JJ Guest: Big Balls, Bare Chests And Bromances

It’s 2010. A derby match of Shakespearean proportions sees Manchester’s warring football factions neck and neck in its 93rd minute. The anguish emanating from the home stands of the Etihad is palpable. With just 17 seconds left on the clock, Paul Scholes rolls the last dice of the match with an effortless header, whipping the ball into the back of the net with swift precision. He gallops toward the erupting away fans, who fuss over their hero like a newborn baby. United’s captain Gary Neville can hardly contain himself, pulling the late-scoring midfielder in, both hands on his cheeks, for a headline-making smooch on the lips dripping with soap-star melodrama.

Victorious, jubilant, the stuff wet dreams are made of, this scene is your first glimpse at The Other Team, JJ Guest’s debut show at OOF Gallery, which sits next to the Tottenham Hotspur stadium in N17. Except things are a little distorted. Reduced to shining monochrome, with the red team’s colours scrubbed and the flurry of spectators absent, the pair’s tender embrace is hacked into eight slices, interlocking torsos aligned on a series of stands to form one illusory whole. To view the art piece as intended requires a seemingly innocent crouch into position. “I quite liked the idea of having straight men bent over,” says the 29-year-old artist, with a coy smile.

It’s one of many ways Guest brings feeling to his work, designing spaces that directly engage the viewer in themes of homoeroticism and community, whether they’re aware of it or not. How fitting, then, that this image is where the journey to The Other Team began, five years ago on Guest’s laptop screen. “I got a real emotional response from seeing it. I was upset,” he says, leading me past a segment of Scholes’s greyscaled elbow, ”which then turned to envy – and being pissed off.”

At the time, a new partner had Guest reflecting heavily on the fears bound up in his queerness, pushing and pulling between feelings of protection, worry and the unfairness of it all. He stripped the image to its limbs, collaging what remained onto a printed T-shirt, and was surprised to find a positive response was gleaned both from his peers and his dad’s pals. “To me, these were gay images, so why were men with five kids liking a picture of two guys kissing on a shirt?” asks Guest. “It’s because they’re football players.”

Save for a crush on Man City’s homegrown hero Phil Foden, Guest is not a football fan, at least in the conventional sense. “I was always too scared to be,” he says of a childhood missed backing his local club, Birmingham City. But in this experiment, he’d suddenly found a visual language that made queerness legible, possibly even relatable, to an audience wholly alien to himself. “As soon as people recognise the players, they’re disarmed. They want to speak to you because they know something about the work.” The artist likens it to a personal past rejection of art galleries, fearful he’d betray some innate institutional order should he misunderstand the works on show.

In this way, The Other Team mirrors the “explain in football terms” meme, exploring a kind of queer performance that’s both hidden and overt through popular imagery and footy ephemera. Even the exhibition’s title is in on the joke, nodding to a culture of silent bigotry and coded put-downs that queer Brits have endured at matches over the years, the worst written down in pencil by former Young British Artist Sarah Lucas in a section of her 1991 piece Five Lists.

“It makes it really difficult to tackle these things when nobody says it aloud, but you know it’s there,” says Guest. And though these grey areas of offence can prove torturous, the artist’s work finds itself both enamoured and provoked by the undefined, teasing and fiddling meanings out of the seemingly mundane with a language of gay semiotics. What a knowing wink and a coloured handkerchief may tell you in a gay bar, for instance, Guest will breadcrumb around his sculptures, leaving you to figure out the rest for yourself.

A knack for storytelling can be traced to his teen years, when a precocious Guest worked as a visual merchandiser at the likes of JD Sports and Selfridges. “I liked the fact that you could control how people walk around spaces and buy certain things,” he says. “That fascinated me – the idea that you could do that in an art setting and have people [purposely] moving around to see different things.”

Choosing this world over the steadier careers offered in maths and science, subjects Guest tested far better in at school, a passion for creating would eventually see him ditch the Midlands for Brighton, where he’d intended to study the art of performance, from building sets to costuming, before switching to illustration. This shake-up would spur the budding artist into developing intricate rotating worlds of spliced-up objects that were sought after by magazine editors and fashion designers alike. Guest also cut his teeth as a videomaker for the litany of straight musicians he befriended around the city, firing on all cylinders as he continued to hone his signature visual style. Yet, the image of Scholes and Neville’s kiss still beckoned, a nagging inside him that would eventually prove too tantalising to ignore. “I can’t ever remember my dad kissing me when I was younger, or crying, unless it was at a football game,” says Guest of the epiphany that changed everything. He started making more collages, along with sculptures that probed aggression, ceramic plates that oozed sex, even brand work with Manchester United was on the cards. It was here, rooted firmly in the hypocrisy of accepted male expression between these two, not-so-distant worlds, that Guest finally found his niche.

from left: ‘On Your Parade’, 2023, courtesy of OOF Gallery, ‘Glory ‘66’, 2023, courtesy of OOF Gallery

Cut to 2021, when the artist received his first commission from the gallery now housing his show. Eddy Frankel’s art and football zine, OOF, had graduated from the page to the palace (Warmington House, a Grade II-listed building which also hosts Spurs’ merch shop) and put on its first exhibition, Balls, which contained Guest’s white-netted ode to the scrotum, depicted as a pair of ceramic footballs. Three years later, the artist cites the encouragement from the OOF team as a real driving force behind The Other Side, constituting a belief not only in himself but his ideas. “[Throughout] they told me go bigger, keep pushing, be a bit braver, whereas my thing is to be smaller, be quieter, keep my mouth shut.”

