Bernadette Anzengruber
Brian Fuata
Agatha Gothe-Snape
Michaela Gleave
Kathryn Gray
Michael Poetschko
Teik-Kim Pok
Sarah Rodigari
Nina Stuhldreher
There are challenges of agency and expediency for artists engaging with sites, people and ludic processes in between. Of course these have always been tricky for everyone.
“Nothing is wrong with anything,” said Henry Ford in 1928, when asked about the possibility of serious competition, “and I don’t see any reason to believe that the present prosperity will not continue.”* Henry may not have been playing games, but his reductive processes of making making cars and making profits ever more efficiently were ingenious and certainly shifted expectations of labour and leisure. We are still playing out the consequences. With more contemporary speculative development, play can be considered in terms of managing risk. Not so long before our recent global financial crisis, the populist theoretical financier Nassim Nicholas Taleb discussed such play in terms of “a systematic program of how to live in a world we don’t understand very well.”** Work and play are never finite. And both can be absurd and deeply serious.
With rules of play we are inventing order. There are formal rules that artists and audiences play with. You and I organise information and materials, space and time as coordinates for our actions therein. There are roles to enact and experience. Games are a space for improvisation within shared teleologies and disputed boundaries.
This exhibition and performance project Rules of play draws on conceptual and perfomative processes of negotiating common rules and ludic spaces. The Austrian and Australian artists involved are diverse, and this project extends conversations and collaboration over time and distance. Each has been asked to play by a set of rules, to devise systems for trial and error and enterprise. This is a process of artistic research and performative solutions.
While setting parameters for here and now, the artists refer back to what has already happened and towards a speculative reimagining what may yet be possible. Rules of play engages with the gallery and civic spaces, local and broader systems, and colonial and imperial and utopic histories. With the premise of play you may be implicated within the work.
“Moonwalkers are the masters of beginnings. Their steps are heavy, not just because there is zero gravity but because their steps are full of hope and promise of new worlds and great forward leaps into new frontiers and beyond, beyond young boys’ dreams. Their steps say ‘hello universe’ - ‘is there anybody out there?’”***
You can begin here with your own live body and awareness. Look about you, observe everything. Elucidate how and why, and remember what came before. Through the configuration of words, the transposition of affect, with gestures and transactions, try to move meaning. Think about the most incredible thing ever – that moment when you brushed fame and glamour and success – and what’s now missing? Repeat more than necessary. Skip whatever steps are required. Discuss.
This project plots parameters of asserting relevance, in terms of local and broader cultural interplay. Or where those rules and we fail, and games can be redrawn.
Rules of play will be staged at Tin Sheds Gallery in Sydney, 8 September - 1 October 2011. The first iteration was at Bell Street Project Space in Vienna in September 2010.
Images - Agatha Gothe-Snape, The outcome is certain - part one (above, 2009-10), Michael Poetschko, Kontaktzone / Contact zone, photography, mapping and audio. Installation detail. (below, 2010)
* Henry Ford in 1928, just before the great depression and his disastrous attempt to build a rubber plantation empire in Brazil. Quoted by Greg Grandin in Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, 2009.
** Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007.
*** quoting Sarah Rodigari in dialogue for Rules of play, 2011.
