Author: Rebecca Bednarz

Lara Favaretto

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
“I like to shift from perfection to the fall, to push the work to its tipping point, its limit, to endanger it, to the point of making it yield, jam, collapse.”

 

 

WHO

Lara Favaretto (born 1973, Italy) creates site-specific art installations out of found and recycled materials. She is particularly interested in exploring how objects that appear ordinary and carefree at first glance can actually reveal darker themes of futility, tragedy, and decay.

 

WHAT

In Coppie Semplici / Simple Couples, Lara Favaretto re-enchants industrial car wash brushes by stripping away their original function and transforming them into kinetic abstract paintings.

 

WHY

Named after human couples, Lara Favaretto’s brushes take on lives of their own. Moving but going nowhere, they celebrate absurdity while reflecting upon the monotony of modern life and consumer culture. The dust that accumulates around the work from the brushes wearing down relates to the effect that couples have on one another, each individual slowly transforming through their ongoing interaction.

 

LISTEN

PlayTime curator Trevor Smith muses on how the mundane can be mesmerizing. Read the transcript.

 

 

WORKS

 

Coppie Semplici / Simple Couples, 2009
Maria and Felix
Amamamiya and Sasayama
Harold and Maude
Shirley and Cyril
Bobby and Laura
Kelly and Griff
Stéphane and Salina
Seven pairs of car wash brushes, iron slabs, motors, electrical boxes, and wires
Rennie Collection

 

(Image credits: Photo by Blaine Campbell, © Lara Favaretto; courtesy of Lara Favaretto Studio; photo by Allison White/PEM.)

Martin Creed

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
“Anything is art that is used as art by people.”

 

 

WHO

Artist and musician Martin Creed (born 1968, United Kingdom) has been described as “part court jester, part subversive philosopher.” In his work, all materials and spatial conditions hold equal creative potential: white is no better than black, empty is no better than full. Creed’s works provide unexpectedly playful ways of reconsidering the hierarchical assumptions with which we negotiate the world.

 

WHAT

Both works by Creed are installed per his instructions. For Work No. 329, he directed the museum to: fill latex balloons with half of the air in a given space and then fill that space with the balloons. Viewers bring the piece to life by entering and walking through.

 

WHY

In his signature whimsical way, Creed uses a simple, everyday object to draw our attention to an invisible entity that surrounds us: the air that fills us when we breathe.

 

LISTEN

PlayTime curator Trevor Smith on how Martin Creed’s simple gestures transform the traditional museum experience. Read the transcript.

 

WORKS

 

Work No. 329, 2004
Balloons
Rennie Collection

 

Work No. 798, 2007
Emulsion on wall
Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

 

(Image credits: Photo by Bob Packert/PEM; Martin Creed, photo by Hugo Glendinning; photo by Bob Packert/PEM; photo by Allison White/PEM.)

Nick Cave

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
“Sometimes you don’t know why you do something . . . . It’s something primal and secret.”

 

 

 

WHO

Nick Cave (born 1959, United States) uses sculpture, textiles, performance and installation as a means to enact social change in his Chicago community and beyond. His training as a dancer and fashion designer influences his practice.

 

WHAT

Cave creates sculptural costumes from everyday objects in his series of Soundsuits. During a performance, Cave’s sculptures are both visual and audible experiences, as the movement of the materials create unexpected sounds. Bunny Boy features one such Soundsuit in a slow, quiet, sexually suggestive dance performance.

 

WHY

One of the most entrancing aspects of Cave’s Soundsuits is how they usually conceal all indicators of the performer’s identity, such as race and gender. In Bunny Boy, Cave puts on a Soundsuit that reveals his chest bare. Stepping into the spotlight, his avatar merges the human body with fantasy figuration.

 

LISTEN

PlayTime curator Trevor Smith on how Nick Cave’s costumes both conceal and reveal the maker. Read the transcript.

 

 

WATCH

Nick Cave’s response to the PlayTime manifesto—with sock puppets. Read the transcript.

 

 

 

WORKS

 

Bunny Boy, 2012
Video (14 minutes, 5 seconds)
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

 

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

Mark Bradford

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
“I wanted to do a video of me playing basketball, but I wanted to create a condition, a struggle.”

