Play in the City 2013

            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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

            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.

        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.

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.