Such revelations have seen the artist step into the shoes of his audience in an attempt to confront his own prejudices about the LGBTQ+ community. “It was like a kind of therapy,” he says of the catharsis felt while grouting the show’s second room, Splash. Guest dug deep to find his inner tradie and thought it fitting that he should learn a builder’s skills from a female pal, having completely shied away from the machismo of such traditionally male spaces in the past.

Vaguely reminiscent of a sauna or public bathhouse, Splash’s surroundings are punctuated with the ephemera of a changing room; think a pair of fresh y-fronts, erect plastic sports bottles and a vast, tiled bathtub. The room took four days to construct and is equipped with two spray bottles, tools that art lovers can use to slowly unearth a water resistant mosaic of unselfconscious post-match male bonding, or softcore scally porn, depending on whose perspective you’re after. “My mum told me this used to be on TV and the back [pages] of newspapers – players in the bath, all butt naked – I just couldn’t get my head around it,” he adds, still bewildered.

Honing in on the spirit of joy and the manifold ways it presents itself in life, Guest’s closing statement pushes the envelope a little further. Leading us to a dark room littered with confetti, the synths of Bronski Beat’s 1984 queer classic Smalltown Boy outstretch in slow agony from a speaker in the far corner to signal a party that’s long over. One of several final winks to the viewing public is Glory ’66, a subversion of Geoff Hurst’s 1966 Wembley hat-trick, the goals which granted England its only World Cup win. Again, something is amiss. But it’s not the greyscale or industrial metal sheen, it’s the sight of a glory hole measured to a perfect diameter of 3.5 inches where the ball should be.

On Your Parade sits across from such antics, depicting a champagne shower once again stripped of all its colourful stimuli, leaving us the bare bones of celebration to project our hopes, fantasies and, in the case of this printed trough, steaming piss all over. The art of desecration is Guest’s parting gift, a wit-packed final bow, or moonie, that was bound to ruffle a few feathers, as the artist would soon find in the comments of a recent interview.

“People were so upset about the glory hole, because it was fucking with something so special to them. They felt that it was crass and witless,” he says, having ecstatically trawled through each interaction first hand. “For me, what was so lovely about that comment section [came from] the people genuinely educating each other in conversation about the queer experience – all in the context of football.” It’s these kinds of conversations Guest had hoped to spark since the project’s inception and though he’s aware that not everyone would see how he depicts humour in the perverse, despite it being in their faces during almost every match, he remains defiant in his choices. “I can’t make work for everyone, and that’s not the intent here, but I do want to make work that speaks to the people I’m scared of.”

This minor comment war is just a fragment of how Guest’s work hopes to encourage the sporting industry at large to unshackle itself from the masculine tradition. Take the widespread outrage at Fifa’s decision to host the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where same-sex relations are forbidden under sharia law. It is not forgotten that David Beckham opened his wallet to the Qatari riyal without scruples, pocketing £125 million to promote the World Cup, despite claiming to be friendly to the LGBTQ+ community. This is the same player who, two decades ago, pioneered the era of the well-groomed, ‘metrosexual’ it-boy; and now Jack Grealish can take to magazine covers holding glittery Prada bags or wearing skimpy, thigh-bearing shorts without having to fend off allegations of homosexuality.

The OOF Gallery space is there to toe the line with all these stirred-up emotions, which Guest has seen himself while patrolling the gallery. Lending an ear to the many attendees eager to volunteer their own raunchy locker-room tales to the artist – a mix of starry-eyed reminiscences, mid-life soul-searching and “a lot of shower confessions,” Guest teases – he has been left with enough material to explore over a lifetime of future exhibitions.

We end our interview in The Bricklayers Arms on Tottenham High Road, one of the many local boozers that Guest has called home during his residency. Gazing at its walls, which are lined with Spurs stars past and present that neither of us could ever hope to identify, we experience something oddly flattering: this space now feels like ours, too. And that, stresses Guest, is the beauty of The Other Side. “I’ve learned a lot about my own take on gayness and the homophobia I’ve carried with me over the years, things I thought were keeping me safe,” he says, “but actually, are they?” Though he may still walk a little stiffly on his visits during matchdays, manoeuvring away from the firing line of chanting lad-babies, it’s clear that Guest wouldn’t trade the half-decade he’s spent navigating these conflicting camps for the world, or even for a kiss from D-Becks himself.

Artworks by JJ Guest. Taken from Issue 59 of 10 Men – PRECISION, CRAFT, LUXURY – is out NOW. Order your copy here.

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