The Artists Toybox | dirtyfilthyfilm

The Artists Toy box, a full compendium of games.

In this text I am going to discuss the importance of imaginative play to the creative practitioner in the contemporary arts.

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” (Winnicott, D. 1971 p54)

My interest lies with the way artists enable themselves to either make an adult return to the process of play as an enabling tool. To feed the imagination, or indeed their acceptance that they never lost this as a skill.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Albert Einstein. ( Sorren, S 2011) Of course Einstien is not suggesting that education and knowledge are unimportant, but that knowledge without imagination is just knowledge.

Roland Bathes argues that there is a difference in the structure of play when the toy is representative of the grown up world.

“The merest set of blocks, provided it is not too refined, implies a very different learning of the world: then, the child does not in any way create meaningful objects, it matters little to him whether they have an adult name; the actions he performs are not those of a user but those of a demiurge. He creates forms which walk, which roll, he creates life, not property: objects now act by themselves, they are no longer an inert and complicated material in the palm of his hand. But such toys are rather rare: French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators.” (Barths, R. date)

In Mythologies Bathes discusses the toy in French society as being a miniature version of grown up things, he suggests that play for children, on the whole is a rehearsal for adulthood. That the creative is driven by a much more abstract rout through creative play.

Now here I have to make a distinction between the imaginative play of small children and “ruled playing” such a sports, computer games and board games.

Imaginative play involves the player to make up there own world from scratch, without direction from toy manufactures or marketing men. When I was a child I collected cigarette boxes and built forts and houses, monuments and worlds. These simple building blocks were enough to fire my imagination and were an obvious progression from Lego, which for me had its limitations.

I reluctantly stopped playing at 13.

I remember distinctly becoming a teenager and facing the fact that I was no longer a child, it felt inappropriate for me to play as I had as a child. Our society has no definitive right of passage, we were not sent out into the forest to kill a bear, or spend a night in a cave and therefore become an adult. Even in mid Wales in 1976.

I put all the things from my childhood into two black bin liners and buried them in the field over the road from my house. I think we all do this in one way or another, maybe not in such a literal way. I was burying my childish things, and I was burying my child self? In Barthes, Death of an Author Bathes is dealing with a far from literal notion, but focuses on a new measure of the importance of the relational triangulation of the artist, work and audience. My challenge to this is that for me the death of the author is at times a literal burying and resurrecting of that real playful and creative child in all of us. This is a very clear and real feeling during our vacations when we have to engage fully in the real world and the luxury of our dialogue with our creative peers and tutors becomes limited.

As creative practitioners we have to approach the bones of our work with a childlike innocence. Free then to flesh it out intellectually.

Orson Welles says much the same thing when interviewed about the importance of filmmakers who learn to make films from watching films, his response is that “filmmakers should approach filmmaking from a position of innocence, like Adam in the garden of Eden.” (Horizon BBCtv 1973) Film making becomes the act of playing with this incredibly expensive toy box that is a film set, to create something that is truly yours.

In his seminal book on play Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga says;

“Poesis doctrinae tamquam somnium- poetry is like a dream of philosophic love, says the deep minded Francis Bacon. The mythical imaginings of savages, those children of nature, concerning the origins of existence often contain the seeds of wisdom that will find expression in logical forms of a later age.” (Huizinga, J. 1949,p141)

These seeds of wisdom are our fruit as creative practitioners and are as valid if discovered though the act of creative play within our practice or conversely, if we were to discover them through intellectual philosophical thought.

Play is noted by biological behaviourists as an act of rehearsal, the rough and tumble becomes a rehearsal for life, knowing ones strength, the acting out of social hierarchies for future reference. An act of illustration to be used in future situations. The act of playing hardwires the brain to be open, to be playful, to be enabled. A good example of this is highlighted in a story related by the artist Jim Lambie on the Imagine episode Glasgow - The Grit and The Glamour.

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This for me is a prime example of the considered play of the artist, and inspired my approach to my current piece of work “A Factory Act”. I was to spend time alone in a large water bottling plant in Wales and allow the building to drive the work.

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I find it difficult not to plan ahead, I did a huge amount of research for this work, scared that I would come back with nothing. But I managed to resist relying on this forethought.

The large labyrinthine space, and my small presence turned into an autobiographical allegory. I left (at 19) a factory town with high employment at a time when jobs were hard to come by, in order to pursue a life in the arts. The characters in the piece are all me, different versions of me, the me that left and the me that stayed. And like Lambie the me that left, the playful creative me, made some things that would never have existed had I stayed.

The very act of play at the beginning of a piece of work, grounds ones practice. “When art becomes self-conscious, that is, conscious of its own grace, it is apt to lose something of its eternal childlike innocence.” (Huizinga, J. 1949 p229)

"All work and no play make’s Jack a dull boy".

(Kubrick, S. 1979)

Jack Torrance writes endlessly (typed by kubricks secretary Margret Adams) in Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaption of “The shining”. 1979.

