"Play is the original human narrative," author, MacArthur fellow Vivian Paley OPB broadcast May 2001
Curator's statement
Play is a core human behavior and by its nature transforms staid situations into innovative and revealing ones. Like a wild fairy tale, this show purposefully jars, challenges and heightens what is real about the game of life. To accomplish this, all five artists are expected to Play by their own rules like aesthetic athletes while exploring game theory, traditional play, irreverence and darker themes like superstition, threat and the most tragic of games, war. These players create, improvise and adapt while retaining their identities, resembling emergent properties of a complex system or the interplay of a jazz quintet. I have confidence in these players; the results will be worth the risks. The stakes are high, we have over two centuries of the Industrial Revolution under our belts and humanity is re-examining what is essential to the human experience. A culture can be defined by how it plays.
Play: releasing the genii in the bottle
Play has a way of twisting and bending everyday humdrum into something pleasurable, addressing both the light and dark sides of humanity, regardless of age. Even children's games like "ring around the rosie" addressed the horrors of Europe's bubonic plague. As a behavior, Play catalyses the need and inevitability of change and transformation even when no solution is apparent. Thus, it is core to the creative act, hope and adaptability. Play catalyses innovation by introducing new momentum and novel elements into behavior patterns. Without a sense of Play, marriages grow stale, workplaces lose productivity and families lose cohesion. Indeed, Play can be a considered the secret to a life worth living or the spark of vitality. Noted anthropologist Gregory Bateson considered art, "A sort of play behavior whose function is to practice and make more perfected communication." Play is also synonymous with anything that has heightened salience; the Play of light, making a musical instrument sing or dramatic theater productions. Often children reveal things in Play that won't be told outright. Play is the Mona Lisa's smile, the genii freed from its bottle, which fulfills wishes with unexpected results.
Play, both in process and aesthetics changes the world into something livable. By highlighting that power in art it re-examines something the traditional thinking art world hasn't drawn much attention to, even though we know it was core to guys like Calder, De Kooning, Duchamp, Oldenberg, Appel and the ever self-amused Picasso. More recent artists like Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Carroll Dunham, Judy Pfaff and Pipilotti Rist aren't kidding around either. Late in life even Rembrandt employed a series of exotic costumes to keep his spark. In his case the brush was strong enough to draw layers from such a simple game of dress-up, the player does matter.
Because it is universal from infancy, Play transcends categories like painting, installation, photography and performance. Like beauty, Play is part of the way we define the subjective and cannot really ever be taken out of the human equation. Similarly, its power cannot be fully controlled. Play evolves, forming its own collective logic.
Obviously, Play doesn't diminish seriousness like some stodgy Victorians believed, although that attitude still persists. As a mind set it gives individuals an adaptive zone and groups the chance to form consensus in an open forum, politics are a game after all. Through curiosity, inventiveness and rules we sort expectations, resources and outcomes in patterns that influence everything from food fights to traffic jams. Game theory grew out of this awareness and reminds one how Mozart's humor, Einstein's hamming around, the showmanship of Paganini and Paul Klee's insightful wonder added a lust for life that focused rather than deflected the critical weight of their output. Play pushes mere technique into the realms of virtuosity. If one dares to push the envelope, one must Play. It isn't all light though, Play can address darker themes as well. In fact, the conceptual germ for this show was planted by holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl who stated,
To discover there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be a surprise enough for an outsider.
Generally speaking of course, any pursuit of art in camp was somewhat grotesque. I would say that the real impression by anything connected with art arose only from the ghostlike contrast between the performance and the background of desolate camp life.
As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.
This was Earth shaking. Somehow the luxury of artful Play was necessary, even if only the grim variety existed. Taken in comparison to most of history, life in America affords us nearly unlimited luxuries of Play and Art. Presently what smacks of a missed opportunity is how little we savor this as a culture. That attitude that has shifted slightly due to recent harsh realities creeping into American life.
The dark side of Play is often entered via humor. In particular, gallows humor is especially effective as it tests the forbidden or unsettling where there is little hope. When faced with the unknown or ever-present threat, Play offers alternatives even when none exist. Since Play itself is pattern forming and adjusting it prepares the mind and body as a mantra against fear and inaction. In fact, artists through the very creative act, create open-ended game pieces that can often be exported. Art is a wildcard in civilization's deck.
