Play in the City 2013

After making many trips into Philadelphia the past few weeks I can really see how it’s considered a “City of Neighborhoods”.  This concept really struck me on Friday, however, when I visited Philly’s Italian Market, South Street, and the many sections in between.  I prefer these areas to Center City; they seem more honest, raw, and interesting to me while reminding me an awful lot of downtown New York.  The first time I walked through South Street was last Friday when my group and I visited Magic Gardens.  I saw how influenced the blocks were by the “younger generations” through art, music, and style. 

André Cadere was an artist in the 70's who created pieces called "Barres." They were a series of small wooden cylinders painted bright colors, then glued together into long sticks. Cadere carried the sticks around France, Germany, and New York, interacting with people on the streets and subways, and even leaving the pieces in the galleries of other artists. The Barres could be displayed leaning up against a wall, on the floor, and in numerous other ways. His works were very playful in that the colors on his Barres were arranged in a pattern, except for one anomaly. The cylinders were visibly cut and sanded by hand, and some of the glue could still be seen in the borders between them. After Cadere’s death in 1978, his Barres became less playful, because he wasn’t around to interact with them anymore. Part of their appeal came from how he defied the traditional ways of displaying art, and the spontaneity that came with that

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“…while conceptual art uses its own logical strategies for execution, “conceptual art is not necessarily logical…””

Linked to movements such as minimalism and conceptualism, Sol LeWitt was an influential American artist. He painted or sculpted basic shapes, playing with lines and color combinations. He is most famous for his wall paintings, where his work is actually painted onto the walls of the museum. Over his career he made over 1,200 drawings and paintings. I found a lot of time-lapse videos of his work being installed: http://www.massmoca.org/lewitt/timelapse.php?id=10. As you can see, many people work on each painting, according to LeWitt's plan. This technique of providing instructions to carry out his idea is his connection to Flanagan's concept of critical play. She writes "For Lewitt, art making-as-instruction was a performative game with concrete rules and outcomes." These "rule-drivin visual works" are the product of many artists completing his instructions in a way that Flanagan considers to be critical play. Every time the work is completed, it changes a little bit. His work has been compared to musical compositions because his original score stays the same, but it can sound different every time.

Samantha Plate

Play In The City

09/29/2013

What Is Play?

            What is play? This is the question that Mary Flanagan tries to answer. She is unable to come up with one specific definition. When asked to describe the reading in class I said “refreshingly indecisive”. The fact that Flanagan admits there are many definitions of play is truly refreshing. Theorists, psychologists, are scientists are always trying to pin “play” down and give it a strict definition. But play in itself defies definition- it is playful. Play sets all the rules and breaks them too. There are so many ways to describe this essential part of life, but no way to define it.

            I truly felt this idea that play cannot be defined on my last trip to Philadelphia. After visiting the mosaic garden my group and I decided to wander around the area, hoping to stumble upon more mosaics. We found ourselves walking in the “wrong” direction, but now I realize it was the right one. We ended up at a playground.

Henri Matisse has long been one of my favorite painters yet up until a few days ago while researching him, I had never seen one of his sculptures.  Although he is labeled as a one of the most important painters in Fauvism, he was also a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor.  Matisse sculpted his figures to express stress and pain and they were certainly darker than his paintings.  He exaggerated the figure’s contours in order to show their struggle.  Much of the figures are twisted and in strange positions. 

Consider

1) An artist (Dove Bradshaw) claims a fire hose in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a work of art.

2) She posts a label next tot he hose, and replaces it whenever it is removed.

3) She photographs her work and has postcards printed. She (secretly) deposits these postcards in the museums own gift shop. And they sell them. For years.

4) The museum acquires a photograph of the firehose and accepts it (the photograph) into its collection.

5) The firehose itself is later acquired by the museum that owns it; the artists work is donated to the museum, which is acknowledges in letters to the donor.

6) An artist book is created in an edition of 10 to document the trajectory of this project, which is now called a performance.

7) The book is published free online and you can peruse its 86 pages.

I had walked into Condom Kingdom without a reason for going in or an objective; this was not a shopping trip. Yet, I stood there holding a headband that was adorned with two sparkly pink penises and considered buying it. I could wear it on the blue bus, eat dinner in Erdman with it on my head, and even incorporate it into my Halloween costume. To me, the headband exemplified everything that the name “Condom Kingdom” implies: a light-hearted, humorous approach to sexuality. Owning it would not only make my friends laugh, it would be a way to work against the repression of female sexuality. Although I did not know it then, I was demonstrating Flanagan’s terms, “play” and “critical play,” and experiencing the effect of the city on “critical play” and one of the flaws of “critical play”.

Flanagan defines “play” when she writes, “In play, the aim is play itself, not success or interaction in ordinary.” Unlike Flanagan’s qualification for “play,” I believed I was playing in Condom Kingdom because I was having fun. Still, both definitions constitute my experience as a playful one; since I went into Condom Kingdom to play (not to bond with my other group members or to buy an item), I was playing for “play itself.” 

I did some research about Dada, especially the artist Arp. There is some discussion about whether he's really create his work by chance?

http://www.francois-murez.com/compoarp%20en.htm 

some one analyze the art from Arp. To most of them,it's hard to believe Arp created his work really by chance. The golden section applys a lot in his work. When the people really try to create things like Arp did, "It doesn’t work. The squares never land where they should. We always feel compelled to adjust the spaces between the papers, moving them closer together or further apart." (http://artofcollage.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/collage-according-to-the-laws-of-chance/)

The Dada movement was an artistic movement, that centered itself around the idea of being anti-art. It aimed to offend, to shock, to critisize, to disturb the senses; if art did one thing, Dada aimed to do the other. This was in protest to what the Dada artists thought of as a world slowly killing itself, a borgiuazie who would rather fight a war with itself than change how the society works.

Of those artists, one whom I find particularly interesting is Marcel Duchamp, the infamous artist behind "The Fountain", a urinal hung on a museum wall with a fake signature. He also created a piece called "Bycicle Wheel", currently on display in New York's Museum of Modern Art; when that sculpture was originally displayed, the artist invited viewers to interact with and spin the bycicle wheel, although that is no longer allowed now that the piece is displayed in MoMA.