Agustina Woodgate makes no secret of the origin material of her “rugs,” but it may take a few moments among them to decipher, so complex and consistent are the patterning and craft.
The cast-off plush toys she uses for her rug works, she believes, “represent memories of their owner[s].” While people have distinct and deep connections to stuffed animals form their childhoods, Woodgate looks to “deliver an alternative memory object that displays and references personal histories.” (The “play” aspect in Woodgate’s work is not limited to stuffed animals alone. In 2013, she painted a giant hopscotch board in Miami and made building blocks from human hair.)
As an immigrant to Miami, much of Woodgate’s work is by definition political. Her most recent endeavor is an online radio station dedicated to an idea she refers to as “techno-immigrants”—those who are connected by technology to what facilitates their moves, to their families back home, to the networks that keep them stable and able.
Erwin Wurm, known for the One-Minute Sculptures that so captured visitors’ imaginations at Playtime this winter, says: “My work speaks about the whole entity of a human being: the physical, the spiritual, the psychological and the political,” which can easily be seen in the interactions people have with the works, which he has been staging for more than twenty years.
Wurm is taking the show on the road this summer—or at least as far as New York’s stunning Brooklyn Bridge Park—where his work Curry Bus will be serving New Yorker’s and tourists alike free hot dogs from a mustard-yellow, vaguely hot dog bun-shaped vehicle. Don’t like hot dogs? If you’re in South Korea, the Dumpling Car will be present at a large retrospective this spring.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Spinello Projects, photo by Joshua Aronson.)
Traveling salesman Alfredo Traps—hapless protagonist of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1960 novel Die Panne (The Breakdown)—is stuck in a small village waiting for his car to be repaired. A retired judge, who occasionally takes in guests, agrees to put the salesman up for the night in his large house. He asks Traps to have dinner with him. They’re joined by three old friends of the judge—two retired lawyers and a local publican, who goes by the nickname of “the executioner.” The elderly lawmen explain to Traps that they like to play a game whenever they meet, assuming their old professions to re-stage historical trials; Socrates, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Dreyfus, the Reichstag Fire. Rarely, however, do they get to play with “living material,” and so Traps is invited to participate as the defendant. Finding the situation amusing, the salesman agrees.
Over a lavish dinner, Traps is genially cross-examined by the two lawyers, one acting for the prosecution, the other as his defense counsel. Although the salesman is intellectually out of his depth, the lawyers are at pains to make him feel welcome and they ply him with wine. The prosecution lawyer plays his role with relish, and is tenacious in his interrogation. He eventually coaxes Traps into confessing that he slept with the wife of his boss. The salesman tells them how discovery of the affair caused his boss to suffer a fatal heart attack, leaving a vacancy in the company that Traps then filled. The court finds Traps guilty of murder and he is symbolically sentenced to death. The lawmen are thrilled with the trial verdict, raising toasts to Traps for being such a good player and letting them reach such a gruesome sentence. Over digestifs, the judge and his friends wax philosophical, explaining to the salesman that the law is nothing without crime, and that as a convicted murderer, Traps is an indispensable, even cherished part of a system that is as immutable as nature. Blind drunk, emotional, and now convinced that he is a gearwheel in a perfect, cosmic cycle of justice that only he can complete, Traps hangs himself. “Alfredo, my good Alfredo!” cries the judge when he discovers the salesman’s body. “For God’s sake, what were you thinking of? You’ve ruined the most wonderful evening we’ve ever had!”
Traps has played the game too well. He wants badly to be part of the team, and so at his trial, desperate to be respected alongside the successful professionals at the table, from his place in the dock he turns in the best performance he can, and that’s what kills him.
I imagine Traps to be the type who might describe himself on a resume or online dating profile as one who “works hard and plays hard,” as if “playing hard” is something to be respected for, part of the Protestant work ethic. Leisure as a form of labour that can be measured by how much sweat you spill in the gym before work starts, by the amount of money you spend on a business lunch, and by the number of drinks you down with your co-workers at the bar after the office closes. In the English speaking world, the word “play”—from the Old English “plegian,” meaning to exercise—slides its meaning easily between work and leisure contexts. Playing is what children do, an important part of their development into adults who will go on to spend their lifetime working. Plays are also what professional actors, directors, playwrights, and technicians produce for theaters. And “player” is an old theatrical word for “actor,” both of which are terms the military use to describe participants in war simulation games. Games conducted with lethal toys but which are, like stage plays, intended as exercises in human behavior carried out under controlled conditions. Players can be found in classical orchestras and pop bands, and earning millions of dollars as professionals on the football field and basketball court. Work and play are conventionally understood to be opposing, distinct activities; one is productive and earns money, the other is used for spending earnings and relaxing in preparation for more work. We call this the “work-life balance,” never the “play-life balance” yet work and play are wound tightly around each other.
