Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices

Tim Stott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317531982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoría y crítica del arte

This book engages debates in current art criticism concerning the turn toward participatory works of art. In particular, it analyzes ludic participation, in which play and games are used organizationally so that participants actively engage with or complete the work of art through their play. Here Stott explores the complex and systematic organization of works of ludic participation, showing how these correlate with social systems of communication, exhibition, and governance. At a time when the advocacy of play and participation has become widespread in our culture, he addresses the shortage of literature on the use of play and games in modern and contemporary arts practice in order to begin a play theory of organization and governance.

1 Precursors to Ludic Participation

With the gradual collapse of High Modernism from the late 1950s onward, diverse arts practices moved away from the studio-to-gallery model of artistic production and began to investigate more performance-based or event-based models, which allowed for participation, so-called “live” production, and distributed authorship. The use of play and games reorganised the encounter with art to be participatory, unpredictable, aleatory, or distributed. In light of this expansion of art toward ludic participation, the aim of this chapter is threefold. Firstly, it is to show that with early examples of ludic participation, whereby the work of art was expanded to unknown others through play, there was an explicit and implicit engagement with systems, or at the very least, an understanding of play and games as distinct organisational modes. Secondly, it is to discuss how certain works of early ludic participation exemplify two distinct arguments for how play and art meet. On the one hand, there is a humanist argument for play, for which play constitutes a gain in agency for an individual or a group and allows players to take pleasure in mastery, if only within the magic circle of their play. On the other hand, there is a posthumanist argument, for which the player is as much plaything as master of her play. In this case, to be in play is to be played. Or more precisely, it is to be mutually entangled and conditional upon other players, play objects, and dynamic, sometimes emergent processes. It would be mistaken to call any one player a master of his play. Admittedly, this is a schematic distinction, and the examples I discuss are explained exhaustively by neither the one nor the other argument, but the distinction still has explanatory power and follows many previous attempts to think play and art together. On the one hand, and here I follow Robert Wilson’s summary of two traditions in the literature on play, there is that which advocates play as the optimal achievement and free expression of those who participate in it. On the other hand, there is that which counters this humanism with the description of systems or a world at play, upon which human agency is conditional.¹ As we shall see in the chapters to follow, current works of ludic participation inherit these arguments, both in the intentions of their authors and in the critical evaluations made of them. Thirdly, the aim of this chapter is to show that this book’s claim for the systematicity of contemporary ludic participation is consistent with selected historical examples. If this can be shown to be the case, one might even suggest (and, for now, it is only a suggestion) that the use of play and games to organise participation is necessarily systematic. At the very least, it might appear that the historical expansion of the work of art toward participatory modes found a distinct and productive expression in the open systematicity of play and games. In support of this, in conclusion to the chapter I introduce a cybernetic description of the organisation achieved in play, as the initial stage in the development of a formal criticism for contemporary ludic participation. The main part of the chapter, however, consists of an analysis of two examples consistent with, first, the humanist argument for ludic participation, and second, the posthumanist argument.

Consistent with the first argument would be The Model—A Model for a Qualitative Society, established by Palle Nielsen, a Danish artist and architect, and which took place in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, for three weeks from the 30 September 1968. Nielsen facilitated within the gallery space an adventure playground constructed by local children, which saw 35,000 visitors, including 20,000 children. Nielsen believed the spontaneous, self-organising children’s play to be an instance of a living community that could serve as a model for adult society. Examples consistent with the second argument would be, firstly, works included in the exhibition Play Orbit that took place in the autumn and winter of 1969, a year after Nielsen’s The Model. Curated by Jasia Reichhardt and exhibited first at the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales in Flint and then at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, Play Orbit also followed a year after Reichardt’s previous, and better known exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, also at the ICA. Many of the toys, games, and puzzles exhibited in Play Orbit examine the human–machine and human–object interface, in the understanding that these are mutually productive. A second example would be the use by a number of Fluxus artists of sets of instruction cards to distribute game rules for the organisation of events, such as with George Brecht’s Motor Vehicle Sundown Event (1960). The purpose of these Flux-games was, as artist Dick Higgins suggested, to build variety and surprise and to encourage levity rather than to demonstrate the “omniscience of their creators [the Fluxus artists themselves].”² An unlikely combination of parlour games with “chance systems” or “aleatoric structures,” such games make clear the necessity to play of rules, constraints, and instructions, which limit but also enable whatever agency players enjoy.³ By contrast, the children of The Model were left, insofar as it was possible, to their play, in support of its unruled, if not also unruly, character. The first example, then, allows the children’s play to develop more or less unhindered, or spontaneously, whereas the second two examples provide rule-based structures to organise play. On the one hand, play begins from and returns the players to themselves, so to speak. On the other hand, players only play by giving themselves over to a distributed form of organisation, the game, which necessarily includes nonhuman agents.

