All Work No Play
Playthings, games, and the status of the viewer
Playthings, 2024, installation view, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University.
Photo: Lindsay Richardson and Aly Palermo.
New York’s Southern Tier is not generally known for its revolutionary approach to art and art-making. Nestled there among its Appalachian foothills is Alfred, New York: a small but serious town with a significant, if slightly underrepresented, history in the arts, particularly within the field of ceramics. Beset in a sea of deep red and strangled by the same austerity that is suffocating us all, it is natural to assume that there is very little fun to be had here. On my worst days, I think I’d agree with that assessment. Today is different. Today I’m sucking dick in a virtual tearoom.
Playthings, curated by my colleagues Anthony Nguyen and William Wheeler, is a remarkable oddity operating in stark contrast to the austere winter landscapes of rural New York. Installed in the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, Playthings assembles a collection of loosely interconnected works all responding to, or operating in some relationship with, the idea of “play.” Playthings manages to do what I had thought might be impossible: it disrupts the flow of life here in Alfred in meaningful, inspiring, and challenging ways, imparting crucial lessons at this historical juncture.
Explaining to you the thoughts, feelings, and questions posed by the work feels to me like the only way of truly grappling with the show’s coy subject matter. The question of “play” — that is, how we ought to think of it within the context of the arts and what role it serves — is not to be dismissed as mere frivolity. It is precisely when the horrors of our transgressions on this earth and against each other have become clear that the concepts of play, playfulness, silliness, and frivolity become charged with genuine power.
Playthings, 2024, installation view, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University.
Photo: Lindsay Richardson and Aly Palermo.
PT 1 PLAYER 1
→ The gallery foyer features a generous invitation. Programmed by artist and designer Jacob Hoving, 16777216 (2024) operates as title, exhibition text, and index. With a phone or a gallery-provided tablet in hand, visitors are invited not only into the space of the exhibition but also to leave their mark on it, drawing, tracing, and scratching themselves onto a digital surface. It’s graffiti by any other name, to be sure, a canvas for the viewer to enact play on the show itself.
Through feats of programming and the imposition of arbitrary, programmatically defined rules, 16777216 challenges the viewer to contend with questions of permanence, impermanence, mark-making, and censorship. On that last note I’ll mention a colleague’s quip: that he hopes nothing “problematic” is written onto the show’s welcome, lest it require deletion.
Sharing the foyer is a work by Clare Gatto and Kara Güt, a duo making fun of facsimile while embracing it with vigor. Constructed from foam, concrete, and a television monitor, Compression (2021) plays off the familiar form of those plastic stones deployed to obscure ugly utility boxes. The distorted and warped image of a waterfall looping across the screen would delight nature lovers were it not for its conceit. Both works prime the viewer to consider the role of the digital in contemporary notions of play, albeit to somewhat different ends. In Hoving’s work, the viewer is invited to play, while with Gatto and Güt, we merely imagine a site of play. It is a welcome show welcoming, priming us for fun and for disappointment, for entertaining a holistic understanding of play encompassing complexity and haptic reciprocity. But between these two works, we are shown, too, the inefficacy of the digital to contain/convey the real, and we are reminded, strategically and brutally, that we are all, always, just playing pretend.
Robert Yang, Tearoom, 2017, video game made in Unity, installation view in Playthings, 2024, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University.
Photo: Lindsay Richardson and Aly Palermo.
PT 2 PLAYING PRETEND
→ There are two video works in the exhibition. The first we encounter, dear pretender, is a work by Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn. Winner (2002) had me laughing my ass off with the ruthlessness of its own self-awareness. In it, Kahn plays Lois, a downtrodden artist with the desperate fear of irrelevance oh so familiar to artists. The narrative unfolds and we discover the pretense: Lois is a “winner” — she’s won a cruise from her local radio station — but she’s also a “loser” — she’s an artist, a sculptor specifically, and a terrible (though also kind of brilliant) one at that.
Here, Lois attempts to capitalize on the platform provided by her arbitrary victory, demanding the time and attention of the radio station cameraman lured to the back of her car in a public parking lot. In her trunk, her art. In her eyes, a little hope. As I gaze through the halls of this academic art institution, I can’t help but see my own desperation in hers. How fickle our limited platforms, how muted the message.
In Ariadne (2019), by Jacky Connolly, the viewer is subjected to an intense crosscutting as the film drifts back and forth between a villa hosted in The Sims and several incongruous shots taken in and around the real New York City. The odd vignettes populated by customized characters and stunningly shot scenes in heart-shaped bathtubs are deeply ambiguous, and confusion may be the point: what can be gleaned from this narrative strikes me as existential, melancholic, and full of pain.
Both works ask us pretenders to contend with platforms, with power, with creation, and with irrelevance. Rather than bringing joy, they reveal the ridiculous; they ask us to consider our own pursuits as the absurd projects they are. Pretentions dissolve, and all that’s left is make-believe.
Playthings, 2024, installation view, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University.
Photo: Lindsay Richardson and Aly Palermo.
PT 3 PLAYING WITH TOYS
→ Let’s retrace our steps across the gallery floor. Videos require time and attention dictated by their length and not by my Twitter/X-poisoned attention span; in contrast, toys can be picked up and put down. Toys can be twisted, played with, observed, tasted, caressed, inserted, thrusted, buzzed, and tossed on a whim. We can consume them at our own pace, give them the attention we think they deserve. This is not an insight unique to the show in question, of course, but it does feel relevant to our inquiry today.
