essay

Beth Kettel: Baseline Drift

First published by Forma on the occasion of Beth Kettel’s Baseline Drift, June 2019


Available as a limited edition risograph print, published by Forma.

I sometimes think of my old basketball superstitiously, like it were an opaque crystal ball made of grubby orange rubber. Looking for a little inspiration before starting this text, I picked it up and headed to my local court knowing that the inevitable bricks I’d throw might catch me a few thoughts on the rebound. I’m long retired as far as my ‘career’ in the sport is concerned… while muscle memory might kick in as soon as I hit the playground, my sloppy behind-the-back crossovers, 360 layups and showboating fade-aways often amount to little more than sluggish folly (…I’m a red-eyed wheezing mess within minutes, clumsily chucking air balls to a soundtrack of Lil Wayne mixtapes…). And yet I realised that there’s something about the court itself - its iconic centre circle, three point line and key - that demands a certain kind of decorum from me, its arcane schematics implying that my time here should amount to something purposeful, something disciplined. 

Considering the ideologically contrived history of the game this isn’t too surprising. Conceived in the last decade of the 19th Century by James Naismith, a professor of physical education at Springfield College, Massachusetts, basketball was fully intended to serve as a pedagogical tool that might keep ‘young men’ active indoors while the baseball diamond or football gridiron were otherwise unavailable. The sport’s instructional benevolence and proviso of player cohesion were intended to curb potential delinquency, its initial missionary work conducted via the many gymnasiums of the Young Men’s Christian Association located throughout the United States. 

In 1990s Britain, back when I started playing in the east-midlands, these tenets of discipline, camaraderie and personal rectitude were still resonating through the cushioned floors of most sports centres in a concerted attempt to steer wayward youth toward wholesome past times. Although the game had clearly intensified in both speed and attitude, its core principles were firmly encrypted into the strange markings you could trace beneath your feet, circumscribing ‘no charge zones’ and ‘three second turnover’ rules that aimed to balance play and promote fairness through a strange composite of multicoloured arcs and bisected lines. 

From ages eight to sixteen I practically lived on court, adopting the training regimes of two teams positioned in regional and national youth leagues. During these years my body and imagination seemed bounded by the base and sidelines demarcated on polished maple floors or spray-painted onto the asphalt of gymnasia and playgrounds up and down the country. The 28 x 15 metre playing area defining the horizon of my adolescent aspirations. I wanted to dunk on rivals, accrue assists, walk on air. My friends and teammates did too. We were caught in a fever dream catalysed by Air Jordan commercials and the sharp-sweet taste of Isostar performance-enhancing hydration drinks.

The court’s internal markings served multiple purposes in conditioning young athletes. On the one hand they set the spatial terms of (often draconian) cardiovascular fitness routines and ball-handling practice. Bleep tests and frog jumps, dribbling exercises and endless left-hand layups. On the other, they underwrote novel forms of organised collective play, turning frenzied free-for-alls into complex attacks on basket. By ‘stacking players’ or ‘screening defenders’, these ‘set plays’ offered game plans that determined the strategic movements players might make through the various zones of the court.

Operating like a secret language, set plays function as a choreographed sequence of manoeuvres that a team internalises. They can be used at various points in a game to switch up the offence, creating space and opportunities for shooters, returning possession of the ball to a point guard or clearing lanes for aggressive drives into deep court. When executed correctly, the feeling of satisfaction can course through a team like an ecstatic energy. Strangely, set plays have a tendency to migrate and ingeniously mutate from formal game scenarios to the municipal playground via what I can only describe as the mycelial consciousness of fan enthusiasm, where total strangers enact complex choreographies unspoken. A kind of subconscious, collective ingenuity that often unfolds in the chaos of play: pick and rolls, give and gos, baseline drifts.

Referring to both a common basketball set play and a technical medical term denoting interference in electrocardiogram readings intended to measure electrical pulses in the heart, Baseline Drift (2019) is also the evocative title chosen by artist Beth Kettel for their new performance in which partially planned self-generative basketball plays are abstracted and enacted by a group of local athlete-performers on the charged site of a multi-use playground in Walthamstow. 

From sun-buckled backboards to habitually absent nets and faded boundary lines, outdoor courts provide a litmus test for the health of municipal sports provision. They can denote the economic buoyancy of a neighbourhood or suggest its council’s ability (or willingness) to maintain infrastructure. They’re a locus for communities both longstanding and impromptu, sometimes only lasting ’til a score of ten before disbanding forever. As a continuation of the pavement, outdoor courts are also subject to all of the infringements of public space where both structured and formless activities intersect, where sporting and social rivalries manifest, and where adolescent energies often coalesce in a manner that makes writer Dave Hickey’s identification of basketball’s innate drama in ‘the polyglot choreography of urban sidewalks’ ring poignantly true. On the public court things can get weird.

In poetically opposing these broad ideas of ‘set play’ and ‘noise’, Kettel seems to be animating the interplay of structure and distortion integral to all play, attempting to condense it into a choreographic game that we can be surprised by, even cheer on if we feel like it. It’s a dynamic present in organised basketball, but perhaps more pointedly so in the kinds of complex games and social assembly that evolve and layer themselves across and through municipal courts, an act of layering and sometimes awkward co-existence that Baseline Drift will contribute to, will bump sweaty shoulders with.