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Play in the City 2013
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Welcome to the on-line conversation for Play in the City, an Emily Balch Seminar offered in Fall 2013 @ Bryn Mawr College, in which we are addressing the question of how we construct, experience, and learn in the act of play. How is play both structured by the environment in which it occurs, and how might it re-structure that space, unsettling and re-drawing the frame in which it is performed? This is an interestingly different kind of place for writing, and may take some getting used to. The first thing to keep in mind is that it's not a site for "formal writing" or "finished thoughts." It's a place for thoughts-in-progress, for what you're thinking (whether you know it or not) on your way to what you think next. Imagine that you're just talking to some people you've met. This is a "conversation" place, a place to find out what you're thinking yourself, and what other people are thinking. The idea here is that your "thoughts in progress" can help others with their thinking, and theirs can help you with yours. |
Who are you writing for? Primarily for yourself, and for others in our course. But also for the world. This is a "public" forum, so people anywhere on the web might look in. You're writing for yourself, for others in the class, AND for others you might or might not know. So, your thoughts in progress can contribute to the thoughts in progress of LOTS of people. The web is giving increasing reality to the idea that there can actually evolve a world community, and you're part of helping to bring that about. We're glad to have you along, and hope you come to both enjoy and value our shared explorations. Feel free to comment on any post below, or to POST YOUR THOUGHTS HERE.
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Control+Shift+Terror
There are a few places where I want to take this paper. We’ll start briefly in a city: Philadelphia. And then we’ll go to another city: Nairobi. And then into some playful, less familiar, far less appealing, but ultimately unavoidable terrain -- simply due to the fact that the world has taken us into this direction and it would be foolish to ignore or underestimate its gravity and relevance in our everyday lives. Because, after all, with what are we left at the end of the day other than our everyday lives? It would, no doubt, serve us well to place our concerns in the big picture of a communal everyday life.
I haven’t yet gone to any markets in Philadelphia, but I know that there are some major, historically-significant markets around the city. I’ve heard they’re fun, cute, artsy - what have you - but I’ve been to my fair share of markets around the world so I don’t yet feel a particular urgency to see more. Markets can be many things (to those other than the sellers), but mainly they are a consumer’s form of entertainment and leisure, effectively through their engagement with a capitalist economy or market system. Producers and sellers make attractive their product or the experience of its purchase, thus encouraging active and enjoyable participation in the market - arguably, a form of play, be it consciously or otherwise.
![Phoenix's picture Phoenix's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1269.jpg)
Surrealist Games
Surrealism was started in Paris near the end of WWI, and despite much speculation to the contrary, has become an international movement and never quite vanished. It encompasses a vast variety of subversion and therefore defies much explanation.
Surrealist games often include the "irrational embellishment" of ideas or objects, as well as the irrational placement of several ideas or objects together. Surrealist poetry is often incomprehensible. The object of most of these games and poems seems to be to create something nonsensical out of sense.
http://www.surrealistmovement-usa.org/pages/forecast.html
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/surrealist_games/
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Modern/resource/1049
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The City as a Board Game
When I stepped onto South Street I immediately felt aspects of my home coming back to me, the quirky atmosphere, interesting shops and coffee houses, and art lining the streets. I felt connected to South Street, to the gardens, to the food. Everything connected me to the play and to the experience of travelling through South Philadelphia. The streets created the perfect board for the game I was about to find myself in known as experiencing a city.
As a player in the game, my main goal was to find as many mosaics as possible throughout the city, with no rules attached expect to have fun and observe city life on South Street, and the surrounding grid of streets, homes, and artwork. Flanagan describes games as “inherently non-liner,” and this is how I felt my game on South Street managed to play out.
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Disempowerment of Play
I still remember the last family dinner I had before I left home. I have about twenty relatives invited and everyone had a talk with me, and there’s one sentence they have been repeating: Don’t wander alone in the city, stay in your dorm when it’s getting dark.
And when I take the class trip of play in the city, I have always feared the messed-up American metropolis would give me some scary encounters. Diversity of strangers----those who my parents always told me to stay away from has planted deep-rooted fear in my mind.
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Zagar and The City
The city is a concentration of humanity. It demonstrates economic triumph in tall buildings and the downfalls of humankind in its homeless population and high crime rates. The modern art world often lives between these two aspects of the city. While art needs money in order to survive, it also needs thoughtfulness, honesty, and some spontaneity in order to make a statement and be provocative. Money can produce a biased prospective and dilute arts’ meaningfulness, so art usually tries to survive only on a substance level of money, with enough room to play with ideas.
