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\u201cContemporary art models more than it represents.\u201d
\n– Nicolas Bourriaud<\/p>\n
In Beyond Play: a New Approach to Games<\/em>, the anthropologist Thomas Malaby expresses his interest in discarding the formalism and exceptionalism underlying most game definitions. Instead he suggests that games can best be understood through two qualities, their \u2018processual\u2019 nature and their inherent \u2018contingency.\u2019 For Malaby a game is not an object, a collection of props or code, but a process that begins and ends with each session of play. In other words, the game of chess only exists when two people sit down to maneuver pieces across a checkered board according to their mutual understanding of the rules. Once they have stopped playing, that particular instance of chess disappears, and the pieces and board become merely trinkets. Central to any of these processes, whether chess or baseball or World of Warcraft<\/em>, is contingency. For Malaby the outcome of a game can never be known ahead of time, or else the process can no longer be defined as a game. The end of any game must always be indeterminate at the beginning.<\/p>\n Beyond Play<\/em> maps these notions of process and contingency onto myriad areas of academic discourse, including pragmatism, semiotics, and practice theory. However, noticeably absent from his list of disciplines are art theory, art criticism, and art history. This is remarkable not only because Beyond Play<\/em> was written in a lively moment in the history of the \u201cAre games art?\u201d debate, but also because the language Malaby uses in describing a process-based, contingency-centric character to games is so strongly reminiscent of two particular moments in art history: when Conceptual Art of the 1960’s and 1970’s challenged definitions of art spectatorship, art-as-object, and artwork exceptionalism, and more recently when the concept of \u2018relational aesthetics\u2019 further blurred the line between the artist, the art work, and the patron<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n NON-TERMINAL ACTS OF CREATION<\/strong><\/p>\n One of Malaby’s central concerns is to free games, and play, from being defined primarily as \u201csafe, separable, and pleasurable\u201d. In addition to this rejection of normative meanings such as \u2018fun\u2019, he posits the idea of treating games as \u201cdomains,\u201d and play as a \u201cmode of experience\u201d that can exist in tandem with any number of other activities. This argument, he notes, is a \u201cconceptualization\u201d of the term game, stripping it of a tangible form as a separable physical activity and restating it as an ongoing process. This exploration of a new perspective on games and play withstands a broad comparison to the treatment of art groups like Fluxus and others connected with Conceptual art, who collectively repositioned art as human-powered events rather than objects.<\/p>\n In the 1960’s artists and critics began favoring the idea in art over the object and dislodged the traditional importance of an inalterable, final, physical form (for example a painting or sculpture) to be viewed by a spectator. Instead art was promoted as its own kind of \u201cprocess of becoming\u201d, to use Malaby\u2019s phrase. The artist and electrical engineer Billy Kluver has noted that Robert Rauschenberg created technological art and performance experiences to \u201cintroduce multiplicity, make works change over time, and activate viewer participation.\u201d In Kluver and Rauschenburg\u2019s Oracle (1962-65)<\/em>, an interactive sculpture and sound environment featuring \u201cgifts from the street\u201d, a car door, a typewriter, and other pieces showcasing quotidian technology, the art was in the experience of engaging it, the work \u201cas changing and provocative as the city it was reporting on\u201d (Kluver, again). Art in the \u201860s then took on a character of metamorphosis, triggered by the engagement of the spectator.<\/p>\n Because the work of artists like Rauschenberg and Kluver could not exist without the active participation of the spectator they suggested a new mode of spectatorship that provoked viewers to reflect on the relationship of art experience to \u201creal life.\u201d Here \u201csemi-bounded\u201d, another phrase from Malaby, is a particularly apt description of the art experience.<\/p>\n Some of the art from this period incorporated game-like structures more directly. \u2018Fluxus Boxes\u2019 contained games and game-related tokens, but perhaps more importantly the Fluxus \u2018event-scores\u2019, which were brief scripts for different pieces of performance art, incorporated formal structures that were, according to historian and philosopher Peter Osbourne, \u201callied to contingency, chance and random systems of relations\u201d. For instance, Conceptual Artist Nam June Paik’s Symphony for 20 Rooms<\/em> structured viewer engagement by having viewers play various sound pieces and complete actions (e.g. kicking objects around) in an imagined play space of 20 rooms. Different audiences might interact in different ways with the piece, producing unpredictable variations in sound and action.