March 2018 – PLAYTIME

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on March 30, 2018March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

This is the sixth and final installment of a series featuring four artists playing Inter/de-pend-ence: The Game, a dialogue-based game exploring cooperation, competition, and other themes of mutual support. For this final round we asked players to take turns sharing reflections on their experiences playing game.

Catch up with the introduction and meet the players, or find the previous rounds here.

You can play Round Six: Reflection by downloading a PDF or drawing cards online.

Christine Wong Yap: I was impressed with how similar our mindsets and approaches are. I wasn’t very familiar with Malcolm’s work, and I thought, “Wow, I am so lucky to be part of this conversation!” The way Ronny, Torreya, and Malcolm each approach artmaking is super interesting to me. I am glad we are all able to relate about these ways of collaborating and working with communities.

Malcolm Peacock: Yeah, I saw the same. I was really happy about that. I think there was a moment when Torreya talks about the stretch thing… When I was younger, bringing up personal things… You know, death is a super complex topic. Your context, relation, and proximity to it affects how you talk about it, and your comfortability with speaking about it with other people. While I’ve gotten really comfortable in speaking about that, I’m always—not on pins and needles, but—like, “Oh, hope I just didn’t kill everyone’s vibe.” So it was so nice when Ronny opened up immediately after. I feel frequently that most of us experience similar things in our lives, just at different times.

There were so many moments where I thought of Kimi [Haunauer] (who’s the reason that Sarrita and I met last year), and all of you guys’ practices. Especially, Christine, when you talked about going to Albuquerque and not knowing anyone…. Everyone described using their practice as a way to ground and find ourselves inside of a space to feel less alone, but also give back to people that maybe helped us feel something. It’s just so nice to hear all of you speak about your work and how much you all genuinely care. Like, “Yaaass! Everybody cares!” There’s something really significant about giving, being present, and showing up, and that’s been such a nice part of this.

Ronny Quevedo: I think it was helpful to see those common threads…. It was interesting to hear how there are common sympathies attached to who we are, how we approach our work, and how that relays into the way we approach our work. For me, it was interesting to see the emotional response to how we perceive labor and practices. It’s a nice reminder that this conversation allows us to talk about things that wouldn’t necessarily be available in public.

That reminds me of a lecture that María Magdalena Campos-Pons once gave at my grad school. She was really unapologetic about her work being sentimental. It was a really grounding thing to hear, because oftentimes there’s not many spaces to elaborate on the fact that our work really comes from a place of communication—that we have an audience in mind that’s very close to us. We’re not trying to make this huge worldview of our work, but in reality we’re trying to make connections, and oftentimes those connections can be resonant to so many people. That’s what I would take from the game.

Torreya Cummings: A lot of what everyone else said really resonates with me too. It’s nice to have a conversation with thoughtful, feeling people who care about the world and each other. I’m really happy to be a part of that.

I think the structure of the game allows us to get into that. I noticed that there were times when somebody was speaking on a subject, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, I have something to add to that,” but it wasn’t my turn to do that with my role in the game, but something else nice about that is that I was listening more intently. That is something interesting about the game structure.

We’ve all mentioned there is a part of the art world, a social aspect to it—but oftentimes you were trying really hard not to show any vulnerability. It’s difficult to build actual community and relationships without being able to be open about the sentimentality aspect of your work—why we are doing this, why we are using these tools to connect with people, and why that’s meaningful to us. It was a pleasure to listen to everybody else’s perspectives on these questions as well. So thank you.

*****

Via questions, examples, tactics, and listening, artists Torreya Cummings, Ronny Quevedo, Malcolm Peacock, and Christine Wong Yap (with gameplay facilitated by Sarrita Hunn) discussed collaboration, meaning, receiving support, supporting others, and whether nations (and art worlds) reflect majorities of residents or artists. In the process, we heard about collaborative models, what audience feedback means to artists, examples of artists helping artists, and critical questions of resistance and imagination. Inter/de-pend-ence: The Game can be a personalized, thought-provoking tool for addressing mutualism, agency, and artists’ roles among diverse and largely unfamiliar participants.

Inter/de-pend-ence has been presented as a participatory performative lecture at SOHO20 (New York City), 8th International World Hedonism Congress (Germany), Common Field Convening 2017 (Los Angeles) and is now available in conjunction with the current exhibition PlayTime, with support from the Peabody Essex Museum.

Sarrita Hunn and Christine Wong Yap would like to thank Peabody Essex Museum for the opportunity to create the online and DIY versions of Inter/de-pend-ence: The Game; game participants Torreya Cummings, Ronny Quevedo, and Malcolm Peacock; Kala Art Institute, where the game was first produced; and all the other spaces and people who helped bring the project to new audiences. Enjoy!

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on March 30, 2018March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

This is the fifth installment in a six-part series featuring four artists playing Inter/de-pend-ence: The Game, a dialogue-based game exploring cooperation, competition, and other themes of mutual support.