 

 

WHO

Mark Bradford (born 1961, United States) lives and works in his hometown of South Los Angeles, where his community is a significant source of inspiration. Before earning his master of fine arts degree, Bradford worked in his mother’s hair salon as a stylist.

 

WHAT

For Practice, Bradford set out to make a video of himself playing basketball with challenging restrictions. Along with a typical Los Angeles Lakers jersey, he wears an outrageously voluminous antebellum hoop skirt. These skirts, worn by women in the pre–Civil War era, feature expansive boning that allowed for air circulation. Here, the Santa Ana winds lift the skirt and trip Bradford up. However, each time he falls on the court, he gets up, dribbles again, and eventually he makes the shot.

 

WHY

Bradford is a 6’8” tall black man. For years, he had to deal with people who assumed that he should be a basketball player. For Bradford, the self-imposed challenges in Practice represent the cultural, gender, and racial stereotypes that he needed to negotiate as a young man.

 

LISTEN

PlayTime curator Trevor Smith on how Mark Bradford uses play to negotiate the expectations that society places on us. Read the transcript.

 

 

WORKS

 

Practice, 2003
Video (3 minutes)
Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

 

(Image credits: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland;  photo by Sean Shim-Boyle (detail); courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland.)

Cory Arcangel

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
“Irony doesn’t produce anything. It takes the air out of the world and I can’t imagine taking any pleasure in that. I’m trying to find something hopeful, some kind of truth.”

 

 

 

WHO

Cory Arcangel (born 1978, United States) became well known for hacking video game cartridges and performing Internet interventions, but his practice crosses a wide range of media. His work fuses an interest in video art, music, coding, and online open sources—all with a tongue-in-cheek sensibility.

 

WHAT

In these works, Arcangel modified two popular Nintendo 64 games with a sly twist. In Self Playing Nintendo 64 NBA Courtside 2, all-star basketball player Shaquille O’Neal repeatedly throws air balls, always missing the basket. In Totally Fucked, Arcangel has removed everything from the scene except Mario, stranded on a block in mid-air, leaving him with nowhere to go.

 

WHY

Arcangel’s hacked cartridge videos evoke laughs at the silly subversion of iconic video games and the futility of the characters’ situations. But the joke fades and desperation mounts when we realize there is no way for anyone to win the game.

 

LISTEN

PlayTime curator Trevor Smith on why it’s fun to watch professional athletes fail. Read the transcript.

 

WORKS

 

Totally Fucked, 2003
Hacked Super Mario Brothers cartridge and Nintendo NES video game system
Courtesy of the artist

 

Self Playing Nintendo 64 NBA Courtside 2, 2011
Hacked Nintendo 64 video game controller, Nintendo 64 game console, NBA Courtside 2 game cartridge, and video
Courtesy of the artist

 

(Image credits: Courtesy of the artist, © Cory Arcangel; photo by Tim Barber (detail); photo by Maria Zanchi,  © Cory Arcangel; photo by Sacha Maric, © Cory Arcangel.)

Dispatches from the Field: The Board Room: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

So The Board Room. We’ve described it as a board game speakeasy.

We have members that come in and play our library of games. We’re also open to the public on certain nights of the week.

We have close to a thousand board games in the library now.

Hi, I’m Tom Nimmo. I’m one of the co-founders of the Board Room. Although if I am being honest, it was Phil who first had the idea for this place.

I’m Phil Trotter. I had the idea for this place.

There are so many different kinds of games and you’ll see that certain people might be really good at one kind of game and really bad at another kind of game.

I really enjoy the face-to-face interaction of board games. There’s just so many different types of interactions that you can have with people and so many different types of games that just… such a huge variety. We think it’s cool as hell and so we want to share it with everyone.

Most of these other clubs are nomadic. They play at restaurants, they play at YMCAs, they play at libraries, but they don’t have a space that they’re renting out. We are unique in that way. I don’t think there’s too many clubs like us.

The board gaming community is growing. We’re bound to all be in the big . . . the bigger board game community sooner rather than later.

I’ve learned a lot about building an organization with social media. How do you advertise a board game club? I’m asking, how do I do it?

Please tell us.