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This sentence worked its way into my work “A Factory Act” This works for me as a piece of text in an artistic context, of course within the movie, this writing becomes a signifier to Wendy Torrence of the decay of Jack Torrance’s sanity. The text takes on the structure of a Play, description, scene setting, dialogue, direction, and at a glance this text is authentic. A perfect illustration of writers block in the extreme. Jack has an inability to play, he is an example of Paternal control, a grown up. Racked with guilt and fighting the urge to drink. A sense of creative play is thing furthest from his mind.

Later on in my adult life I sought work, in which I had a disguised element of play. Animation, filmmaking, drama. I think this is key to my motivation.

The artist regardless of their chosen discipline retains or returns to this sense of play every time they engage with their materials. We move paint around or juxtapose, and mix ideas, concepts and play. Hopefully with an added intellectual critical approach. It is also, in my opinion important for the artist to try and observe the world in an innocent way (as we do when visiting a foreign country) constantly questioning what is deemed as “is” with doubt and intrigue, “what if” should be the hub of our manifesto.

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Joseph Bueys is for me an important trail blazer in the canyons of this “what if” approach to artistic practice. Bueys regarded himself as a Shaman, the outsider of the tribe, who mirrors concepts and ideas of the so called real world into magical shamanistic acts. Imaginative play, thought experiments, discussion and collaboration were essential to the production of his output. In coyote the relationship and trust that these two animals gain for one another is fuelled by play. There is little space for ridged thought, and Bueys and his work for me are the embodiment of “what ifs”. At the end of December I visited MS2, Museum Stuki, the museum of contemporary art in Lodz, Poland. There was an exhibition called Correspondences, modern art and universalism. MS2 has a large collection Bueys work, one of the most important pieces for me was a crate in which bueys transported work to the museum on top of his van. After unpacking the crate he realised the importance of this crate as a receptacle, a container that protected his work from the weather and bears and art thieves and this became part of the show. This is a beautiful object in its own right, but there is a cheekiness that appeals to me about this decision, a cheekiness and a sense of play. Interestingly there was also work by Hanna Hoch called “Boxes for works”, again they where the containers for her montage. We are back to playing with boxes, show me a creative child who has never played with boxes?

Play as a creative enableing tool is being taken seriously in business and education. MIT has a room dedicated to creative visual structuring. Here they use lego. The act of play hones the imagination for engineers and geneticists as well as artists.

Kjeld Kirk Kristiensen, the owner of LEGO, and Bart Victor and Johan Roos, professors at the Swiss business school IMD, developed LEGO Serious Play in 1996 in order to find a way to generate more engagement, imagination, and playfulness in staff meetings (Roos, J & Victor, B, 1998 p3).

It is now is an established business development tool used by companies such as

Google, eBay, Roche, NASA, AstraZeneca, the International Red Cross and DaimlerChrysler as an alternative to traditional planning meetings. Participants use LEGO bricks to build models of themselves, their teams, the organization, and business strategies (Roos, J & Victor, B, 1999 p4).

Play becomes an act of exploring the imagination at a critical creative level. We edit out the irrelevance, we cut back dead wood, we clear the thicket to focus on the aim of the game. A playful approach enables us to step out of fears of failure, and this becomes a liberating factor, enabling us to discover correlations of ideas. In play we tamper with and take apart, we rebuild in other forms, and construct with materials unintended for this use. It could be argued that play is unsophisticated or unintellectual, without critical approach. But when combined with the discipline, sophistication and the intelligence of the artist this play becomes the most important tool in our box.

Conclusion

To conclude the inconclusive we, you the reader and myself the author will play a game.

My approach to all of the work within this module has been constructed in a holistic manner, the thinking behind my practice, my research, my subject, my learning, my essay, have all been informed and well seasoned from one start point, this importance of this creative play to fire creative output. We will play with the form and structure of this conclusion, toy with its form.

We will play the simplest of games, a stacking game, with the simplest of rules or laws I am personally resistant to games with all but the simplest of rules this game has one rule or law: gravity.

We can take the simplest of forms, blocks or cards but in this case, these words and stack them to make a structure as high as we can until an inevitable collapse. The words that I have written, have built to sentences and paragraphs, stacking the weight of my ideas, quotes and research in a careful balancing act. Making a sense that holds the structure together, but as all things in the universe that build, they build to an inevitable collapse. As through the play of Brahman the Hindu god who through his play builds and destroys, the creation of this text will inevitably fall and fail/succeed to decay. The challenge is that the play within this text highlights itself as a valid form, as a contextual example or experiment of an act of play. This becomes quite quickly a game of design, strategy, shape and form that has a potential to create an opportunity for learning or more importantly the discovery of accidental findings that we all use in our practice. It is that essential “what if“ question that drives our creative processes. This is a game in the most abstract sense.

We start with the foundation of the structure and we allow this foundation the heaviest of materials supplied by Huizinga, and Bathes, Wells and Kubrick, we add Lambie and Bueys and hoch. Roos and victor. The structure is solid and broad, on top of that we pile my work, A factory Act. And then my experience until we are left with my own supposition, statements and poetics. At this point the structure stands at its full height wavering, physics throws its hand in with Higgs and gravity. As a structure and as a piece of text it stands, to fall. Game over.