Catch up with the introduction, or find the previous round here.

You can play Round Five: Majorities by downloading a PDF or drawing cards online.

Ronny Quevedo, Answerer

Ronny draws the Question Card, “How much do you think the current existing country (art world) serves the majority of residents (artists)?”

No. {laughs} It’s funny. I think both those concerns reflect each other. I don’t think that the country serves a majority of residents. There’s just a huge ignorance to what actually makes up the country. I think for the most part people are underserved in a variety of capacities, not just socially but culturally. Having said that, if the art world is supposedly leading the cultural legacy, it’s trying to rectify it, but still has a lot more to do—in regards of physical representation, and also in terms of how it serves artists. Not just giving them the opportunity to to make their work, but if artists are generally involved in reaching your community—how does the art world serve the audience that the artist is trying to represent? I think they’re both hand-in-hand. I think both of them are really ill-informed at the moment, and slowly trying to rectify it. In terms of artists specifically, I would say there’s still like a lot of work to do.

Malcolm Peacock, Concretizer

Yeah—no and no. I think people are not clear, or maybe don’t even want to know what is a majority… what is the make up, who is here, who has been here.

Deana Haggag (president of United States Artists) and I are friends from Baltimore and she talks a lot about something that I really deeply care about: A desire to tell stories of artists (tons of artists, different artists), especially artists that are making work about things that are really relevant, important, and necessary to our existence, like the environment, incarceration, or our food. Her company did a big survey and found that over 80% of people in the United States care about art, the legacy of art, and the significance of art, and believe it is a good thing that can cause historical change. A number in the teens of those same people surveyed care about individual artists. I think that disconnect happens and there’s not enough spaces—I’m not just talking about physical spaces—for people to learn about individual artists. I think the government doesn’t want a liberated state or a liberated body of people. It’s been proven that art is a practice that can liberate people. So, of course, in this type of state, where we have this very dictator-looking thing, then there’s probably not going to be a relationship between the government and the art world to promote art on a scale that could change the world.

I think artists, art contexts, and the art world are largely at fault for being complacent in a system of capital, or a market, or schools… for being complacent in the types of structures and things that can be designated as art. That limits the types of artists that… all of us see. In general, for me, it’s a constant process of seeking: trying to find artists who I don’t know, that care about things that I care about, or care about things that I don’t know that I care about yet, because it’s so easy to get looped up in seeing the same names that I enjoy already.

This is going to be tangential: I think that the art world is the place where we could be more open. I think spaces like this—right now, this conversation—is a creation. It’s a great artwork because it’s creating a space for us to wonder—and I think that’s actually the key thing. There’s too much focus on what exists. There’s not enough focus on wonder, or seeking the possibility of something else. It’s pretty stagnant.

I want to make a quick comment about two articles on Artsy. Two years ago, Artsy produced an article about black artists, curators, and writers and at the end Lowery Stokes Sims talks about how black artists are finally getting attention and showing in galleries and museums, but the next challenge will be curation. There needs to be black and brown people in museums involved in the processes of exhibiting this work. (I’ve been wondering when the article about that is going to come out.) What came out a few days ago was an article about capital’s relation to black artists—all that is super important and very valid. The end of the article addresses, in three short paragraphs, Project Row Houses and other black-artist-initiated projects that aren’t reaping capital benefit. That is where I am talking about wonder; that area of the arts for a marginalized body to exist, that makes space for somebody that is not a black figurative painter to have their work recognized. I think we are still super far from that.

Torreya Cummings, Tactician

Torreya draws the Tactics Card, “Find the productive tension.”

There is certainly tension between the arts and the art world and the government…and then there’s tension between what is and what could be, or what has been and what could be.

A lot of people I know are working with the last one: what is and what could be…trying to imagine the future and what you know, trying to get out of a dynamic where it’s all about resistance—moving into something that could be looking past that and into: “What do you want?” and “How can you make it that way?” A lot of this is happening on smaller scales. Maybe it’s not, “This piece is going to change the world,” but maybe it will foster a conversation like we’re having here, like Malcolm mentioned.

Whether it’s productive tension or just the thing we kind of deal with all the time and work in spite of it, I’m not really sure—but people do keep producing.

I think, to some degree, resistance reinforces the thing that you’re resisting. It’s really hard to get out of that dynamic, especially when there is so much to actively combat, but I would like to leave some space for trying to impact our smaller corners of things. I hope that there’s some sort of aggregate, finding—maybe not productivity, that’s such a capitalist perspective—some generative tension.

Christine Wong Yap, Summarizer

Ronny started out with, “How much do you think the current existing country (art world) serves the majority of residents (artists)?” He said, “No,” for both. There’s a strong disconnect about whose counted, whose visible, and how this country supports artists. I think Malcolm agreed, saying a few different things. One was about a survey by United States Artists. There was a disconnect where 80% of the responders said they supported the arts for different reasons, and as a catalyst for historical change, but when they asked them how many of them actually support individual artist, it was a lower number in the teens. But art doesn’t happen without individual artists. Then he talked about an article in Artsy from Lowery Stokes Sims about diversity, and I think this topic has been getting more visibility, especially in New York with the city’s cultural plan.