The double helices of work and play shape the profession of the contemporary artist. Like dentists, architects, and doctors, artists today have “practices.” They are freelancers who always need to be “on,” developing new bodies of art through “research” and using social time to network with gallery dealers, collectors, critics, and curators to ensure what they do is shown in the right institutional contexts and sold into the best collections. (And perhaps it was ever thus: in the 1920s, a friend of the British artist Wyndham Lewis pleaded with him to wear a boiled shirt at least four times a week, “for the sake of your career!”) At the same time—at least in the popular imagination—the artist represents a form of freedom from work, a licensed bohemian engaged in a socially acceptable form of madness. We are still attached to a Romantic idea of the artist-as-seer, whose role is to speak some kind of cosmic truth through their chosen medium that will result in an individual or society experiencing a change of consciousness. (See: “challenge audience assumptions,” “undermine the viewer’s expectations,” and other curatorial spells to ward off irrelevancy.) What the artist calls work is what most of us would think of as play, yet society grants the artist permission to call their play a form of work. Not that the artist needs this permission: for many artists, they could not imagine life without making images or objects.
These days, “creativity” is understood as a useful asset in the work place. (The word “creative” is now as much a job title as it is an adjective.) It is a semi-mystical quality that management theorists believe, if conducted through the correct use of flip-chart brainstorms sessions, Post-It notes, and team trust games, can be harnessed to help fix HR issues or provide the key to solving a project brief. Jobs are “performed,” we are assessed on how well we “act” on behalf of our employers. Uniforms are costumes, company stationary and office decor are set dressing that sets the tone of the work environment. Your local coffee shop is theater, your office is theater, the UN Security Council Chamber is theater. And in these places things are done by humans who are naked underneath their costumes, who eat, shit, fuck, laugh, cry, worry, like everyone else. We are all playing at being grown-ups.
Perhaps our friend Traps is not that different to the artist, and the judge, lawyers and executioner analogous to the art system that enables them. The artist has something to give to the game, and is invited to play. Depending on how skillfully they navigate the interrogation, what readings can be made of their work, how sympathetically they play to the judge, a verdict will be passed and sentence handed down, to be recorded in the art historical ledger. The cycle of interpretation and judgement cannot be completed without the artist. In the Epistles to the Romans, Chapter 7:7, the apostle Paul writes: “I have not known sin but by the law.”
Have I not known art but by the game that names it?
(Image credit: British author and artist Wyndham Lewis photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn in London, in 1916. Courtesy of Everett Collection.)
From Ralph Baer‘s early “brown box” to today’s Nintendo Switch, the video game console has a long history at the intersection of tech, design, economics, and pop culture. From the crude graphics of Pong to the brutal realism of Battlefield, games have evolved significantly since the dawn of the phenomenon in the 1970s. Most serious gamers have their loyalties to systems and, thus, their associated consoles.
New York-based artist Gwen Smith‘s Yoda Project is something of a collaboration. Her partner, fellow artist Haim Steinbach, has for a number of years taken Yoda as his avatar. Over time Smith has photographed Steinbach in everyday situations, often with their son in the frame—using it as an opportunity to make something of a photographic growth chart and to use this playful approach to illustrate her family’s character. Smith describes herself as “an artist, a mother, a seeker, a finder, and a player,” and her playful (yet thoughtful), observational oeuvre captures this complexity.
Angela Washko has assumed a herculean task using a massive platform: “teaching feminism” and questioning received notions of women within the milieu of World of Warcraft, the most popular, cumbersome, multi-player video game in the world. For her, game hacking is a feminist project. As assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Washko’s academic work not only embraces play, but messes with it and the expectations we may of it, and it doesn’t stop with tackling the creation and perception of female avatars in WoW: recently she’s taken on that most loathsome of cultural phenomenon, The Game.