<\/p>\n Other artists of the period chose to employ an even more game-reminiscent method of contriving contingency: they stated rules of engagement. 16 Constellations (1974)<\/em>, by the Contretist artist Max Bill, is a sequence of circles and lines with a rule set printed alongside the work (\u201c1. The Circle does not move. 2. The lines never intersect. 3. The same constellation is not allowed to repeat itself…\u201d). While Bill’s interest was on \u201cmediative, transcendental, utopian ideals\u201d, another piece by Robert Rauschenberg, who was more closely associated with Conceptualist processes, focused on the process of contingent participation of the spectator using rules as a mode of control. Rauschenberg’s 9 Evenings <\/em>combined technology, performance, and instructions for engaging the system. Often those instructions directed audiences members to engage with one another (through hugging, for example), but as in Malaby’s conception of games, \u201cfun\u201d was not a critical part of the process.<\/p>\n An early member of Fluxus, Yoko Ono’s Instructions for Paintings (1962)<\/em>, in contrast to Robert Rauschenberg\u2019s Evenings<\/em>, celebrated a kind of recursive process of art creation: the work was \u2018activated\u2019 by a viewer following the directions, but those instructions could themselves easily be reproduced by a viewer and altered as they saw fit. The art object \u2013 the written set of instructions \u2013 was not important. In fact, Ono had another individual write out the original instructions so that her own hand would be erased from the art, and the \u201cownership\u201d of the rule set would be nullified. As Malaby might point out, this indirectly highlighted the work\u2019s \u201cpotential for transformation\u201d, similar to the sometimes plastic nature of a game\u2019s ruleset in the hands of its players.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n WE CAN ALL RELATE<\/strong><\/p>\n In aligning Malaby’s conceptualization of games to a Conceptualist approach to art, where does the comparison fail?<\/p>\n Malaby remarks on the idea of \u201cshared engagement of contingency [as] a powerful means for developing trust and belonging.\u201d It was not always typical, however, of the Conceptualists to focus on this notion of affecting a major impact on the relationships of spectators\/participants to one another (though there are many exceptions). The phenomenon of shared engagement \u2013 and the related notion of the collective interpretation of outcomes and meaning generated from shared experience \u2013 is core to the much more contemporary notion of \u2018relational art,\u2019 which, in the words of its chief definer, Nicolas Bourriaud, \u201cacquires [its] formal and theoretical marks in Conceptual Art.\u201d Bourriaud’s text Relational Aesthetics<\/em> helps us to triangulate the position of games in relation to the art practices of the present and the Conceptual art that preceded them.<\/p>\n In following with Malaby’s insistence that games do not occupy an entirely separate space from life, relational artworks by Bourriaud\u2019s description \u201ctake as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.\u201d The artworks of this school are necessarily tied to, and react to, real life, and the relationship between the art and the world is layered and complex, defined through the experience of the art. Relational art is not as purposefully anti-object as Conceptual art \u2013 dismissal of the object is not part of a contemporary agenda — but it is not object-centric either. Much as a game of Chess is nothing but the bounded actions of two players with a set of props, the focus in relational aesthetics for Bourriaud remains on \u201cthe collective elaboration of meaning\u201d arising from the encounter.<\/p>\n In elaborating on the encounters in relational art, Bourriaud explicitly mentions games, saying, \u201cthe figures of reference of human relations have now become fully-fledged artistic ‘forms.’ Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games<\/strong>, festivals… all manner of encounter and relational invention\u201d (my emphasis). His placement of games as artistic forms and figures of reference seems to be in concert with Malaby’s description of games’ definitive function in generating meaning through their activation by players, and also to generate a \u201cdistinctive disposition\u201d, as he calls it, about how to act within the domain of engagement.<\/p>\n With relational art, the role of art is \u201cto actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real.