Then there’s capital, and how it’s needed to support artists, but you don’t want the mindset that everything is a transaction. There was a through-line between what Torreya and Malcolm said about what exists and what is possible, what is versus what could be. To open yourself to wonder, to things that don’t fit in the art world, like Project Row Houses. Then, in the same way, in terms of activism: What are the limits of resistance? and How much does that reinstate? Reframing productive tension as generative tension.

Inter/De-pen-dence game play, Round Six: Reflection, will post next week—come back and play along!

Play Digest: Brian Jungen and Teppei Kaneuji

Posted on March 30, 2018March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

**This week’s pairing of PlayTime artists—Brian Jungen and Teppei Kaneuji—focuses on two different approaches to the transformation of the ordinary—both playful in their own way.**

Sculptor Brian Jungen‘s Dane-zaa heritage informs some of his most potent work. As a young man, Jungen took a trip to New York, where he bought a pair of basketball shoes in a trio of colors that were associated with the Haida tribe of the Pacific Northwest. Since that formative moment, Jungen has taken readily available sports clothing—team jerseys and sneakers, in many cases—and transformed their status and material state to contain a different meaning of “tribal” and make connections between the deification of some consumer goods and the commodification of native culture. Jungen is also interested in how “professional sports fill the need for ceremony within the larger culture of society.”His acts of transformation aren’t limited to Air Jordans. He has made whale skeletons out of basic white plastic outdoor chairs, totem poles out of golf bags, and eagles and possums out of suitcases.

Jungen’s work will be highlighted in a the twentieth edition of the Liverpool Biennial this year, in which co-curator Kitty Scott will give special attention to artists of Indigenous Australian and Canadian First People’s descent.

Kyoto-based Teppei Kaneuji uses resin and glue to make accumulated masses of the most unlikely objects. In an interview, the artist cites his “deliberate misuse and substitution” of materials and tools, such as the hair from dolls used to create Teenage Fanclub, one of the Kaneuji pieces on display in Playtime.

His series of assembled stuffed and sewn cut-outs, Games, Dance and the Constructions extends his playful reimagining and reassembling of items into surreal pillow-scapes contained in boxes.

Kaneuji cites everything and everyone from manga to Richard Deacon to Robert Smithson as influences. He finds—not unlike Jungen does in his work—that there are what could almost be described as cultural patterns that resolve themselves from the intermingling and reimagining of consumer goods, unleashing the unexpected in the overly-familiar.

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: Photo by Ken Sawyer/PEM.)

Play Digest: Cao Fei and Lara Favaretto

Posted on March 30, 2018March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

Using two very different approaches to materials, artists Cao Fei and Lara Favaretto both look at the absurdities of contemporary life. From the deeply digital to the industrial mundane, here’s a little more about how these two PlayTime artists look at life and play.

Artist Cao Fei had her first major museum retrospective at MoMA PS1 at the age of thirty-seven. In PlayTime, we present two pieces in which the artist finds playful responses to technology and humanity—giving life to machines or swapping mechanical precision for humanity. As curator Trevor Smith puts it, she is riffing on the idea that if “technology could free us from labor, we’d all have more time to play.”

Much of Fei’s digital-cinematic work revolves around video game imagery, cosplay, and the assignment of avatars in our lives, and she emphasizes the transcription of abilities onto other forms. She sometimes refers to her characters not just merely as avatars, but as “interpreters.”

She is no stranger to more conventional notions or sources of play, either. After having children and being immersed in the mindless anthropomorphism of everything from flowers to trains, her appreciation of children’s notions of play led to the making of the film East Wind starring a truck (manufactured for collecting trash by Dong Feng, or “east wind”) modeled on Thomas the Tank Engine and follows it as it drives Beijing’s highways and collects onlookers at fuel stops (he also gets pulled over by the police).

More recently, Cao has been selected by BMW as the latest creator for its Art Car project—the first Chinese artist to do so—premiering this week at Art Basel Hong Kong.

Lara Favaretto makes work comprised of a dry sense of humor and an exploration of art through the scrim of industrialized society—often combining the two: disintegrating cubes of paper confetti; a room of oxygen tanks triggering tiny party favors into action; and, of course, the showpiece of PEM’s East India Marine Hall, Coppie Semplici / Simple Couples, which uses car wash brushes to celebrate absurdity and comment on the mundanity of contemporary life. She says of her work and chosen materials: “I select objects that add parallel lives to my installations, objects that already have a history, especially those that have been submitted to various kinds of energy, power, and weather conditions—all agents that intervene on the materials that compose each artifact.”