“Tired of playing [WoW] as directed,” Washko went off-piste and began asking questions and naming names. Unfortunately, she “did not learn how to turn WoW into a space for equitable, respectful conversation,” as intended, but she has unmasked some ugly truths about who we are and how we present ourselves in the realms of these games: “Who we are online is who we are IRL.”
Lydia Gordon, assistant curator for PlayTime, will be moderating an upcoming panel, Game Changers: Women Activists in Digital Space, at PEM on Saturday, May 5, at 4:15 pm. Join us for this special PlayTime conversation with artist Angela Washko, scholar and activist Susana Morris, and game designer Jane Friedhoff. The panel is made possible by the George Swinnerton Parker Memorial Lecture Fund and offered in conjunction with the Present Tense Initiative.
(Image credit: Photo by Allison White/PEM.)
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!
For millennia psychiatric disease has plagued the human population. It has remained difficult to treat, let alone to cure, in part because of its obscured etiology. We just didn’t understand enough about what goes on in the brain to generate these clusters of symptoms that we experience as mental illness. It was the introduction of technologies, like neuroimaging (e.g. fMRI), that allowed us to begin to identify biological markers of psychiatric disease; to point to a mark on a brain scan and say, “this is what’s wrong here.” It is these same neuroimaging technologies that are now enabling treatment of the disorders that they initially delineated.
Neurofeedback training is a process by which an individual can change the way their brain operates. It is based on the premise that the human brain is plastic: it has the ability to alter its structure and function. During neurofeedback training, patients receive information about what their brain does naturally, and then they change it. How? By playing.
We are all driven to play. We are motivated to solve the problems that keep us from winning games, completing puzzles, or scoring points. Yet, explaining this seemingly innate drive to play is difficult, as play is often characterized as an act performed without purpose and without the expectation of practical outcomes. It requires an appreciation of the means without a lust for the end. So, what would it mean—for humans and humanity—if play suddenly became . . . purposeful? Researchers are now harnessing this robust and universal motivation to play to treat patients suffering from psychiatric disorders. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.
Many neurofeedback training programs employ a digital game interface to deliver feedback (from neuroimaging, for example) to patients about what their brains are doing: what parts of the brain are active, which regions are talking to which other regions, etc. When the desired regions of the brain spontaneously become active at the right time, patients receive a reward in the game, perhaps more points or an extra life. When patients’ brain activity fails to produce the desired pattern of neural activation, they do worse in the game. By repeating this protocol, patients with severe psychiatric illnesses can essentially change the activity patterns in their brain to function more like disease-free subjects, which in turn is associated with improved symptom severity.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a psychiatric condition characterized by difficulties in communicating and interacting in social settings. Neuroimaging studies have identified correlates of these behavioral symptoms at the level of neural connectivity: two key regions implicated in social processing, the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the somatosensory cortex, have been shown to be connected more weakly—to “talk” to one another less—in ASD patients relative to healthy control subjects.
In a recent study published in the scientific journal eLIFE, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health sought to ameliorate symptoms of ASD by increasing the connection between these two regions using neurofeedback training. fMRI neuroimaging was used to scan the brains of ASD patients (males fifteen to twenty-five years of age) while they played a video game. As part of the digital puzzle-like game, participants had to reveal regions of an image that were covered by a blank mask. They were not given any further instructions, but while they were playing the game, the fMRI scanner monitored the activity of the two brain regions of interest, the STS and the somatosensory cortex. When these two regions “talked” to one another (exhibiting the desired neural activity), patients were rewarded in the game: a piece of the masked image would become visible. Because the patients were motivated to play the game and uncover the masked images, over time, they learned to unconsciously reproduce the neural activity that resulted in this reward. And in the end . . . it worked!
By the end of the neurofeedback training regimen, ASD patients had significantly increased the connectivity between the STS and the somatosensory cortex even when they were no longer engaged in playing the video game (i.e. at rest). Importantly, this change in neural activity was correlated with a decrease in ASD symptom severity. Even more impressive, these changes in brain signaling were durable: they were still evident even a year after the neurofeedback training had ended. So, it appears that, under some circumstances, our innate drive to play can be harnessed to heal.