Artists are described as “creating outside commercial establishments.” (Flanagan, 3) according to Critical Play by Mary Flanagan. Isaiah Zagar follows Flanagan’s definition of an artist. Zagar’s art was rejected by museums, so he brought it to the streets. His art form is mosaics, which he layers on top of buildings in his hometown of Philadelphia. His mosaics are made of tiles, molds, broken mirrors, bicycle wheels, bottles, and other found objects. Zagar’s Mosaics are so widespread in Philadelphia that they have become part of the cultural identity of the city. Even though Zagar’s mosaics are less prominent than the cities’ museums, they are more unique and regional.
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The Electric Dress
From the Flanagan article I chose to research Atsuko Tanaka, who revolutionized the meaning of play with her Electric Dress which was designed as a cross between a traditional kimono and the new age of technology. It was a full body dress with hundreds of light bulbs in primary colors that would light her up and “blink like fireworks.” This piece spoke to me because it not only took the art form of fashion, but it also was influential in the new wave movement of technology, as it was created in the year 1956, and she would then wear her creation to various exhibitions over the years, expressing her playfulness and imagination.
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Subversion of Rhyme and Reason
There is nothing quite like standing in the entrance of a building, looking down, and realizing that you can see through the floor. Nor is it quite like glancing up, and noticing a large naked figure staring at you from the ceiling. Then again, Isaiah Zagar is not your typical artist, so one should not expect a typical entrance to his life-work. The Magic Gardens in Philadelphia, PA are something else; completely covered in tiles and metal, glass and wood, the structure looks like something better suited to Wonderland than Philly. Yet Philly is where it calls home, and it is all the better for it; after all, in Wonderland no one would think twice about a giant wall of china and bottles. In a small residential area of Philly, the striking contrast makes the garden all the more arresting, all the better for it. The Magic Gardens, despite its name, has very few living plants in it at all; more are painted on the walls, but this is far more a garden of sights and insights than fruits and leaves. Every square inch of the space is covered in one material or another, used in the most unusual ways; things are drawn or painted onto some tiles, other tiles are arranged into figures. Some spaces have no tiles, but only ‘other’; broken crockery, smashed mirrors, carefully cut shapes and outlines. Words are a part of the presentation, but not always for the reading; some are arranged to be read, yes, but others are positioned not to be read, but so that people know the words are there; perhaps they are placed too small and too high to be read from street level.
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Play with Friends
After reading the introduction of Critical Play, I started to question if I played critically in Philly. I think the answer is no. According to Flanagan, “critical play means to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life.” During the visit in Zagar’s Magic Garden, I didn’t really think about how this shining and beautiful garden is related to human life. Instead, I just took time to enjoy being surrounded by mosaics, telling my groups how incredible it is, and taking interesting photos with them. Besides the Magic Garden itself, being with my group is the part I liked the most. I have thought about how it would be if I was there myself. Could I have spent one hour there? Probably not: it is such a small garden actually. But I think I did play “ …the use of play forms as forms of bonding, including the exhibition and validation or parody of membership and traditions in a community.”, Flanagan puts this sentence in Critical Reading. With my group, I did play.
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To Subvert With Pomegranate
Phoenix
MLord
Play in the City 028
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
To Subvert With Pomegranate
As a player in the city, I “explore what is permissible and what pushes at that boundary between rules and expectations” (Flanagan 13). For a long time now, I have understood instinctively that art, to me, is a way of surprising people. The first person who put this sensation into words was Dorothy Allison in her essay, "This is Our World." Allison described art as a way to challenge and to cause people to think about the ideas that they prefer to shove aside and pretend don't exist. My reaction to this was an intense sense of "I'm not the only one." According to Mary Flanagan, not only am I not the only one, I come from a long line of artists who see art as their tool to shock and surprise—their instrument of Duchamp’s “spirit of revolt” (3). “As the connection between art and critical play continues, artists will further explore embodied play and situations in and efforts to ‘unplay’ preconceived notions of…everyday living, and rework them” (Flanagan 148). Preconceived notions are exactly what I have been fighting, armed only with a pineapple and a pomegranate.
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Street Intervention
“Artists make words touchable, create palindromes, do street intervention, and even skywrite from airplanes to disrupt the everyday actions in the city.” Flanagan, 14
There is something defiant about Isaiah Zagar’s mosaics. Cities are built for efficiency, functionality, but not necessarily beauty. Yet, around South Street, a glimmer of light in the gap between two buildings could mean a mosaic of mirrors and color. Zagar’s art is a street intervention, playfully ignoring Philadelphia’s figurative and literal grids to bring a different dimension into its streets.