Last summer, two of Favaretto’s installations sparked commentary: at Skulptur Projekte Münster, she installed the next in her Monument series, the sculpture Momentary Monument – The Stone—“marked with a deep slit into which visitors can throw their spare change”—which raised over $30,000 for people facing deportation. In Nottingham, Thinking Head had Nottingham Contemporary neighbors calling the fire squad!

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: Photo by Allison White/PEM.)

Legal Playthings: An Essay

Posted on March 28, 2018March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

Artist and archive hound Marc Fischer digs deep to find the un-fun side of play and games.

Industry trade periodicals represent a vast layer of publishing that lives outside of even the best magazine racks and news stands. In Chicago, where I live, our city’s main public library, the Harold Washington Library Center, has a rich browsing collection of these business magazines, with some dating back to the late 1800s. The library’s holdings reveal that there is a magazine for just about any trade or industry you can think of. Rubber World, Quick Frozen Foods, Gifts and Decorative Accessories, Scrap, Battery Man, American Shoemaker, and Institutions Volume Feeding are just some of the titles on offer.

While working on an ongoing publication series titled Library Excavations, I became particularly fascinated with the magazine Playthings, which describes itself as “The Toy Business Authority since 1903.” For a magazine about the business of toys and play, Playthings usually isn’t very fun. Its columnists are generally serious-looking older white men whose portrait photos head off columns about sales trends, rising and falling interest in particular types of toys, supply chain dilemmas, production problems, and seasonal expectations for key shopping periods like Christmas, Halloween, and the arrival of summer. Sometimes there is a column about how great Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are doing in the market, and then maybe another about how they are no longer doing so well. A long winter with late snow in Chicago, we learn, will screw up toy sales in the spring and delay profits.

For this layperson, the most interesting feature in Playthings is not the content written by the magazine staff, but the legal notices placed by toy manufactures. It is here, unexpectedly, that the real play happens–though always with a hefty element of threat and sometimes more than a little menace. Having gone to the trouble to create Strawberry Shortcake, Trolls, and Super Soakers, corporations are not about to play around when it comes to competitor knock offs.

In a July 1992 editorial, Playthings editor Frank Raysen Jr. writes: “Unfortunately with its faddish nature, the toy industry is particularly prone to the copycat syndrome, as infringers seek to capitalize on the latest hits before the next one comes along. It’s a problem that never seems to go away, despite the best efforts of U.S. toymakers, the Customs Service, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. And it’s a costly problem to combat with threatening ads, lawsuits, or other preventive measures.”

Hairs are split ever so finely in these notices. A 1977 notice for Marx Toys, makers of the Big Wheel tricycle, calls out another manufacturer that had the chutzpah to also describe their tricycle as “big.” A notice placed by Nintendo uses their game character Mario to implore the industry to use their company’s trademark properly. There is no such thing as “a Nintendo.” There is the Nintendo Entertainment System® and Nintendo Magazine®, but you should not get all generic with their trademarks and apply them indiscriminately to all video game products.

Most of these notices engage the reader in a couple ways. First, the companies want to remind everyone that they make things that are fun, so clever wordplay is a must. Second, they will not hesitate to sue you into the ground if you steal their stuff. There is a compelling friction created when these mixed goals rub against the enjoyable memories readers may have of playing with toys that are caught in the middle of a legal battle. There is an unexpected joy in coming across these notices at the odd intersection of childhood fun and corporate legal antics. ♦

(Image credits: Photo of advertisements from the defunct trade magazine Playthings by and courtesy of Marc Fischer.)

Games Adults Play: A Comic Series

Posted on March 13, 2018March 4, 2019 by Rebecca Bednarz

Comic Josh Gondelman and artist Molly Roth share a list of just a few of their favorite games that adults play. This week, egg, you’re it!

FREEZE EGG

Number of players: 1 + as many doctors as it takes

Description of gameplay: In a game of endurance, a player consults with a medical team to postpone procreation indefinitely by preserving her eggs. There is no opponent in this game. Freeze Egg, much like golf, is primarily a challenge of the player’s own skills.

Game ends when…: A player becomes the winner when she gives birth, changes her mind and adopts a child, or decides “You know what? Kids are kind of a hassle anyway. Forget the whole thing.”

Missed last week’s game? Find it here. Look for the latest installments of Games Adults Play in the coming weeks.

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on March 30, 2018March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

This is the fourth installment in a six-part series featuring four artists playing Inter/de-pend-ence: The Game, a dialogue-based game exploring cooperation, competition, and other themes of mutual support.

Are you playing? Catch up with the introduction, or find the previous rounds here and here.

You can play Round 4: Supporting Others by downloading a PDF or drawing cards online.

Malcolm Peacock, Answerer

Malcolm draws the Question Card, “How do you support others/other artists?”

It’s funny, because the ways we support each other as artists are often the ways we support people in general. Which I think is really good.

