Art as Play?: The Digital and the Surreal

"Who are you today?" I respond, mock-seriously, gazing down affectionately at a tousled blond three-year-old who had greeted me at the door in answer to my ring, "And who am I?"

Direct links between children's play and art have been presumed by philosophers, praised by poets, and promulgated by psychologists, not least among them Freud (1908), who asks rhetorically: "Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer . . . ?" (143). Indeed, claims about the association of play and art have occurred in such profusion that it would be daunting to make a compendium of all those who have set forth relevant ideas. A brief eclectic list of authors who have done so either explicitly or implicitly from a variety of disciplines might feature philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau, poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Rilke, the cultural historian Huizinga and art historian Gombrich, as well as literary critic Benjamin and psychoanalysts Freud, Erikson, and Winnicott, but such a list would exclude an impressive array of visual artists who have likewise made such claims, albeit often in nonverbal as well as in verbal form. Such claims include the propositions that children's play leads to art, that play is an early form of art, that art itself—in reverse—is a form of play, that art-making is to adults what play is to children, and that art of the highest caliber involves a sort of play. Each of these premises deserves, of course, separate examination and evaluation; yet, in this brief space, I want merely to explore their general relevance for a few salient examples of modern and contemporary art.

Granted that we can and do find connections between child's play and art, it seems odd that, whereas, all children play, very few children grow up to become artists. If the links are strong and obvious, why should this be so? What is it that gives a work of art the spin that takes it sailing over the picket fence and out into the world so that strangers want to contemplate it, enjoy it, learn from it, and return to it? Whereas, on the contrary, a child's play occurs within the confines of the domestic sphere and, with rare exceptions, remains there. A child's play or "art" is of little interest to anyone outside his or her own family circle with the possible exception of dedicated educators and researchers. Works of art, on the other hand, when they attain public significance, do so because they transcend their first contexts; they extend beyond the immediate range of their makers. They possess and acquire a cultural value that surpasses private relevance. Thinkers, however, who would draw straight lines from children's games, drawings, riddles, and imaginary lives to art are prone to gloss over this inconvenient distinction.

First, to address what we might mean by "play," let us turn to Marina Warner (2005), who highlights the ambiguity and fecund nature of this term by including among its many meanings such ideas as "mimicry and laughter, feigning and struggle, illusion and display, performance, masquerade, ritual and ceremony." She adds "games, sports, and races, tumbling and juggling, guising and miming, flyting and flirting—even gambling" (8). A manifold cluster of signification, not unlike the art associated with it.

My special interest here is to query the association between play and art as it seems to be occurring in work created by manipulations of technology in our age of advancing electronic reproduction, art that might well be typified by such a landmark event as the 010101: Art in Technological Times exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001). Indeed, the interactive digital works in that show and in many others since the turn of the century invite spectators into worlds of co-manipulation, improvisation, and virtual reality. Viewers interact with the exhibits in a state of wonder at the playful and enjoyable possibilities of the emergent media. Such work makes us ask ourselves whether, in fact, art has actually morphed into play...