Let’s peek first at Allan Wexler’s Breathe (2018) and Hear (2018) from their Glass/Wear series. Here, two contraptions dangle from the ceiling with an alarming sense of ease. These objects-turned-playthings embrace the sensuousness of their glass medium, curving and contorting their forms to and around the body as supplemental organs presumably meant to aid respiration (containing breath as in Breathe) and audible sensation (enhancing sound as in Hear). The objects are beautiful and well-designed. They’re also divorced from interaction in a way that seems natural to the gallery space but unnatural to the demands of “play.” We look and we want to touch, but we can’t. Too fragile. This is an interesting inversion of our role as players. What does it mean when an object of such playful proportions denies our touch? What are toys that are only meant to be looked at? Collectibles? Art?
Near the back of the gallery, hung along a curtain painted in the evocative blue of medical supplies, is a mixed media work by Emily Sara. This enigmatic meeting of a gouache and pencil painting (Untitled (2013)), several gigantic saltine earrings (Untitled (Saltine with earrings 1-3) (2021)), and an image of a bear made from resin and acrylic paint (Untitled (Resin Bear) (2021)) speaks a playful logic of its own.
Sara asks us to wrestle with our own ableist assumptions about the relationship between play, “health,” and the body. Appropriating the visual logic of the healthcare industry, Sara warps and wefts our expectations. She reminds us that play sometimes looks like art itself, which is to say that sometimes we — the audience, now seeing through the perspective of the artist — find ourselves appropriating, bending, and breaking the logic of material around us for the purpose of leveling meaningful, if also very playful critiques.
Ban Patterson, Pond, 1962, facsimile of score, vinyl floor decal, wind-up frogs, performers. Installation view in Playthings, 2024, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University.
Photo: Lindsay Richardson and Aly Palermo.
PT 4: PLAYING GAMES
→ Let’s end this tour as playthings, you and I, first by visiting Pond (1962), a Fluxus Event by Ben Patterson, a founding member of the group. Pond plays within the characteristically Fluxus space between object, performance, conceptual work, and latent relational aesthetics. Faced with a grid of hyper-bureaucratic lines, numbers, and a firm set of rules, our experience of Pond is stunted by the size of the crowd that plays it. You and I are not enough. We need eight people to make it make sense.
Travel back in time to the opening and you’ll see a couple of undergrads taking a swing at their own performative interpretations of the piece. There, they release small mechanical frogs onto the grid of black tape on the ground. As the small frogs pass from square to square, the participants mock them with croaks and coos. The resulting sound is ideally a cacophonous roar, echoing that of a pond full of live frogs. Awkward undergrads fail to do the work justice, but then failure seems to be what this work was always about: the failure to translate the reality of a frog-filled pond, the absurd failure of rules, the awkward failure of a chorus of nervous kids
***
Just beyond the pond, a pisser. There, a small station of three desktop computers invites players into the world of Robert Yang’s public bathroom simulator. Paul Higham’s Call of Duty: Voxels and Sigils (Unmodelled) (2017) also uses data derived from video games and, through a process the artist calls “Autotecture,” breathes it back to life in the form of obtuse real-world objects.
Yang’s work, The Tearoom (2017), takes those propagandistic possibilities even further. It is arguably the most radical in the exhibition, even as viewers chuckle at its humorous approach to queer history and the violent legacy of state-sanctioned oppression. As we start the game, we immediately find ourselves cast as an anonymous gay man in a bathroom stall circa 1962. Three rifle-shaped cocks dangle from three glory holes to our left. Like Higham’s objects, the fleshy weapons play off the long legacy of violence in video games, making us aware of the contrast between social taboos around sex and the apparently acceptable roleplaying of warfare and murder.
Gameplay involves pissing in a stall, waiting for a fellow fairy, and sucking off his weapon-shaped member before the cops break it up. It’s all a very funny spectacle, and one that wraps the exhibition nicely with an assertion about the value of play (as in sex) as well as its dangers (anonymity and the policing of behavior on the part of a violent state apparatus). I’ve had to explain cruising to my students more than once since the exhibition opened because of The Tearoom. It’s a great gift to this small, conservative geography.
CONCLUSION: PLAYING WITH OURSELVES
→ Playthings is unusually daring for an exhibition of this scope. Speaking to its curators, I get the sense that the exhibition is both a work of love and a radical challenge. When we evoke “play” in art, it is usually deployed to shallow ends. Play with my piece, the work is interactive. Play my game, I promise it does “art” correctly. Play with the medium, I promise there are real and not strictly formal reasons to do so.
Play feels frivolous right now given the apocalyptic nature of the various crises we face, but play may also be interrogated as a site of profound potential. If we take the time to explore this work, to contend with the curators’ decisions and with the works in and of themselves, we may arrive only at more questions than answers:
What does play look like in a world as populated with violence?
What does play look like when the body operates within parameters that we deem abnormal or abhorrent?
Can we even call it “play” when the parameters of that play are so strictly managed by curators, source codes, rules, and structures of various sorts?
When does “play” become serious, and how might we disrupt, break, and/or challenge that flow?
And finally, perhaps most crucially for you, my art audience,What value is there in art that is not also playful? That does not encourage such questions, challenge our assumptions, or reveal the underlying structures that present themselves within the game we call art?
Here, we are all Playthings, and we are all better for it.
by Kelsey Sucena
Kelsey Sucena (she/they, b.1994) is a trans* photographer, writer, editor, educator, and former Park Ranger. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at the New York State College of Ceramics.
