class: center, middle # Games and Play in Art --- # Dada .center[] > "The adoption of chance had yet another purpose, a secret one. This was to restore to the work of art its primeval magic power ... By appealing directly to the unconscious, which is part and parcel of chance, we sought to restore to the work of art something of the numinous quality of which art has been the vehicle since time immemorial..." <span style="float:right;">- Richter</span> .footnote[_Hans Arp, Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17_ ] --- # Primitivism .center[] > "“this is how the child perceives the world” - Kandinsky .footnote[_Paul Klee, Death and Fire, 1940_ ] --- # Modern avant-gardes - Aimed to overturn the conventional hierarchy of values. New as essential, old as noxious. - Exposing play as a desirable alternative to the traditional artistic "work". - “directness and authenticity”, sensual experience, freedom, “abolition of logic” and “living art” as alternative values. --- # Surrealism > "If there is one activity in Surrealism which has most invited the derision of imbeciles, it is our persistent playing of games, which can be found throughout most of our publications over the last thirty-five years. Although as a defensive measure we sometimes described such activity as „experimental‟ we were looking primarily for entertainment, and those rewarding discoveries it yielded in relation to knowledge came only later. ... Furthermore, the urgent need we felt to do away with old antinomies that dominate work and leisure, „wisdom‟ and „folly‟, etc such as action and dream, pastand future, sanity and madness, high and low, and so on – disposed us not to spare that of the serious and non-serious (games)." <span style="float:right;">- Breton</span> --- # Artists who play .center[] > "Breton appeared with a revolver tied to each temple, Eluard in ballerina's tutu, Fraenkel in an apron, and all the Dadaists wore funnel-shaped ‟hats‟ on their heads." .footnote[_Hugo Ball reciting Karawane in a Cubist costume at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, 1916P_ ] --- # Fluxus .center[] > "George Brecht produced many Flux boxes and scores based on the model of game. In his Swim Puzzle Box Game (1965) he instructed the "players" to “arrange the beads in such a way the word CUAL never occurs”. However, there were no beads in the box, only a seashell." .footnote[_George Maciunas, Spell Your Name with these Objects, 1976_ ] --- # Performance .center[] > "Happenings were among the first process-oriented works in which play-like activity was not just an artistic means to produce an artwork but a final product itself"" .footnote[_Allen Kaprow's Environments_ ] --- # Viewers as co-players .center[] .footnote[_Marina Abramovic, Rhythm O, 1974 Tate_ ] --- # Relational aesthetics .center[] > "This work brought together veteran miners and members of historical re-enactment societies who restaged the controversial clash between miners and the police during 1984-5." .footnote[_Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001_ ] --- # Role-playing .center[] > “a walk, a football match, a Sunday radio station, a spectacle on a building site, an exhibition featuring real people” .footnote[_Joanna Warsza (curator), Stadium X. A Place that never was, 2008_]