The humanism of the first tradition continues in much of the criticism of ludic participation at present. Yet if we bring ludic participation under a cybernetic and systems-theoretical description, we find that to be in play is to be systematically organised in communication with others, which latter might be other players or objects and other nonhuman constraints. It undermines the sovereignty of the human subject at play in order to describe the complex networks of relations in which a player’s agency arises. As such, it is better equipped to answer the question of how it is, in both Flux-games and Nielsen’s Model, that players “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”⁴ At the end of this chapter, as a first step in the formulation of this description, I discuss the cybernetic theory of play presented by cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson.

In more detail, the humanist argument understands play as a voluntary, intentional, or internally motivated activity, and often advocates play as the optimal achievement of a human agent. When we play, and especially when we play with art, we are most fully ourselves and most free. This argument finds its first articulation in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). For Schiller, play has a reconciliatory power. It is the unified action of sensuous reason, an engagement with the world by which “the autonomy of reason is … opened up within the domain of sense” (Die Selbsttätigkeit der Vernunft … auf dem Felde der Sinnlichkeit eröffnet) and which therefore corrects and safeguards against the fragmentary demands of everyday necessities.⁵ As Michael Podro later summarises, aesthetic play is where “the objects and sensuous stuff of the world are now actively felt for, celebrated and elaborated upon.”⁶ Jürgen Habermas argues that Schiller presents the “first programmatic work towards an aesthetic critique of modernity.”⁷ In presenting aesthetic play as a form of self-realisation, Schiller is the first modern advocate for the “resurrection of a disintegrated common sense,” a resurrection that can only occur through the formative processes of art.⁸ In the absence of religion this account advances aesthetic play as both an “emancipation of the senses” and a unifying, communal force that might facilitate the formation of unconstrained consensus, or at the very least construct a realm of appearance that realises the ideal of equality.⁹ In sum, aesthetic play promises autonomy and freedom.¹⁰ By extension, to participate through play is to be reconciled with a work of art in a way impossible otherwise. It also might be to anticipate a broader social freedom. As Fredric Jameson writes, aesthetic play so conceived offers a lesson in freedom:

[A] practical apprenticeship for the real political and social freedom to come. In art, consciousness prepares itself for a change in the world itself and at the same time learns to make demands upon the real world which hasten that change.¹¹

This view continued in Herbert Marcuse’s opposition of free and fulfilling play, on the one hand, and unfree and alienating labour, on the other, from which he derives the demand that everyday activities such as work should become play and that play should spread as the principal mode of social activity. In his discussion of Schiller’s notion of the “play impulse” (Spieltrieb), Marcuse states that he wishes “to rescue the full content of Schiller’s notion from the benevolent aesthetic treatment to which the traditional interpretation has confined it.”¹² By which Marcuse appears to mean that Schiller’s proposal for an aesthetic “apprenticeship” in freedom has become confined only to the domain of art and has not led to social and political freedoms it promises.

The promise of freedom to be found in play is very much at the centre of Palle Nielsen’s claims for The Model, and recurs in much of the debate and criticism prompted by it. Except that here it is the freely chosen play of children that is to be observed, as a model of free activity for those who do not play. Lars Bang Larsen writes that The Model completed “art’s radical promises,” as it used the museum to construct what Nielsen called a “communicating environment” in which participation was not simply encouraged but necessary to the completion of the exhibition.¹³ Nielsen also had more pragmatic ambitions, using The Model as an environment in which children’s play could be observed and modified in order to understand how children best played or how they best satisfied their “physical and sensory needs.”¹⁴ This investigation had begun already in 1967 when Nielsen designed a playground in his role as artistic consultant to the municipal architect for the Copenhagen suburb of Gladsaxe. In March 1968, he had joined other activists in erecting an illegal adventure playground in another of Copenhagen’s working-class suburbs, Northern Borough. His concerns were the formation of something comparable to the children’s public sphere (Kinderöffentlichkeit) demanded by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in 1972 as a precursor to a proletarian public sphere and he supported advocacy for urban spaces for children’s play made by “junk” or “adventure” playground movements in Denmark, England, and elsewhere.¹⁵ In June 1968, Nielsen joined the activist group Aktion Samtal (Action Dialogue) in Stockholm. Despite criticism from his fellow activists, Nielsen proposed to Pontus Hultén, the director of the Moderna Museet, a “pedagogical model exhibition.”¹⁶

The playground of The Model consisted of wooden frames and galleries, a “diving pool” filled with rubber foam, instruments, tires, rope swings, topical masks of Chairman Mao...