Zagar’s mosaics are inherently spontaneous. He doesn’t always plan ahead where his next mosaic will be, what it will look like, or where he will get his materials. Many of his mosaics spill across alleyways and onto the back walls of houses, creeping along fence lines as if they’re no longer in the artist’s control. The mosaics fill cracks in alleys with seemingly random words and images. Looking at a map of Zagar’s mosaics is not like looking at a map of a typical art gallery. The mosaics make no distinctive pattern and many do not even appear on the map. In the magic gardens, the route you take is not restricted to a path. Zagar’s art defies the city’s nearly symmetrical grid pattern in its meandering nature.
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Quiet Critical Play
In Mary Flanagan’s book Critical Play, she addresses the connection between the artistic movement of Fluxus and the concept of critical play. Broader than the fluxus movement, theatre in general can be a form of critical play. Flanagan speaks to this connection, and could have easily included the genre of autoteatro in her writing. A few weeks ago I was a part of the “The Quiet Volume,” a theatre piece by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells, which incorporates text and audio to guide the audience. “The Quiet Volume” has all the hallmarks of Flanagan-approved critical play: not only is it exciting and playful, but it is critical in that it creates a space where the participants can question a basic aspect of human life. In this case, it is reading. Where we read, how we read, and the nature of words is explored through “The Quiet Volume.” Flanagan would define this as critical play.
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Connecting the Dots
Jessica Bernal
Play in the City-ESEM
Connecting the dots
All I needed to learn in life to survive, I learned in third grade. Mrs. Washington, my third grade teacher, she deserved teacher of the year awards and perhaps a life supply of Diet Coke just to keep her smiling. That woman had been teaching for twenty-two years and still got out of her red Buick every morning. She meant well and of course wanted the best for a couple of eight year olds, which at that time just meant making it to high school alive. I learned what R&B music was like and how within minutes the rhythm would sway your body side to side. I learned why my best friend’s hair didn’t feel or look like mine and most importantly, why she was darker than I. She wasn’t the ideal teacher parents would want their kids in school with. Instead of focusing on fractions and spelling the hardest words imaginable, we’d watch movies. I learned more from watching those movies than I would’ve learned from any show on PBS or the Discovery Channel for that matter.
I learned to take a step back from it all and letting the play unfold character by character and each scene connecting to each other like connecting dots. Once the movie starts, everything in the room fades and everyone disappears into dust.
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Is All Art Play?
It’s obvious that kids on a playground are playing. They are running around, bumping each other, screaming, carousing, and often having the time of their young lives. But what makes all of those different activities they take part in fall under the umbrella term of play? Is it the physicality, the human companions, or even the entertainment value? If those things are the definition of play, than many adults have not played for years. So many of the games and activities in a child’s world are nonexistent in an adult’s, yet adults are nonetheless capable of play just as much as kids.
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"The Spectator Makes The Picture"
When I was reading Flanagan's Critical Play, a quote from French-American artist, Marcel Duchamp, immediately caught my attention. "The spectator makes the picture (Critical Play, Page 10)." This is exactly how I felt as for my recent trips to the city of Philadelphia.
In my very first trip along Benjamin Franklin Parkway, I had a variety of "spectator experiences" with my classmates. At the Museum of Art, we saw a group of men racing to the top of the stairs, whilst their lady friends were cheering at the finish line. Their playful activity made a real-life art. Witnessing the process of their play of art, some audience outside the museum dismissed their play and found no value in their race, but I enjoyed watching them running on the stairs. It's such a special moment for me to see adults play freely regardless of other people's thoughts. But my idea could be largely different with my friends' opinions. This explains what Duchamp's meant in his words.
Spectators all have their own interpretations regarding to every piece of art. Some might agree with the artist's ideas. Others may envision a completely fresh sense. They can even add new meanings and new aspects to it, creating their unique version through this original piece.
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The Laws of Chance
Little pieces of paper fall down and scatter across the floor. Pictures and memories are torn apart and delicately released to find their own path. Each ripped up chunk by itself is meaningless, its story hidden beyond the incomplete edges. Once all the small fragments come together on the ground they become something new, though not in the traditional way. Once the pile is formed, they are merely an abstract mess of torn papers, waiting for someone to come along and see them as something more.
This is the process that the Dada artist Hans Arp used in his Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance as mentioned in Chapter 5 of Mary Flanagan’s Critical Play. Flanagan said that “In his automatic processes, Arp would draw, rip the drawings into pieces, allow the pieces to fall where they may, and affix them where they lay as a memento of the operation.” In both of my excursions into the city of Philadelphia, this quote was represented in various ways that gave both the experience and the quote greater significance for me.