 

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Dispatches from the Field: SkeeBoston: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

I’ve never met anyone that hates Skee-Ball. It’s a game that you played as a kid at an old Chuck E. Cheese or a skating rink. I came to Boston and I missed my friends that I met through a Skee-Ball league down in Raleigh. Approached the owner of The Greatest Bar and told him we could bring in a bunch of people on an off night. He looked at me like, great, you know, let’s make it happen. We had almost a hundred and fifty people right out of the gate. Five and a half years later, we’re on our seventeenth skeeson now.

We have three skeeball skeesons a year, eight weeks long, and they culminate in a team playoff and an individual playoff. We have a top sixty-four  NCAA bracket and we play down until there’s one last person standing and they are the champion in Boston.

Skeeson means season. Hundos for hundreds.

40 streak means out of your nine balls you get to roll, you roll all 40s.

I thought it was very strange that they insisted on saying hundo instead of hundreds. And I was like, guys, can’t you just say hundreds. And then I started playing and hundo is just so much easier to say and makes you sound a lot cooler in the skeeball world.

Everyone joins kickball leagues and it comes with trophies and shirts and beer. We just bring it inside, year round.

I think it’s sort of fun to be really good at something really silly like Skee-Ball.

All of our team names are like Skee-Ball puns.

This season we were the Hunger Lanes.

Born to Skee Wild.

It Ain’t Easy Being Skeezy.

I think our favorite one was Skee-dazzled where we essentially bedazzled ha jean jackets.

My team name is called the Premature Combinations: Sponsored by Skeealis.

We’ve had people meet and get married. We’ve had babies come out of relationships at Skee-Ball.

I mean they’ll be people that will be in my wedding, they’ll be bridesmaids.

So it’s more the people, less the game. But the game is pretty fun.

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Writing Trivia Is Hard: Interview Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

My name is Travis Larchuk and I am the head writer of NPR’s Ask Me Another, which is a public radio quiz show. It’s an hour long show, it airs on the weekends in most places, and it’s hosted by a comedian Ophira Eisenberg. We have a musician whose famous from the internet, Jonathan Coulton. It’s a very nerdy show. At the end there’s a winner. They win a Rubix cube that cost us nine dollars. It’s very low stakes.

Writing trivia is hard, there’s a lot of fact-checking involved. You have to make sure that there is only one answer to the question, which is harder than you might think. For example, who’s the spy with the initials J.B. who was the star of a blockbuster movie franchise? It could be James Bond but it could also be Jason Bourne. Or if you go into TV it could be Jack Bauer. It could be Jack Bristow from Alias. There are a ton of spies with the initials J.B.!

The last thing that you want is for somebody to give an answer and then you have to stop down everything while get on to Google to see if they are actually correct and that they have just slipped into a hole that you didn’t even realize was there.

We had on our show a big controversy because the answer to a clue about a food that smelled bad but tasted great was. We said it was jackfruit and a lot of people wrote in and said it was durian. There was a huge controversy about it. I don’t want your letters! I do not want your letters about this. I’ve read enough of them. Public radio listeners love to let you know when you’re wrong. And they’re great! And please continue to donate to your local public radio station.

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Disarm: An Interview: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

My name is Pedro Reyes and what I do is mainly sculpture. Disarm is a project . . . It is a set of musical instruments made out of destroyed weapons.

[sound of flute being played]

To make a guitar or to make a violin or to make a drum set we were working very much like cavemen. You know blowing and scratching and banging these pieces of metal, trying to figure out how to make sound with them.

[bell rhythm]

It is very important to train our capacity to play, to be a little bit foolish. I am not a musician. I often invite musicians to create compositions, which is super exciting because it means that every time that they play it is a new thing.

[guitar-like instrument riff]

The best thing is when when you don’t know when a project continues to bring surprises.

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Dispatches from the Field: Come Out and Play: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

5 4 3 2…[whistle]

[music with clapping]

So Come Out and Play is an annual festival. We’ve been running it now for twelve years.

It offers free games created—original games created by designers from all over the country, sometimes outside of the country.

You know, we think of it as a big street game field day festival.

People go out and use this dowsing rod to help you find different types of sound.

Right now we are at Come Out and Play Family Day here on Governor’s Island in New York City.

Myself and my colleagues at Brooklyn Game Lab are out here demoing Battle Lab, which is our physical live action roleplaying program.

What we’ve brought today is actually a couple different games that our campers have designed this summer. We go through the whole process from brainstorming, writing the rules, play testing, fixing it, and play testing it again. And finally playing and sharing our games.

