The Social Constellation of the Stadium

Such suspension and mediation is also true of the experience of sport today, and increasingly so amidst waves of lockdown. The appeal for me was never simply the game itself, but the chaos of the crowd, the nostalgic soundscape of the audience, and the architecture that is so purposefully built. Emptied of these crowds, the stadium becomes a strange, hollow structure. Here I will reflect on ways in which the stadium is represented in contemporary art as a space that houses not the imagined communities that it is sometimes said to, but a fractured and fragmented crowd, a sort of social constellation that belies the myth of united spectatorship. Most communities are in a very real sense imagined, and this is not, as political scientist Benedict Anderson argues, a marker of inauthenticity: “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”² 2 - Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 6. It is the role of narratives, which construct personal and collective identities, and “meaning-creating experiences³ 3 - Anderson, Imagined Communities, 204-05, 53.” that are key here, and although Anderson is considering the imagined community of the nation-state, the role of narratives and the creation of meaning are likewise instructive in considering the stadium’s imagined communities.