In response to this realization, I can’t help but wonder: what happens to our experience of play when it is endowed with purpose? Will our motivation to play dissipate the more utilitarian it becomes? Will the act of childhood play continue to promote healthy emotional development, as it has been shown to do in many species? At this point it may be too early to answer these questions. What is apparent, is that play holds the potential to help us learn, to help us grow, and now, to help us heal—at all ages of life. ♦
Musicians play. Artists, meanwhile, typically make works. You might ask why—is the terminology a defense against philistine suspicions that artists are pulling a fast one, little real work involved? Does it, conversely, serve as a psychological reassurance for artists themselves that they’re making genuine effort, an equivalent of male writers—from Dickens to Hemingway to Nabokov—using a standing desk? The first irony here is that “work” is something of a misnomer, in the experience of this frequent lurker, for what transpires in artist’s studios.
Not that artists don’t put the hours in. The German artist Wolfgang Tillmans once told me that he puts in an eight-hour day in the belief that being there simply increases the chances of a good result (a principle known to writers as “ass on seat”). The British artist Mark Wallinger, recounting a period where he’d just finished a major series and didn’t know where to go next, told me he’d sit in the “thinking room” of his two adjoining studios—often all day—and wait until he had half an idea, then pin it to the wall; the next day he’d come in and try to catch the other half. Another British painter I know spent this summer bowling up to his studio around 5am and says he couldn’t have been happier. But the work here is primarily showing up, not what goes on during the studio time, and probably the more the artist says to themselves “I am working,” the more likely a neurological shutdown is to occur: like trying hard to remember a name, the part of the mind that needs to be flexible and free is tied up with something else.
One close analogue to what goes on in the creative process—speaking as a writer and sometime improvising musician—is Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of “flow.” The Hungarian psychologist breaks this down into nine component states, but it adds up to a condition—one comparison he makes is, indeed, with playing jazz—where the whole body and mind are engaged and unified (the result might also be called “where did the last four hours go”). Also—particularly in sports—called being “in the zone,” flow was theorized by Csíkszentmihályi in the mid-’70s, but inevitably it’s a much older idea. In The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), Buddhist popularizer Alan Watts writes that “This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” But artists don’t quite want to play either, not least because “play” is now a problematic word.
In the mid-century counterculture that Watts’ work helped midwife, play was an anarchic categorical inverse of workaday living, of “straight” culture: see, for example, Richard Neville’s picaresque 1970 manual Play Power. Fast forward, and along with the counterculture itself, play has been recouped. We are all supposed to be playing now: gamifying our inbox management, erasing the line between labor and fun, every wage slave a self-starting creative. This leaves play as a suspect category. And, to return to ironies, it’s partly if unwittingly the fault of the artist—as the avatar of neoliberal individualism and mobility, the person who is never really working despite making “works,” because they do what they love—that that’s happened.
A few years ago the American artist Carol Bove, herself a questioner of the residual givens of the ’60s, told me she’d banned the word “work” from her vocabulary. More recently, in an essay, she expanded on the experiment:
“I discovered that the absence of the word “work” forced me to reconsider assumptions about leisure, because the idea of work implied its opposite. I let go of the notion that I deserved a certain amount of downtime from being productive or from being active. The labor/leisure dichotomy became uncoupled and then dissolved. I couldn’t use labor to allay guilt or self-punish or feel superior. Work didn’t exist, so all the psychological payoff of work for work’s sake had nowhere to go. I started to adjust my thinking about productivity so that it was no longer valued in and of itself. It strikes me as vulgar always to have to apply a cost/benefit analysis to days lived; it’s like understanding an exchange of gifts only as barter. The work exercise made me feel as if I was awakening from one of the spells of capitalism.”
What, Bove asked, is an artist’s activity if it’s not work? You don’t want it to be work because work is now ideological, used in the services of biopower; and so now, in its way, is play. Creativity, for the artist, is the result—powered often by intuitive leaps—but it’s not the state. How, then, to categorize what goes on behind the studio door? I’ll address this to any corporate-management types who might happen to be reading: there is a word for what happens there.
It isn’t work. It isn’t play. It isn’t even flow. There is a word, and a definition too. But I’m not telling you what it is. ♦
(Image credit: Henry Henri Bonaventure Monnier, The Painter’s Studio, about 1855. Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
On a recent research visit to New York City, I had the privilege of sitting down with multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams in his Brooklyn studio alongside PEM’s Curator of the Present Tense Trevor Smith and George Putnam Curator of American Art Austen Barron Bailly. Adams is finishing up a body of work that depicts black bodies in water: figures relaxing on floats, embracing each other, and playing. Using a brilliant mix of warm and cool colors, Adams deconstructs his subjects into collages: a figure’s arm is a different hue than her leg, one’s cheek is a different color than his nose, and their swimsuit patterns stand in vivid contrast to their deep turquoise environment. While the treatment of color and flatness of paint initially captures one’s attention, it is the content of Adams’ series that begs further thought. What are the politics surrounding representations of leisure and the black figure?
