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Playtime
By Lance Blomgren
The history of modern art suggests that playtime — with its connotative kinship to children's games, fantasy, invention and adventure, and notions of leisure — has provided artists with a strong inspirational metaphor for unconstrained expression, new structures to envision creative practice and techniques, and, it seems, a politically potent philosophy, ripe with socially regenerative possibility.
Play, for the Dadaists, was viewed as an essential strategy for cultural healing and social reinvention in the aftermath of World War I. The horrors of the preceding years, Tristan Tzara argued, were delivered under the guise of rational thought and doctrines of progress. Only a strong adherence to the ridiculous, the irrational, and the deliberately non-productive could undo a way of thinking that had led to such calculated devastation.
For the Surrealists, the loosely structured features of play suggested a link to ideas of psychoanalysis — a means of reverting to childhood — and provided a solid model for artistic practice aiming to represent and transgress the limits of conscious thought.
In the post World War II years, notions of play figured prominently into Abstract Expressionism (a way of breaking down objectivity and approaching non-hierarchical ideas of surface and material), the Cobra movement (both as an active rejection of rational culture and a Jungian performance of regression to unearth the archetypal images of fantasy thought to lie beneath the layers of human subconscious), and Pop Art (a frequent subject matter for inquiries into the signs of consumer culture, work, and leisure).
The Situationist International, under the theoretical direction of Constant and Guy Debord, viewed play as a model for personal and social advancement, a privileged condition that would free us from capitalism's discourse of Homo Faber to become Homo Ludens, humans who are able to interact, indeed play, with our physical environment.
In Vancouver, similar ideas about the artistic and social importance of play and its inherent quality of creative freedom have underscored a number of recent exhibitions, including Corin Sworn's Adventure Playground at the Or Gallery, and The Vancouver School at the Artists for Kids Gallery.
Sworn's Adventure Playground created a context for play where classes of primary school students could work with the artist in designing, constructing, and decorating a playground of cardboard tunnels, houses, and play spaces. Throughout the course of the project, the gallery functioned as a hands-on workshop for the unbridled imagination, not to mention a literal space of repose from regimented education or art viewing.
Reminiscent of some of the Surrealist and Cobra experiments with adolescent collaboration, as well as Palle Nielsen's influential research project, Model for a Qualitative Society (1968), Sworn's project implicates itself in the ideological histories of play, childhood development, and utopian action. The overt hopefulness of these earlier projects — the idea that novel social solutions could be discovered through play — becomes, in Sworn's hands, a point of re-examination: Is it possible to uncover an alternative vision of community (or education) through play? Is playtime really an escape from tired, limp thinking? Is play really unstructured at all? Is the social and artistic context in which play has been championed over the past generations still valid?
As the exhibition seemed to suggest, the answer to these questions is no, not really. Adventure Playground brought to mind the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson's notion that "Play needs firm limits, then free movement within those limits. Without firm limits there is no play."
The chaotic jumble of materials and half-dash-built structures, in some sense, seemed to point to the impossibility of locating a balance between play and purpose, a hint of coherent social innovation in the midst of such a communal endeavour. For play to reveal its transcendent promise, the "rules" need to be agreed upon. And from the appearance of the installation, Sworn did little to guide or direct her collaborators' impulses, apart from limiting the choice of materials, which was a decision more about safety than limitation.
This is not a criticism of the project. The resonance of Sworn's project lies in her steadfast decision to limit her control, her refusal to disavow its failures and allow its outcome to overshadow the experiment. Visually, the installation took on a mesmerizing, disorienting presence in the gallery and elicited a surprisingly emotive response to both the materials and the act of construction. It heightened the sense that play, in its most romanticized sense as well as its overly ordered present-day incarnation, has somehow lost its meaning, but is refusing to admit defeat.
In comparison to much of the off-putting and exclusive onslaught of "relational" art projects, Sworn's effort should also be commended for actually providing a welcoming space of exchange and public collaboration.
The Vancouver School, a collaborative installation by five renowned B.C. artists — Douglas Coupland, Graham Gilmore, Angela Grossmann, Attila Lukacs, and Derek Root — provided a more visually dramatic, outcome-oriented counterpoint to Sworn's project.
Exhibited in an old elementary school gymnasium, the central gallery space at Artists for Kids, this exhibition brought an overt appreciation for play in artistic process into the literal context of childhood play and education. The artists — suitably all art school friends from the Emily Carr Institute in the 1980s — were given free rein to use an abandoned school's educational refuse as raw material for this project. Outdated sports equipment, bathroom fixtures, blackboards, desks, books, and filmstrips all found their way into the fodder.
These objects were reconfigured in the space, resulting in a large-scale, experientially dense funhouse environment that blurred (and therefore highlighted) our distinctions between play and structure.
Numerous overhead projectors were assembled into a large suspended sculpture, urinals were converted into wall-climbing implements, bathroom stalls became a labyrinth, and outside a school bus was transformed into a video projection space. A P.A. system, rife with officious Orwellian connotations, became a public vehicle for free speech, with children and adults adding a frenzied, improvisational voiceover to the proceedings. Blackboards covering one section of the gallery were scrawled with absurd, poetically charged true/false statements about human socialization: "If someone criticizes me for making a mistake, I would quickly point out some of that person's mistakes." The effect was jarring, the installation teetering a constant line between light-hearted and maniacal.
Similar to Sworn's piece, the tension of The Vancouver School resided in both its actualization of play and its critical engagement with the structures of this phenomenon, not to mention the roles in which play functions.
Reliant on the participation of children — kids were bused in every hour for a month — this installation nonetheless raised the question as to whether the spirit of the piece, its poignant observations on society's obsession with standardized education and controlled recreational environments, could be transposed onto a more passive audience. Is interacting with the elements of an artwork really playing? Can a distinctly adult-oriented (and nostalgic) vision of play transcend its own self-consciousness?
Again, the answer seems to be no. In the end, the School was defined as much by its grandeur, spectacle, and conceptual tightness as by its social dimension. And yet, the questions surrounding the educational context of the exhibition and the collaborative nature of its creation remained highly animated. In its conception, construction and, yes, playful elicitation of issues of authority and autonomy, The Vancouver School was one of the most ambitious, awe-inspiring, and thoughtful exhibitions undertaken in this city in quite awhile.