My own emotional, personal coming of age—leaving for college—was marked significantly and very abruptly by the death of my father. So, I have taken the initiative over the last five years to do a lot of outreach, just reaching out constantly. That is one of the only ways I can actively, substantially, and sustainably support people who I think need and deserve support. Yet to return support that I have received is really complicated; being established on the backbone of death, it’s extremely serious to me. I have had to do a lot of labor in myself to make sense when that care or support isn’t reciprocated. I think that is a difficult thing to have to learn, especially post-death and as a child.

As an artist, when I have extra money in a budget, or in my personal budget, I try to spend that on artists, especially artists who are underrepresented in their contexts. So, if I’m at a print fair and black women artists aren’t getting prints bought, I’m trying to buy those prints. I am also trying to support artists in my practice by giving… I have a pretty conversational practice, and the work that I am making right now is really about feeling inside of capitalism, and all of the reasons why it is so difficult to find space to do so. I think it’s a good way to give to artists—artists who aren’t under a capitalist regime, feeling like they have to make their practice into a production. I want to be able to give those artists space to exist and to know that their practice doesn’t—shouldn’t be, and doesn’t have to be—contingent upon a market. I think it should always be contingent on their desires.

Ronny Quevedo, Concretizer

It’s interesting to hear Malcolm talk about those things in regards to death and mourning—issues I’ve been dealing with myself personally also with my dad. He passed away about eight years ago.

In regards to support, I try to understand what support means to me, through my own experiences which I felt not necessarily unsupported, but maybe ill-equipped or unprepared, or a completely new experience. I try to put myself in that position.

Christine, I’m going to use the example you used before because as we’re artists that are constantly traveling, I think this might become more recurring… When we come across a new or unfamiliar space, I try to find resources with which I could help. So, when Christine told me she was going to Albuquerque, I had been there before, so it was a really clear moment where I was like, “OK, I know what Albuquerque can feel like.” Your work is so reliant on community, and this project was contingent on working with immigrant residents, so I just made sure that Christine was connected to the people that I had worked with a year before—and Working Classroom is really well connected to the migrant community. That’s also a really sensitive topic—people who are in statuses that they would rather try to keep under a low profile—so I felt like it would be a good time to connect Christine with Working Classroom who are sensitive to the needs of the audience that she was working with.

Christine Wong Yap, Tactician

Christine draws the Tactic Card, “Discuss a 180º perspective.”

Not supporting artists? {laughs} Miami just happened and, I mean, not to knock anybody who goes to Miami [art fairs], but I definitely feel that the emphasis on outfits and heels and parties is not about art and artists. Just the fact that so many artworks are shiny bubbles that literally people want to see themselves reflected in—not in any deep way, but in a superficial, cosmetic way. That to me is 100% not about supporting artists. It’s not really a space intended for artists.

Torreya Cummings, Summarizer

I’m going to try synthesizing this a little bit. I heard people talk about similar things. One of those is support: The desire to support others and other artists. That is often coming from a personal place of feeling and empathy. You want to ameliorate it in other people, so connecting people with resources that they can benefit from—especially artists you feel like are under-represented, or aligned with your values—and trying to help them— whether through financial support like buying their work, or connecting them with resources in a new and unfamiliar place.

I think Malcolm brought up the difficulty in separating when you’re putting care into something and/or someone, and you may not get it back in the same way from the same person. That can be a difficult thing to overcome, but it sounds like it’s still seen as valuable (to put that effort into the world) even if it doesn’t come back to you directly.

Looking at money and the market system… You can support somebody financially by buying their work, but the market is not designed to be supportive of artists. It’s a tricky place where you know the difference between going to Miami and taking selfies, and supporting somebody whose work you admire… It’s still all about money, but it’s coming from a really different set of intentions.

Inter/De-pen-dence game play, Round Five: Majorities, will post next week—come back and play along!

Sweat: An Image Gallery

Posted on March 20, 2018March 4, 2019 by Rebecca Bednarz

Photographer B.A. Van Sise brings us a new installment of his series Sweat. In his before-and-after portraits, we get a dramatic glimpse of the emotional life of players from the Metropolitan Riveters as well as a few featured professional bull riders and wrestlers.

For the last few months, I’ve been photographing athletes from a wide variety of sports as they arrive at their respective arenas and then, again, mere seconds after they come off the playing field.

The big thing I’ve learned: Some athletes like to sweat. And some athletes need to cry.

I’m not a sports analyst, a sports reporter, a sports scientist, a sports doctor, or even, really, a sports fan—and can offer little more than anecdata from my time getting to meet, however briefly, athletes from so many different stripes. Time and time again, it’s become obvious that the most striking differences from one sport to the next come down to what writer Charles Portis referred to as “true grit” in his novel of the same name.