Representations of the figure in states of leisure are not new to the history of art. We can trace representations of recreation and leisure to the art-making of ancient civilizations, including Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and Assyrian. But in modern Western societies, the practice of leisure became an arena of racial, class, and gender divisions alongside the development of cities and growing populations. Particularly after the French Revolution, it was only the bourgeoisie who had regular access to the parks, cafes, and operas, while the working class had free time only on Sundays. This imbalance and the mundane ambivalence associated with bourgeois leisure activity is captured in many of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works of European artists, such as Mary Cassatt (born in the U.S., lived and worked in France), Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The representation of figures swimming was also a worthy subject of art, and made popular by Renoir, Gustave Courbet, Viggo Johansen, as well as American Impressionists, including Childe Hassam. To this day, artists take inspiration from the figure aswim, such as British artist David Hockney whose work on this subject is arguably his most iconic. Yet, all of these canonical examples fail to depict a figure who is not white. Where do we find representations of black figures swimming—at leisure at all—in art and why has it taken so long?
A recent exhibition at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, called Bodies in Water, explored representations of the human relationship to water. The wall label that accompanied Charlie “Teenie” Harris’s Swimming Instruction at Integrated Pool (1959) explained how most public pools in the U.S. were segregated until the 1950s, and almost no pools were built in black communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When African Americans did have access to pools, they were small and insufficient compared to the grand resort-style pools built in white communities. In places with racial segregation policies (whether official or community-policed), swimming pools became sites of extreme violence and oppression against black children and patrons. The effects of this racial injustice and oppressive site continue to plague our society: seventy percent of black Americans do not know how to swim.
Harris’s photograph presents an uncommon image: a black lifeguard giving a swimming lesson to a white student in a 1950s integrated pool. While Swimming Instruction shows no immediate conflict, the story behind the image perseveres: the Highland Park community members and city officials resisted integration of Pittsburgh’s public pools through 1951. It was only the threat of legal action that forced the city to pass non-discrimination laws at swimming pools and to hire black lifeguards. While the central figure in Harris’s photograph is unknown, we understand he is giving more than just a swimming lesson. At the time, an image of a black lifeguard in a position of authority was a political one: the boy is responsible for not only for his student’s safety, but he is also seemingly risking his own well-being against a backdrop of very recent oppressive and violent actions that occurred at his very site of employment. Swimming Instruction at Integrated Pool represents the racial politics of staying afloat.
Considering this history of swimming pools as inaccessible sites of leisure for black Americans, Derrick Adams, like Harris, carefully selects which scenes to signify. By depicting his subjects in reclined and relaxed positions, Adams’s work confronts this legacy with optimism and ease. His subjects take the place of white America’s (read: Taylor Swift’s) obsession with swan floats and flourish, many of them seemingly posing for their own close-up. And it’s about time. Adams’s figures are so diligently rendered that the paintings serve as portraits as much as they do to capture a scene. His representations of black bodies swimming and floating work to insert a kind of humanity within a long trajectory of everyday subject matter and the omission of black figures within it. It is through this lens of being and belonging that Adams’s art creates new ways of understanding sites of leisure as not only raced and privileged, but also optimistic and playful.
(Image credit: Derrick Adams, Floater No. 58 (two rafts), 2017, courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery.)
South African artist Robin Rhode has a favorite wall in Johannesburg, where he has painted more than twenty murals since 2011. While Rhode has lived in Berlin for the past fifteen years, his connection to the Newclare neighborhood of Johannesburg is strong. He visits often and stages his performative drawings on the wall there regularly. Inserting himself (or a performer) into his drawings has become his trademark. It is said that his practice is, in fact, derived from a hazing ritual that occurs in South African schools “in which newcomers are made to draw and interact with a figure as if it were real.” Rhode’s approach as it intersects with PlayTime is summarized perfectly when he says, “If you grow up in a volatile society—under apartheid, for example—you start to develop very interesting, humorous takes on the world. You begin to use humor as a coping mechanism. Humor becomes a means of destabilizing a reality that is much harsher. Humor becomes subversion.”