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Playing with Flanagan
Flanagan defines play, at one point, as separated from reality. This makes me wonder- did we ever truly play in the city? I know for sure that I never felt separated from reality while in Philadelphia (or indeed any other city). If anything, being in the city felt more realistic, more consequential than anything else I do in my life. This makes me unsure of whether or not to agree with what Flanagan writes about.
However, Flanagan also offers up a definition for “critical play”. She defines it as “creat[ing] or occupy[ing] play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life… Criticality in play can be fostered in order to question an aspect of a game’s ‘content,’ or an aspect of a play scenario’s function that might otherwise be considered a given or necessary… Critical play is characterized by a careful examination of social, cultural, political, or even personal themes that function as alternates to popular play spaces.” Perhaps this definition is a bit closer to the experiences I’ve had in the city. Another issue I was trying to work through while reading Flanagan was her section about “technology”. I don’t believe that my play in the city required any technology. I found that simply walking around was enough to feel that I was playing. This leads me to believe that my main method of playing in the city is by using subversion.
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Playing to Learn
On my very first venture into Philadelphia with Play in the City to experience the Quiet Volume, I thought that Agatha, Phoenix, Thea and I were wandering aimlessly. But after reading Mary Flanagan’s writing about “critical play,” I realized that we were, indeed, playing critically. She references a paper by Brian Sutton-Smith, in which he categorizes play into four sections: play as learning, play as power, play as fantasy, and play as self. Though this is not entirely the concept Flanagan uses for her work, I found it incredibly interesting that what I think of as “play” might not be play to everyone and that though many people argue that something is not play if there is a product at the end, play nearly always has a product, albeit not a tangible one. When we were in Philadelphia we were playing to learn: to learn about the city, about science, and about ourselves.
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Eating Critically
Mary Flanagan, in the introduction to her book Clinical Play defines play as many different things, finding sources in the works of anthropologist Brian Sutton-Smith, Historian Johan Huizinga, and the general agreement found between most anthropologists and historians. Some of the general “rules” of play that Flanagan mentions are that play is central to human life, is mentally or physically challenging, is voluntary and pleasurable, and is somehow separated from reality. In my travels into Philadelphia, I found that what most helped me to play was that the trips were very separated from my everyday reality.
My daily routine is filled with classes, studying, and Erdman’s consistent but decent cuisine. Escaping the norm and exploring the streets of Philadelphia was definitely a welcome aberration. One specific change that helped me to relax was the food.
Bryn Mawr’s food is delicious. A powerful recruiting factor that Bryn Mawr has is their superiority in food production: Bryn Mawr’s dining services are much better than other colleges. However, three meals a day of our unchanging diet leaves students desperate for something more. Reading Terminal Market was the perfect solution.
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Choose Your Own Adventure
Before reading the excerpt from Flanagan’s book, I used to think of my adventures into Philadelphia as an unrestricted adventure. I could go wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted. After reading her book, however, I’ve begun to think of my adventures as more limited. Flanagan quotes Costikyan in her book discussing the differences between stories and games. “Stories,” writes Costikyan “are inherently liner. However much characters may agonize over the decisions they make, they make them the same way every time we reread the story, and the outcome is always the same…Games are inherently non-linear. They depend on decision-making, [with] real, plausible alternatives. It must be entirely reasonable for a player to make a decision one way in one game, and a different way in the next.”
But what about the Choose Your Own Adventure books? The series of books that allow one to assume the position of the main character, and choose one of several “real, plausible outcomes” multiple times throughout the book. The Choose Your Own Adventure books are in this way both stories and games. On one hand, it is a story in that there are not an unlimited number of ways for the story to end, no matter how many times one redoes the story or chooses a different path. On the other hand, it is a game in that the path that one’s character takes can be different each time, and the outcome does not not need to be the same.
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To Play, or not to Play (Critically)
In Mary Flanagan’s Critical Play, she does an impressive job of painting critical play in a light that implies that it is superior to plain old play. She defines it as “a means to create...play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life.” She states that play is “fun, voluntary, and intrinsically motivated.” I think she implies that plain play does not render useful results. Yet she does grudgingly quote Johan Huizinga where he says “All art derives from play.” When Hanna and I visited the Mosaic Gardens last weekend, this quote could be used to describe Zagar’s whole masterpiece. I understand that critical play is an effective means of creating art, but it is not the best means to enjoy art.