The differences are large, and it’s hard not to notice that the more physical the sport, the better the athletes take their pratfalls in stride. Shooting roller derby ‘girls’ a few months ago, several of the competitors apologized—one of them profusely—because, after a couple hours getting knocked around, they’d forgotten my shoot and wiped the blood off their faces on their way off the track. A professional wrestler, screaming in pain from the capsaicin in his eyes after a stunt went wrong, stopped while having his face doused with milk to consider his sense of professionalism. “Wait, I need to get my photo taken,” he declared, half-and-half running down his cheeks. “Fuck it, let’s do it.” Meanwhile, the professional baseball players photographed during spring training, after three largely inert hours standing out in a field, demanded that a stylist redo their coiffures before being photographed, and most of the dozen professional bull riders I photographed—whose entire event consists of eight very tough seconds of activity—refused their ‘after’ image, because they were concerned how they’d look, visibly crying after falling off cattle.

The inverse relationship extends, it seems, to courtesy as well. While shooting Knicks basketball players—a couple dozen guys, any one of whom could have thrown my six foot, two hundred pound body like a rag doll—it was hard not to be encouraged seeing each and every player, many of them seemingly drenched skin, bone and marrow with sweat, strain themselves through their panting breath to be courteous to my assistant. In contrast, the bull riders—their every hair, hat, and buckle as firmly in place as when they’d gone out to ride a few seconds earlier—threw chairs backstage, and repeatedly asked the league’s PR rep what they could do to get out of meeting fans after the event. The very next day I photographed the Metropolitan Riveters—the National Women’s Hockey League team roughly affiliated with the New Jersey Devils—and the two dozen ladies of that team marched off the ice, looking more disheveled than any other athletes I’d seen in this series—and politely asked to move quickly—as a hundred little girls who’d attended the game were waiting patiently in the arena lobby to meet them and get their autographs, which was as clear to them, as to me, a far greater priority.

What does this all mean? My sampling size is small, and even if it weren’t . . . well, Socrates, himself a great fan of the sports of his day, once declared that “the only thing I know, is that I know nothing.”

In my last installment of this series for PEM, I suggested that I misnamed the project. Perhaps I was right. Some athletes perspire. Some athletes cry. Some do both. Maybe the work might better have been called, simply, Salt Water.

Harrison Browne // Metropolitan Riveters

Silvano Alves // Professional Bull Riders

Flint Rasmussen // Professional Bull Riders

“Eddie Machete” // Professional wrestler

“Jason Sinclair” // Professional wrestler

Missed part 1 of B.A. Van Sise’s Sweat series? Check it out here.

Visitors Respond to the PlayTime Manifesto

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Rebecca Bednarz

PLAY hard!
PLAY more often than you think you should.
PLAY is cool.
PLAY is the thing.
PLAY is golden rays of sunshine.
PLAY feeds my soul.
PLAY your favorite song.
PLAY with my heart.
PLAY is my sanity.
PLAY is noodles.
PLAY is rockin’ out.
PLAY is _______________.

Visitors respond to the PLAYTIME manifesto in the gallery. What’s your take on the MANIFESTO?
#PEMplaytime

Play Digest: Nick Cave and Martin Creed

Posted on March 22, 2018March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

From avatars to social justice to clownish behaviors, artists’ response to play takes all forms. This week we highlight stories and background on two PlayTime artists: Nick Cave and Martin Creed.

Artist and performer Nick Cave‘s Bunny Boy stars one of Cave’s celebrated “soundsuits.” He has said that he wants to use art—in much the same way we use play—as a form of diplomacy. Cave’s work intersects with a number of other themes we’ve explored on PlayTime: avatars, racial identity, and materiality. He views his role as one of civic responsibility (his first soundsuit was made in 1992 as a response to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles and created a new one in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida). Recently, he collaborated with Chicago-based architect and MacArthur fellow Jeanne Gang for a suited-up performance in a Studio Gang–designed environment.

He gamely responded to our PlayTime Manifesto in an unexpected way. You can see Cave talk more about his work and his relationship to Chicago here.

While there is much more to PlayTime than what has become known as “The Balloon Room,” the experience of being in Martin Creed‘s Work No. 329 has probably been the dominant episode of most people’s visits to the exhibition. A musician as well as an artist, Creed visited Boston for the world premiere of his new piece, Work No. 2890 Bum Piano, at the Boston Center for the Arts. Creed, who won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2001, has been called “clownish,” by Roberta Smith of the New York Times and a “cheerful mourner” (but one who creates atmospheres of “playful disarray”) by The Guardian, and London’s Hayward Gallery held a retrospective of his work in 2014, called What’s the Point of It? His work can provoke strong reactions (Smith also wrote that his work veers between shock therapy and tenderness), but the artist, who was raised in the Quaker tradition, has said of the influence of his family’s beliefs on him: “I grew up with the idea that everything is important—the smallest detail and the way that you treat people. One of the big Quaker ideas is that there are no sacred spaces, that all spaces can be churches. That is the same, probably, as my attitude to art galleries.”

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on March 21, 2018March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

This is the third installment in a six-part series featuring four artists playing Inter/de-pend-ence: The Game, a dialogue-based game exploring cooperation, competition, and other themes of mutual support.

Catch up with the introduction and meet the players, or find Round 2 here.