Playful experimenter Roman Signer says “art is a game.” In response to the question, “Do you think a lot about the meaning or background of your works?” he said: “No. I read a lot, about avalanches, dams, volcanic eruptions, fire fighters, architecture, weather. . . . I am neither a craftsman nor an intellectual. Something in between—a game-player.” Working with everyday objects, Signer manages to uses the functional aspects of these objects in a completely unexpected way.
In the spirit of PlayTime, Signer freely admits that he utilizes with multiple elements (wind, water, sand) that play together in concert in his “useless inventions” that are “completely pointless.”
Signer’s reputation as the “explosion artist” is justified, but his engagement with the human need to experiment—a sort of risk and play exercise in itself; a lived experience.
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.)
In spring 1994, when we were students at Emory University, Kumrain invited me to play pick-up basketball, along with his friends Mustafa and Qamar in the hopes of forming a team for the Indo-Pak Basketball Tournament in Greenville, South Carolina. Mustafa, Qamar, and Ali lived outside Atlanta near historic Stone Mountain, once home to the Ku Klux Klan. As an Indian American, my close African American friends, liberal white friends, and other South Asian American friends all lived in Dekalb County, Fulton County, and Cobb County. Mustafa’s family lived in Gwinnett County, which was outside the perimeter demarcated by the I-285. It was held as common sense that few people of color traveled outside the perimeter. Upon meeting, playing basketball, and being dominated by Mustafa on the makeshift court in his parents’ driveway, I immediately realized the joy of male bonding with fellow Indian and Pakistanis in Georgia. I decided to join Mustafa and his mostly Muslim Pakistani American peers; we formed the team known as the Atlanta Outkasts, a name inspired by the popular Atlanta hip hop group OutKast. From the very onset, black style, black aesthetics, and hip-hop culture were instrumental in how we, as young immigrant men, crafted our identity and embodied “cool.” As Team Atlanta Outkasts, we played together for more than fifteen years.
This kind of love for athletics, maybe especially for basketball, was not unique to us. Two other Atlanta teams had gathered to compete at that weekend tournament, one of which—a majority Sikh team—reached the finals of the tournament. Malik, a founding member of the Outkasts, knew several of the members of the Sikh team, Krush, from their college days at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The other team, Crescent Moon, was comprised of men from Al-Farooq Masjid—pious Muslims, as demonstrated by their long beards and performance of salat (prayer). Mustafa and Qamar, at this point in their lives, did not embody the same level of piety: they partied hard, drank alcohol, used recreational drugs, and were outside the boundaries of Muslim respectability, even though many members of both teams attended mosque together. Regardless, one can see how the religious centers such as the Sikh gurdwara and Muslim mosques (masjids) in Atlanta, just like the major Christian churches, catered to and supported basketball as a means to raising young men within the fold of American identity.
The types of camaraderie and competitiveness at the tournament were incredible; it gave me chills. I had harbored my own stereotypes of Indians and Pakistanis in the United States as being un-athletic; my own ego had convinced me that I was an exceptional athlete and therefore unlike other Indian Americans. However, the players and teams at the 1994 tournament forced me to reconsider my own biases. I felt like an outsider and yet so comfortable. It was a surreal experience. Never before had I been surrounded by a slew of such talented South Asian American basketball players. When I played intramural basketball with an Indian American team at Emory in my freshmen year, I had met only a few very strong players, but the Indo-Pak Tournament was an experience of its own. I could not stop smiling with both a realization of my Indian identity as athletic and being part of this basketball universe, but I also felt great pressure to play my best. South Asian American basketball excellence was no longer exceptional but rather simply routine in this setting. Here, as I’ve also observed in the Indo-Pak basketball circuits of Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Dallas, players take great joy in the male-bonding space of basketball, a space in which they affirm and are affirmed as athletes and men. The sweet sound of the swish, the crossover move, a no-look pass, viciously blocking a shot, and the forceful dunking of the ball resulted in such unadulterated joy.