Come Out and Play is a festival that started off just really for  teens and adults, and has expanded to have games for people of all ages.

I played games. I went to the fencing. I went to the throwing the ball and putting it in the bucket.

We really think about, like,  how do we get people to play together in different ways. It has to feel surprising and fresh, right? There’s nothing sadder in this world than a hopscotch grid that you’ve seen like eight times. They want a game that allows them to hang out with their friends. It’s a three-minute game that between like three and twenty-one people can jump in and play. It takes me like a minute and a half to explain, and once you’ve seen it played I don’t really have to explain it to you at all. And if somebody doesn’t like it, they’re like, alright, I’m going to go do something else. And then somebody else is like, this is my jam, I’m going to do this all night! This is our practice. This is, like, how we think about making something. We just want people to have experiences that they think are joyful and fun.

[music]

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Pedro Reyes

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
“It is very important to train ourselves in our capacity to play, to be a little bit foolish.”

 

WHO

Pedro Reyes (born 1972, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City. Having studied architecture, Reyes is keenly interested in how people interact with structures—both built and imagined. While his projects take many forms, they often explore ideas of utopian societies and social revolution. His choice of materials is often inspired by political or social issues, such as gun control and citizenship.

 

WHAT

Disarm Mechanized II is a mechanical orchestra made out of weapons seized by the Mexican police in Ciudad Juárez. As a response to the drug cartel wars, Reyes dismantled the guns to create this work. He collaborated with local musicians to design and build the instruments, and also to compose the music you hear.

 

WHY

The prevalence of gun violence in Mexico and the United States led Reyes to explore how deadly weapons could be turned into agents of peace and social change. By repurposing the guns to make music, he rejects their original violent function.

 

LISTEN

PlayTime curator Trevor Smith discusses how Pedro Reyes uses play for social change. Read the transcript.

 

 

WATCH

Pedro Reyes on the relationship between play and creativity. Read the transcript.

 

 

 

WORKS

 

Disarm Mechanized ll, 2012–14
Recycled metal from decommissioned weapons
Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

 

(Image credits: Photo by Allison White/PEM; © Pedro Reyes; photo by Allison White/PEM.)

Finish This Sentence: Play Is: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

Pedro Reyes: Play is central to the creative process. To have room to play is to have room to say what if?

Eric Zimmerman: There is the play of shadows on the wall. There’s the idea of playing a musical instrument.

Jade Ivy: Going outside and playing Woodchucks with your friends, like, on a warm, sunny day. You’re just kicking back, relaxing.

Eric Turiel: Relax, take a load off.

Tritemare: Very reminiscent of childhood, early things. Things that ordinarily aren’t fun become fun.

Charlotte Richards: Starting from when we’re really young, it’s the foundation of how we learn, how we have fun.

Mattie Brice: Play is a context where we practice or live through—sort of—alternate realities and experiment with new customs and protocols for various forms of catharsis or exploration.

Travis Larchuk: You’ve got work, rest, and play. Play is the one that is not work or rest.

Jaden D. Francis: Dancing with my mom. And I play with my bike.

Tracy Fullerton: Play is movement within constraints.

Jane Friedhoff: I tend to think about play as existing within a set of confines or constraints, and thinking about creative ways to kind of move in, out, and around them, to subvert them, to take advantage of them.

Sam Roberts: One of the things that lets us immerse totally into play is when we know there is a safety net there, right? It’s like, you’re not happy to jump from a height unless you know something below can catch you, right? Play is a trust exercise. Close your eyes and fall backwards and hope that they catch you.

Alioune N’gom: Play is putting yourself in a situation that is not reality and interacting with other people in a situation that is not necessarily a one-to-one match with reality.

Everett Phillips: Play is laughter. That would be my one-word answer.

Duke DeVilling: Play and sports just go hand in hand.

Kristen Skillman: Relaxing and it takes your mind off of the more serious things.

Randall Roberts: It’s almost like meditation with a smile. It’s chasing after that, it’s chasing after bliss.

Amanda Penny: Play is imaginative because you get to put your own way to everything and it’s just kind of creative!

Courtney Price: Play doesn’t necessarily create anything. It isn’t necessary. It’s funny because I think it’s so necessary. [laughter]

Stephanie Barish: Play is my favorite thing.

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