Full Description
Games and play occupied a central, if misunderstood, role in modern art in the twentieth century. Many art-historical narratives have downplayed the ways in which artists returned to play and to games as analogues to art practice, as metaphors for creativity, or as models for art criticism. The essays collected in this volume investigate the fundamental importance of supposedly nonserious activity and attend to the ways in which artists used play and games in order to reconsider their practice and to expand their critical strategies. With subjects ranging from early twentieth-century manifestations of games and play in Surrealism, Duchamp, Picasso, and Bauhaus photography to their repercussions in Fluxus, performance, public practice, and new media, these essays establish the diversity and potential of games and play and point toward an alternate trajectory in the development of modern art.
Aside from the editor, the contributors are Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Jon Cates, Mary Ann Caws, Susan Laxton, Claudia Mesch, Kevin Moore, Gavin Parkinson, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Owen F. Smith, Ellen Handler Spitz, Stephanie L. Taylor, and Debra Wacks.
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
David J. Getsy
Part I: Games and Play in Twentieth-Century Art History
From Judgment to Process: The Modern Ludic Field
Susan Laxton
The Duchamp Code
Gavin Parkinson
My Utopia: Play in Bauhaus Photography
Kevin Moore
Serious Play: Games and Early Twentieth-Century Modernism
Claudia Mesch
Surrealist Gaming: Rules and the Rest
Mary Ann Caws
Playing in the Sand with Picasso: Relief Sculpture as Game in the Summer of 1930
David J. Getsy
Joseph Cornell's Dangerous Games
Stephanie L. Taylor
Playing with Dada: Hannah Wilke's Irreverent Artistic Discourse with Duchamp
Debra Wacks
Dick Higgins, Fluxus, and Infinite Play: An "Amodernist" Worldview
Owen F. Smith
1Subversive Toys: The Art of Liliana Porter
Florencia Bazzano-Nelson
Part II: Contemporary Artists' Views on Play and Games in New Media and Public Practices
Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming
Anne-Marie Schleiner
Running and Gunning in the Gallery: Art Mods, Art Institutions, and the Artists Who Destroy Them
Jon Cates
Coda: Distinguishing Art from Play
Zigzagging with Full Stops from Play to Art
Ellen Handler Spitz
List of Contributors
Index