However, in other basketball spaces, Indo-Pak players had to negotiate being stereotyped as either not American or “manly” enough. In sleeveless shirts and with sweat glistening off their athletic bodies, the players took pleasure in translating their musculature and bodily movements into basketball excellence. These men were also simultaneously claiming their American identity by playing basketball, which is so quintessentially American. Whereas the common assumption about the South Asian American man is that he is good for cricket, ping-pong, or the spelling bee, these basketball tournaments and pick-up games offer a reprieve from being culturally typecast as nerdy, not manly enough, or as un-American. The young men took delight in out-competing and beating their co-ethnic peers. There was a desire even in this space of athletic parity to still be seen as exceptional, as the model of the athletic South Asian American man.
An oasis like this also presents other political possibilities. When I was researching the Indo-Pak Basketball circuit in Washington, DC, and Maryland in 2008—the year Barack Obama became the first African American president—there were explicit conversations on the court that were loudly stated now. A few hours after the election, Mustafa texted me, “Now it is time for reparations,” a reference to centuries of unpaid black slave labor. Meanwhile, at the pick-up games in Maryland with members of the DC Indo-Pak team Maryland Five Pillars and their African American peers, players shared their experiences of racism while traveling and living in various places across the United States. Thus, instead of treating the election of Obama as an absence of racism, it became an opportunity on the Indo-Pak basketball court to talk explicitly about how South Asian Americans and African Americans are treated in the U.S. These moments of basketball on the co-ethnic-only circuits allow young men of color a chance to hope and desire another tomorrow, as seen with the photo of Mo Hoque of team NY D-Unit. It is an opportunity to offer a rendition of American identity that could be more welcoming. ♦
(Image credits: Courtesy of Ginash George, Indopak 2017, Chicago.)
In 1883, sixteen-year-old George Swinnerton Parker (born 1866 in Salem, Massachusetts) was bored. A lover of board games, Parker had become restless with the available options of his time, including the highly successful and proselytizing The Mansion of Happiness. This track game included sixty-seven spaces through which players would journey to arrive at the titular manse in the center of the board. In addition to counting, players could also partake in “An Instructive, Moral & Entertaining Amusement” as they tried to advance towards the mansion quickly by landing on spaces marked “Piety,” “Honesty,” “Humility,” or “Generosity,” while avoiding the dangers of “Audacity,” “Cruelty,” and “Ingratitude.”[1] Sound familiar? In the twentieth century, Milton Bradley Company rebranded the game to create what is now the classic Life.
The game of piety was originally developed in Italy during the sixteenth century and later published by England’s Laurie and Whittle in about 1800. Anne W. Abbott of Beverly, Massachusetts, contributed to the development of The Mansion of Happiness, an Instructive, Moral, & Entertaining Amusement, published by the Q. & S. B. Ives Company of Salem, in 1843. Beginning in 1823, Stephen and William Ives had founded The Q. & S. B. Ives Company as Salem’s printing company. They published early track games while maintaining a long publishing record for The Salem Observer (1828–96), Salem’s Charter (1853), and even the East India Marine Hall Corporation’s by-laws (1826). Immediately following Mansion of Happiness, Q. & S. B. Ives Company published The Game of Pope and Pagan or Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army in 1844, a game based on the struggle of Christian missionaries to overcome Satan and paganism (they also released the card game Old Maid around this time).[2] In this questionably titled and generally offensive game, Robert Rath notes how, “[The Game of Pope and Pagan] depicted “half-unclothed ‘natives’ gathering around a roaring fire.”[3]
No wonder young Parker was bored. By 1883, he was living in a world where new manufacturing processes were invented, developed, and implemented. Parker had witnessed first hand this shift to industrial society. Born at 103 Essex Street to Captain George Augustus Parker and Sarah Hegenmen Parker, George was the youngest of three brothers. As Salem’s maritime trade dried up by the mid-nineteenth century, his father moved the family to Medford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a merchant and real estate agent.[4] By 1870, George Augustus Parker’s wealth had depleted. The man suffered from Bright’s disease and passed away in 1876 when his son was just 10 years old.[5] Now residing with his widowed mother, aunt, and uncles in the family’s large Medford home, the youngest Parker son turned towards his older brother Charles, then just twenty-three, of Salem for support. Charles was living in a local boardinghouse and working his way up at a fuel wholesaling firm.[6] With brotherly encouragement, George moved back to Salem with his mother into a much smaller home at 8 Mall Street, leaving behind extended family in Medford, in order to pursue a better life.