Play Round 3: Receiving Support by downloading a PDF, or drawing cards online.

Ronny Quevedo, Answerer

Ronny draws the Question Card: “What is your most significant recent form of (artistic) support?”

My most recent form of support is from people who have been trying to stand up for me and represent me, in order for me to get back into teaching. That has been really supportive, in small efforts of doing portfolio reviews for somebody, or substituting for a class. That’s been really supportive in helping me feel like there is a community, support structure, or support system.

With regards to the arts more specifically, I was given A Blade of Grass Fellowship to do a project here in the Bronx. They provide support in a way that I haven’t felt before. As soon as the fellowship was announced, they contacted me asking me if there was anything else that I need. They’re reaching out to people to let them know about the project and connecting me to people that might help with the production of a store sign. At the same time, they’re being hands off on the day-to-day activities. So it felt supportive that they have a strong sense of confidence in the project and in me, and, at the same time, they provide structural support. Institutionally, that was the best form of support that I’ve felt in a long time.

Christine Wong Yap, Concretizer

It’s cool because my example relates to both of the things he was talking about. I did a project called Belonging in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past summer. It was a participatory project where I invited people to tell me about places where they felt belonging. But I am not from Albuquerque, so a really big challenge for me was outreach and finding constituents or participants who wanted to work with me.

Ronny, who had done a project in Albuquerque, connected me with an organization called Working Classroom. I worked with their interns over two sessions and they submitted their own stories of belonging, and they also went out into their communities and interviewed other people about their places, too.

Like how Ronny had the help of someone for his teaching, sometimes knowing people to help you get in, connecting you, is really helpful. Then the support of working with an institution with a bunch of people is also is really nice. So, thanks Ronny!

Torreya Cummings, Tactician

Torreya draws the Tactics Card, “Stretch.”

OK, what I’ve been hearing are two interconnected responses: people and institutional support. People being part of institutions, connecting, and advocating—I think that’s where “stretch” comes in in my own process.

I’m really reluctant to reach out and ask for help. Where stretching comes in is when things happen when you leave the house, when you talk to people that you might not have talked to for awhile, or you go to an opening and you see somebody and you’re working on something similar, and you connect and share resources… “Oh I didn’t know you were looking for that thing… I know somebody else who might have that to offer.”

Stretching comes in assuming that there is no help, or when there is, asking: “Is there a stipend? Is there an honorarium? What’s your budget?” I don’t think I was really taught to ask about that kind of thing initially. I’ve had to learn, or get over my shyness to talk to people that I might be interested in working with but I just assumed they wouldn’t be interested. That’s how I think stretching relates.

Malcolm Peacock, Summarizer

Ronny talked about support in the general sense, and then he reflected on specifics within art, like having relationships to help him go back into teaching. Which was really cool to know that he has a widespread network willing to support him—whether it’s small teaching gigs, or substitute teaching—there are now avenues for him to go back into that practice. Then he talked about opportunities at a bigger level, at an institutional level, that let him have freedom in doing things, but was also recognizing that he needed some structural support to work on the project.

Then Christine talked about Belonging, finding people in Albuquerque, and not being from there. Ronny put her in touch with Working Classroom, which ended up becoming a significant part of the project that was able to help her locate community that the project could maybe be situated within, or that could maybe be situated in the project. So it’s a running pattern: individuals and relationships being previously established, to help projects go on, but then also institutional support, so there’s connections and advocacy.

Then we talk about “stretch” as the tactic. One new thing brought up—that I think was touched on a little bit by Ronny on how making something more positive in collaboration isn’t necessarily key—is insecurity. When we get into situations where we have to socialize, and we maybe haven’t been taught the types of methods to do so, ‘stretch’ is a way to overcome fears, or maybe just being okay with asking about space or a stipend, about travel expenses. Those stretches could fuel a more productive process and a more cohesive collaboration.

Inter/De-pen-dence game play, Round Four: Supporting Others, will post next week—come back and play along!

The (Neuro)science Behind Play: An Essay

Posted on March 14, 2018March 4, 2019 by Rebecca Bednarz

Play has multiple benefits for children—and adults. But what is it about how we play that’s so beneficial? In part 2 of his essay, neuroscientist Sergio Pellis tells us: it’s the comfort of the familiar combined with the spirit of the unpredictable. Missed part 1? Check it out here.

Beyond childhood and the adult uses of play

While play is most commonly associated with childhood, some species, including rats, dogs, and more than fifty percent of all primate species, retain play into adulthood. Some of this play may be useful to relieve stress, maintain friendships, and ensure skills are kept well honed.5 The very qualities that make play fighting playful, and that in juveniles generate the experiences important for brain development, are also the qualities that make it a useful tool for social assessment and manipulation. When two adult playmates have an established social relationship, with one dominant over the other, the play fighting involves the same give and take routine already noted, but the inferior partner may reinforce that social status by altering the role reversal ratio in favor of its partner. Alternatively, the inferior partner may play more roughly than expected, not conceding the advantage to its partner. If the dominant partner tolerates such a situation, the inferior animal may push its luck further and so test whether it can reverse its status. A forceful put down by the dominant, conversely, signals that the dominant is retaining its superior position.

