Games and play occupied a central, if misunderstood, role in modern art in the twentieth century. Many art-historical narratives have downplayed the ways in which artists returned to play and to games as analogues to art practice, as metaphors for creativity, or as models for art criticism. The essays collected in this volume investigate the fundamental importance of supposedly nonserious activity and attend to the ways in which artists used play and games in order to reconsider their practice and to expand their critical strategies. With subjects ranging from early twentieth-century manifestations of games and play in Surrealism, Duchamp, Picasso, and Bauhaus photography to their repercussions in Fluxus, performance, public practice, and new media, these essays establish the diversity and potential of games and play and point toward an alternate trajectory in the development of modern art.

Aside from the editor, the contributors are Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Jon Cates, Mary Ann Caws, Susan Laxton, Claudia Mesch, Kevin Moore, Gavin Parkinson, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Owen F. Smith, Ellen Handler Spitz, Stephanie L. Taylor, and Debra Wacks.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

David J. Getsy

Part I: Games and Play in Twentieth-Century Art History

From Judgment to Process: The Modern Ludic Field

Susan Laxton

The Duchamp Code

Gavin Parkinson

My Utopia: Play in Bauhaus Photography

Kevin Moore

Serious Play: Games and Early Twentieth-Century Modernism

Claudia Mesch

Surrealist Gaming: Rules and the Rest

Mary Ann Caws

Playing in the Sand with Picasso: Relief Sculpture as Game in the Summer of 1930

David J. Getsy

Joseph Cornell’s Dangerous Games

Stephanie L. Taylor

Playing with Dada: Hannah Wilke’s Irreverent Artistic Discourse with Duchamp

Debra Wacks

Dick Higgins, Fluxus, and Infinite Play: An “Amodernist” Worldview

Owen F. Smith

1Subversive Toys: The Art of Liliana Porter

Florencia Bazzano-Nelson

Part II: Contemporary Artists’ Views on Play and Games in New Media and Public Practices

Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Running and Gunning in the Gallery: Art Mods, Art Institutions, and the Artists Who Destroy Them

Jon Cates

Coda: Distinguishing Art from Play

Zigzagging with Full Stops from Play to Art

Ellen Handler Spitz

List of Contributors

Index