While George S. Parker’s own childhood was riddled with sickness and the loss of his father, he held a passion for thrilling and new playful experiences. The concept of childhood—in which both play and study helped shape future productive adults—was becoming widely adopted.[7] Parker’s desire for secular games reflected the cause and effects of industrial society, including human initiative over divine submission. So at age sixteen, he developed and sold his card game Banking door to door in Boston while on approved leave from high school. Banking was a game of supposition, free will, and trade: players received loaned cards from the bank only to repay with interest. Players earned profits and formed financial alliances, all while being encouraged to betray one another in order to advance one’s own interests.
In 1885, Parker bought the rights to Anne W. Abbott’s 1840 card game Dr. Busby and several other games, including a reissue of Mansion of Happiness. He opened a toy store at the corner of Salem’s Franklin and Washington streets in 1887, the site of the current Hawthorne Hotel. As business grew, his brother Charles joined the company in 1888. The brothers renamed their store Parker Brothers and moved to 182 Bridge Street. In 1893, third brother Edward Parker joined the company, relocating one last time to 190 Bridge Street.
The incorporation of Parker Brothers occurred on December 19, 1901. The company went on to open offices in London, Paris, and New York to great success, even through the Great Depression, due to the development of Clue, Risk, and Monopoly.[8]
George S. Parker was an avid supporter and former director of the Essex Institute, one of PEM’s precursor institutions founded in 1848 with a mission to preserve and publicize the history of Salem while overseeing natural history collections, historic homes, a library, and public museum. Parker often invited his highly regarded colleagues to lecture at the Essex Institute. It is within this legacy that George S. Parker’s grandson, Randolph Barton (born 1932) became president of the Essex Institute while serving as the last CEO of Parker Brothers. Barton was instrumental in the 1992 merging of the Essex Institute and the Peabody Museum into what is today the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM). PEM’s Barton Gallery is named in honor his parents, Robert B. M. Barton (1903–1995) and Sally Parker (1907–2000). At PEM, play is part of our DNA.
A particular Parker Brothers legacy can be discovered in the PlayTime exhibition. Parker Brothers developed a precursor game to table tennis, or ping pong, in 1896 called Pillow-Dex. This game invited players to bat inflated balloons back and forth across a string stretched over a table. One would win by landing the balloon on their opponent’s side ten times in a row.[9] Martin Creed’s Work No. 329, 2004, on loan from Rennie Collection in Vancouver, invites a comparable experience.
While Parker Brothers played a major role in developing Salem’s identity and community, Parker Brothers was in poor shape by the 1960s. In 1965, General Mills approached the company about a buyout that became official in 1968. Ranny Barton continued to serve as president of the company through 1984. Today, Parker Brothers (along with Milton Bradley Company) have been consolidated as part of Hasbro, Inc., with headquarters in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
In addition to the objects mentioned above, PEM holds many Parker Brothers games in our collection, including Tommy Town’s Visit to the Country, Authors, Sherlock Holmes, The Wonderful Game of Oz, Star Reporter, Dealer’s Choice, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.
Lydia Gordon will be moderating an upcoming panel, Game Changers: Women Activists in Digital Space, at PEM on Saturday, May 5, at 4:15 pm. Join us for this special PlayTime conversation with artist Angela Washko, scholar and activist Susana Morris, and game designer Jane Friedhoff. The panel is made possible by the George Swinnerton Parker Memorial Lecture Fund and offered in conjunction with the Present Tense Initiative.
[1] “90 Years of Fun: The History of Parker Brothers, 1883–1973,” Instructive and Amusing: Essays on Toys, Games, and Education in New England (Salem, MA, Essex Institute, 1987), 138. Original tapes from Fox’s interviews are in our collection and at Salem State University.
[2] Essex Institute, Instructive, 141.
[3] Robert Rath, “Board Games were Indoctrination Tools for Christ, then Capitalism,” waypoint, Vice, November 30, 2017.
[4] Philip E. Orbanes, The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers From Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 2.
[5] Orbanes, The Game Makers, 3.
[6] Orbanes, The Game Makers, 6.
[7] For more on this, see Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood (London: BBC Books, 2006).
[8] “90 Years of Fun: The History of Parker Brothers, 1883–1973,” Instructive and Amusing: Essays on Toys, Games, and Education in New England (Salem, MA., Essex Institute, 1987), 154–55.
[9] Margaret Hofer, The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003).
(Image credit: Parker Brothers, Star Reporter (detail), 1955, Peabody Essex Museum, 136.201.)
