Author: Eugenia Bell

Play Digest: Paul McCarthy, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Pedro Reyes

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

These three PlayTime artists exhibit a range of expression—from sculpture to video to sound to textiles—but all three are inspired to negotiate political and cultural forces through play.

 

Paul McCarthy draws inspiration from the realms of childhood movie fantasy: Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Pinocchio, and other tales of mischief, silliness, and naughtiness (along with more adult Hollywood fare). The piece that appears in Playtime, Pinocchio Pipenose, embodies McCarthy’s (and to a large extent, Playtime‘s) spirit of play rewarding misbehavior and, as Trevor Smith puts it, acting as a safe space for transgressions (to which McCarthy is no stranger). At the same time, McCarthy is a complicated figure whose work sparks as much controversy and revulsion as it does praise and critical acclaim. 

Rivane Neuenschwander is known for a playful approach to her work, which—like the piece presented as part of our exhibition, Watchword—also requires wordplay, communication, and participation to activate the work for the viewer, including games, wearable work, and comics. 

Neuenschwander has also created work geared directly at children. In London, in 2015, she initiated a program whereby kids created their own superhero capes, of sorts, that helped the children confront their fears. 

 

 

“We are doing holes in these rifles before the rifles make holes in us.” Pedro Reyes‘ flutes made from guns were played recently at a March for Our Lives rally in Cincinnati, Ohio. Like the “gun flutes”—a signature part of the Reyes’ art making—his Disarm Mechanized II in Playtime comments on the depth with which deadly weapons have infiltrated our culture and have come to define different, fraught aspects of it. No stranger to building protest and politics into his work, Reyes has been known to employ satire and comedy to surprising effect. In a new project—Manufacturing Mischief—to premiere later this month at MIT, the artist uses puppets to expand Reyes’ commentary on the impact of new and old technology on current politics.

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

(Image credit: © Paul McCarthy)

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on 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!

Concentration: A Story

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
The latest in Albert Mobilio’s series of (very) short stories based on old-time games illustrates how the characteristics of play capture the essence of our lives.

An entire deck of cards is shuffled and dealt face down in rows. The exact pattern, Sandy knows, isn’t important. Sandy knows about cards and she knows about quiet. She thinks more about quiet—and why she can’t keep it—than she thinks about cards, but she makes sure each card has a definite place. The group settles—Jack and Bean were teasing Frank about his attempt to grow a beard last winter; they’ve stopped and Frank sits still and inspects his hands with surprise, as if they were newly purchased. And Jess has found a place to pause in a long tale about this guy at work and the guy he hired and why she’s pretty sure that the first guy hired the other guy to get in his pants and this first guy always does this but it never works because he hires artsy-looking guys and won’t believe Jess when she tells him they’re straight. When the talk stops as suddenly as a spigot that’s been shut they all notice how the air hums with its absence; Sandy tries to tune into and relax within this gauzy frequency.

She can’t. She doesn’t trust the quiet and so she says, “I didn’t know the boy I asked to the prom was, uh, having sex with my, you know, he was, well he is, my step-brother,” but the last few words dissolve in the self-conscious laughter that always devours her awkward attempts to add to any conversation. The ensuing chorus of whats and huhs lacks much interrogative energy; at this provoke such a thought? Once during a discussion of how people can never find their phones at home, she piped up: “I leave my phone in the bathroom because I’m always in there, not for what you think,” a gulping chortle overwhelming the kicker, “even when I don’t need to be.

Her giddiness softens what otherwise would be off-putting for some. Not Jess, though. That voice—the laugh, the way it smudges whatever silly thing that escapes Sandy’s jingle-jangle brain—gets to her, or really gets all over her. Sandy’s talk is an itchy sweater Jess can’t peel off. The confessional intimacy unnerves her. Implicates her; it’s as if Sandy was ventriloquizing an inner life Jess didn’t know she had. But she’s much more bothered by the inadvertency. How does craziness like that slip out? How could your guard be so low? What if Jess just blurted out something like the things Sandy says? Could there be a situation, the right or wrong person, that could cast a spell and loosen words she’d regret? It was frightening. Sandy was frightening.

As the pile of cards grows beneath Sandy’s clasped hands, the wrinkles on the back of her fingers absorb her. The deep creases at the knuckles; the other ones like bloodless paper cuts. She hasn’t said a word since mentioning her prom and permits her-self only a tight anti-smile as she collects another pair. Across the table Jess, too, holds her tongue, holds herself head to toe, and eyes her friend warily. The others—Bean and Jack—are busy elaborating on the kind and degree of Frank’s romantic failures.

The two of them hoot and make noise that would suggest a good time. The game continues until all the cards are removed or turned face up, whichever comes first. ♦

Missed earlier stories? Find them here, here, and here.

(Image credit: Photo courtesy Stuart Burns via Flickr.)

Play Digest: Brian Jungen and Teppei Kaneuji

Posted on 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.)

It Is as If You Were Playing Chess: A Game

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

You’ve always wanted to be a chess master! But you aren’t one, are you? Now you can at least look like one! Pretend you’re playing chess! Make moves! Act like you feel things! Smirk! Frown! Weep! Chess!

Game designer Pippin Barr doesn’t make popular video games. It Is as If You Were Playing Chess not only poses the idea of a chess game you merely pretend to be playing, but brings it to life and so allows you to participate in the experience itself. Barr says, “The central image for me in this is that of a player sitting at their computer or using their mobile device while be observed by another person. To the observer it should look as though the player is genuinely playing some kind of game. In this case the idea is for them to look as though they are playing a game of chess, making the appropriate motions (to drag chess pieces around), facial expressions, eye movements, and so on. ‘It is as if you were playing chess’ is thus an interface designed to support you in pretending that you’re playing a game of chess.”

Your move.

Play Digest: Cao Fei and Lara Favaretto

Posted on 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 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.)

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on 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!

Play Digest: Nick Cave and Martin Creed

Posted on 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.

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, photo by James Prinz (detail), © Nick Cave)

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on 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!

“Check Ya Later!”: An Infographic

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Artist and funnyman Andrew Kuo describes his approach to analysis: “Putting abstract ideas on a scale challenges the authority of a momentary thought. It’s appealing to trace how feelings change in relation to other feelings and a given time frame. “

Look for the next infographic in coming weeks.

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