art people have seen it they seem to find it has an immediacy. It seems to be quite accessible which is what I try to do in my work anyway which is for there to be a way in, almost a hook, where people can hang things on or ideas on."

Having initially hooked viewers, Patterson's work encourages them to be as comfortable with fine art as they are with other abstractions or fictions such as maps or charts. It asks them to take that same "leap of faith" which they do when they read a map, listen to music - or believe in transubstantiation.

And even the most obscure or private references in his work can find an audience - and vice versa - because the associations of both artist and spectator are shaped by a shared social context.

Through integrating both text and objects, Patterson explores the literal and metaphysical potential of both. In an installation ... words fly up ... shown recently at the Lisson Gallery in London, Patterson suspended six box kites near the ceiling. On the wall were the names of Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Franklin Cody, Colonel W. F. `Buffalo Bill' Cody, Benjamin Franklin, Marconi and Kakinoki Kinsuke.

Patterson juxtaposed the kite, an ethereal object used for both pleasure and science, with the real and fictional names associated with scientific advances and the breaking of boundaries. The kites flew up, the viewers thoughts remained below in the gallery. They were free to draw their own associations, to go fly their own intellectual kite.

In courting that element of accident, or chance, which is present in all art and allowing alternative interpretations, Patterson's work is, in the words of one critic "about making connections".

And coincidence is a valid part of this. In a public art project in 1993, Patterson converted a road through the town of Givors in France into a racing track, complete with a black and white chequer board finishing line. While making the work, he discovered that the Formula One champion, Alain Prost, comes from the next village.

As the Turner Prize's finishing line draws closer, Patterson admits that he would be upset not to win. But he is trying to approach the Tate exhibition like any other show.

"Obviously it isn't like any other show," he says. "There's much more pressure on you, but really I'm just trying to get on with other things as well. It's great to be nominated, but it isn't the be all and end all.

"You don't make work in the hope that you will be nominated or win a prize. It would be great to win but I'm trying to remain philosophical about it, although you always have fleeting moments of fantasy of the brilliant speech you'll be making to the sort of Dicky Attenborough darling types, saying things like I'd like to thank my mum'. That quickly evaporates, but you have to entertain these fantasies otherwise you start losing your grip."