Similarly, when strangers meet, a playful interaction may be a way to assess one another without having to resort to serious aggression. For example, consider the use of jokes between colleagues when settling into a new job. Such jokes, as a form of play, can test the relationships and personalities of your potential colleagues and allow you to assess your position in the order of things. If a joke is too off color, or perceived as a put down, then you can back away with, “sorry, I was only joking.” Indeed, playful flirting is a common tactic for humans to break the ice in more romantic settings. In this case, a playful, gentle punch to a shoulder can be very informative as to whether such closeness is welcome or unwelcome – again, allowing either partner a graceful exit before a bigger faux pas is made.

In play, any given action can be ambiguous. Was that a deliberate transgression of the rules, or was it a mistake due to the excitement of the moment? Yet such ambiguity serves a purpose. Among juveniles, such ambiguity taxes the capabilities of their developing prefrontal cortex, helping them to hone their skills. With adults, such ambiguity creates plausible denial—“I didn’t mean to punch you so hard, I was just playing.” The nuanced skills needed for navigating such ambiguity in adulthood depends on the same prefrontal cortex mechanisms that are improved by juveniles via the experiences gained during play. Species with larger brains, and hence a larger prefrontal cortex, can create even more complex cycles of ambiguity.

Playing with play

A core feature of play fighting is that it involves following a species-typical sequence of competition, such as the attack and defense of the nape in rats (figure 5 in part 1). To a degree, the sequence has a predictable pattern. A rat perceiving its partner approaching will adopt a defensive tactic that blocks access to its nape, even if its partner has just contacted its rump, not its nape. The unpredictability arises from the partner in the advantageous position momentarily relinquishing that advantage. For some species, however, a different form of unpredictability can be introduced. In the close cousin of the chimpanzee, the bonobo, play fighting involves competing for access to the shoulder, which if contacted is gently bitten. Typically, two animals approach one another face-to-face then they grapple with their hands and weave in and out, lunging to bite each other’s shoulders while evading counter bites.

Such encounters have a stereotyped predictability about them, and yet they remain subject to unpredictability. On one occasion, I saw a young, juvenile female and an older, adolescent male playing in this way for many minutes, with repeated attacks, wrestles and withdrawals. Then, suddenly, the female came running toward the sitting male as she had done countless times before, but this time, did something different. As he raised his arms ready to grab her as she lunged at his shoulder, she rotated around fully as she jumped toward him, landing with her mouth contacting his groin and her feet grasping his head. He fell backward, chest heaving, mouth wide open, and making noises like human laughter. I suspect that he was as surprised as I was by this unexpected maneuver. She broke the species-typical play theme!

Such “theme breaking” must be even more demanding of the prefrontal cortex, both for the theme breaker and the ability of the partner to identify this correctly as play and not some aberrant action by a demented animal. Yet theme breaking is relatively common not only in bonobos, but also in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. It is less common, but present in some other species of primates, especially some monkeys, such as the New World spider monkey. What these species have in common is a particularly large brain, with a well-developed prefrontal cortex. A demanding social system that entails complex social relationships also challenges the development of the prefrontal cortex in a species. Being well endowed with a prefrontal cortex and confronting a demanding social system appears to generate the kinds of capacities in the prefrontal cortex that can create the ability to play with play that may be particularly valuable as a means of further sharpening those prefrontal cortex–derived abilities.

Humans have these two attributes—a very large prefrontal cortex and an exceptionally complex social system. As such, it may not be surprising that humans are highly playful and play in more diverse ways than any other species. We have taken the heritage we have in common with bonobos and developed it to unanticipated dimensions.6 Art may be the quintessential expression of such playfulness. After all, much art repeats well-known themes, but artists can insert unexpected twists and turns into those themes. This unites the comfort of the familiar with the frisant of the unpredictable, tapping into the roots of what we find pleasurable in play: it is a way in which to explore the unknown while remaining anchored in the known. ♦

5 For further reading, see Charmalie A. D. Nahallage, Jean-Baptiste Leca, and Michael A. Huffman, “Stone handling, an object play behaviour in macaques: Welfare and neurological health implications of a bio-culturally driven tradition,” Behaviour 153 (2016), 845–869; Elisabetta Palagi, “Playing at every age: Modalities and potential functions in non-human primates,” in Anthony D. Pellegrini (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Development of Play (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 70–82.
6 For further reading, see Angeline S. Lillard, “Why do the children (pretend) play?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21 (2016), 826–834; Sergio M. Pellis and Vivien C. Pellis, “Play and cognition: The final frontier,” in Mary C. Olmstead (ed.), Animal Cognition: Principles, Evolution, and Development (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2016), 201–230.