\u201d Malaby’s games fit well within this concept. To Malaby games and game-like life activities are \u201cmutually informed,\u201d and he even uses similar terminology to the quote from Bourriaud at the top of this essay when he speaks of Greek games of luck, which for their players \u201cserved as models for their actions in other high-stakes arenas of their lives.” Malaby\u2019s articulation of how a definition of games must “allow for the way they inhabit, reflect, and constitute the processes of everyday experience” lies in parallel to Bourriad’s articulation of relational art.<\/p>\n Bourriaud also applies the game metaphor to his analysis of relational works like Les Ateliers du Paradiseu (1990)<\/em>, which turned the gallery into a club house for the artists to live in, and which had \u201cprecise rules of play… The interplay of inter-human relations was thus materialized in compliance with the principles of an interactive video-game\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n THE HEART OF ARTNESS<\/strong><\/p>\n Just as games are not reducible to their rules in Malaby’s eyes, Bourriaud believes that art \u201cis not an immutable essence… Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts.\u201d They demonstrate a certain recursion, in this sense, a concept of particular interest to Malaby. In relational art, \u201cthe game is being forever re-enacted… in relation to the players and the system which they construct and criticize.\u201d The art is flexible to some degree: it is, as Marcel Duchamp said of chess, \u201cvery plastic.\u201d<\/p>\n Does it follow that the \u2018mini-utopias\u2019 created by artists in the era of relational art are using contingency as a critical point of departure? They surely are, but it is on the point of contingency that Malaby’s games diverge from Bourriaud\u2019s art practices. Despite the fact that art, like games, \u201ctightens the space of relations\u201d among people, the art described by Bourriaud does not necessarily concern itself with issues described by Malaby, like permitting \u2018flow\u2019, the \u201clearned condition of mastery\u201d. Likewise, relational artworks are not, as Malaby says of games, \u201cdistinctive in their achievement of a generative balance between the open-endedness of contingencies and the reproducibility of conditions for action\u201d and are not always searching for \u201cjust the right mix of the expected and unexpected.\u201d<\/p>\n Though creating relational art might fairly be characterized in a fashion similar to how Malaby characterizes the creation of games – \u201cabout creating the complex, implicit, contingent conditions wherein the texture of engaged human experience can happen” – relational art does not necessarily favor unpredictability in reflecting that texture of experience to the same extent as games. Contingencies exist as important features of relational works, which, like Conceptual works, are activated through participation and often improvisation, but there seems to be a separation in the matter of the degree to which the designer\/artist focuses on that balance of contingency and predictability in art and in games.<\/p>\n Malaby’s Beyond Play<\/em> ultimately suggests that gameness can be discovered in many activities we don’t typically recognize as games, and that the relationship of games to game-like activities is important and culturally meaningful. As a mode, play can exist atop any number of activities, and we see this mode of engagement take a crucial role in several areas of art. The Conceptualists, perhaps not explicitly, discovered the applicability and relevance of play and gameness to their own work and times, and it has since become typical of contemporary, relational art.<\/p>\n Ultimately, these parallels offer a way of considering both the \u2018gameness of art\u2019 and the \u2018artness of games\u2019 more than they suggest that games are art, or vice versa. If games truly are processes that are un-tethered to any particular formal expression or cultural space, their potential for enhancing cultural practices like art creation is obvious, and the adoption of gameness in art that positions itself as a \u201csystem of interactive encounters\u201d, to use Bourriaud\u2019s phrase, seems almost inevitable.<\/p>\n +-+<\/p>\n BIBLIOGRAPHY<\/strong><\/p>\n Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presses du Reel, 1998: 9-79<\/p>\n Kluver, Billy with Julie Martin. \u201cWorking with Rauschenberg.\u201d Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective. Guggenheim Museum, 1998: 310-27<\/p>\n Malaby, Thomas M. \u201cBeyond Play: A New Approach to Games.\u201d Games & Culture.<\/p>\n Osborne, Peter, ed. Conceptual Art. Phaidon Press Limited, 2002<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cContemporary art models more than it represents.\u201d – Nicolas Bourriaud In Beyond Play: a New Approach to Games, the anthropologist Thomas Malaby expresses his interest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1532"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2435,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions\/2435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}