In this exhibit all five artists set up their own rules and the resulting interplay will test their strategies against one another, likely developing some moments of surprising consensus. The show can be seen like a battlefield, a playground, a board game or dance lessons, it asks viewers if they are a gladiator or Fred Astaire? It is up to the subjective and sovereign individual. Play is after all one of the most important options in the tool belt of the self.
Artist profiles:
Bruce Conkle corrodes seemingly untouchable or ephemeral icons like Mickey Mouse, Vermont's maple syrup industry, Sasquatch, fossil fuels and the forest primeval by giving them an actual physical presence. Like a modern jester, his work is so outrageous that even deep satire becomes flattering. By playing with "the myth" these aloof icons become tangible examples of fragility, impermanence and often-ecological harbingers.
For Play, Conkle presents artificial life and death in unnatural contexts. His snowmen in freezers, video game stills and Sasquatch hides are all fish out of water. Thus man, like the snowman needs artificial climate to survive and the mysterious Bigfoot loses his mystique and environment when he's just a rug. Conkle creates a disturbing caricature of our real fantasy world.
Jacqueline Ehlis plays directly with the properties of materials and infuses them with the pleasure and zest of discovery. The viewer is engaged directly as if thrown a ball and asked to catch through recognition of her materials and their often-uncanny hybridizations. By modifying some of her mentor, Dave Hickey's views on beauty and democracy she stands in stark contrast to the Aristotelian idea that great art must be ambivalent. Instead, her work aggressively engages the viewer, space, color, surface and participates in the transfiguration of painting's history.
For Play, Jacqueline bounces off heroic icons like pirates and the drips of Jackson Pollock. There is also a wild reinterpretation of Barnett Newman's zip, Sasquatch and monster truck culture all in one painting. Instead of being nostalgic, her shiny objects are obviously so freshly minted that one feels a new kind of pirate-rebel-artist can once again exist.
Jeff Jahn, being a multidisciplinary; artist, critic, and composer, considers Play the great emulsifier. Play engages history yet frees one from it, cutting the Gordian Knot. Interested in seemingly simple genres like finger painting and sandcastles, his work points out how idiosyncratic one can make an idea when taken to logical extremes, while pointing out man's vanity with 21st century awareness. Play after all bestows "Oomph."
For Play, Jahn's works are conceptually atavistic, territorial, and somewhat self-repeating or fractal-shaped finger paintings. Literally painted by sense of touch, they go deeper than formalism. Call it primordialism, the shapes, color and texture are filled with biological releasing mechanisms (visual cues which tell the brain, "that is a head, those are the eyes, those are teeth, it is poisonous, it bites or it is food"). Jahn's work connects the body and mind creating something inherently sensual, beautiful, and seductive. By revealing the "animal source code" they force one to assess the threat and beauty akin to encountering a bear in your path.
Artist and curator Todd Johnson is interested in how systems develop and entropy. Tied to game theory and complex emerging patterns of order Todd finds patterns and displays them so nakedly they lose their initial charm like a game one plays for habit instead of enjoyment. The repeated images code and recode until the patterns eventually dysfunction. Thus, the inevitability of change is revealed. Like a hacker beating network security nothing remains safe in perpetuity.
For Play, Johnson's numerous photographs of strange camouflage lose their ability to avoid detection, thereby defeating the purpose of their pattern. Similarly, the images of men hunting or paramilitary games cannot conceal the inherent pattern that leads to war, man's most perfect dysfunction.
Hilary Pfeifer plays by blurring or pureeing kitsch and loftier things. Her works can resemble toys, internal organs, voodoo dolls, germs or models of molecules. When confronting her work it is often difficult to tell if one has entered a fun zone or some sort of biohazard lab.
For Play, Pfeifer has taken some of those eternal but hackneyed stock epithets that float around the art world and blended them. Rules like "real art does not match your couch" and "sculpture goes on top of the pedestal" have been broken so often that one wonders why the epithet survives. In one case Pfeifer merges the antipodes of the epithets and approaches the couch as a true hybrid. She redefines the gaudy green couch, the couch redefines the art and both emerge as a tongue in cheek symbiant. It is a fact; good taste needs bad taste to exist. They are partners in a beautiful crime, secret lovers making out on Hilary's love seat, or turning up in unexpected places like viruses or surveillance tools.
August 2002