Tom Grey is on the MA Fine Art: Digital course at Central Saint Martins and recently shared a survey with UAL Post-Grad Community to support the research paper he is writing for his MA. The survey was primary data for a research paper, which Tom is writing as part of his studies for the MA Fine Art Digital course.
The paper seeks to explore the link between art and play, using the characterisation of play by Huizinga in his book, Homo Ludens.
Thank you to everyone who completed the survey I shared with the Post-Grad Community. I thought you might be curious to know why I shared the survey, and what the findings were.
Huizinga characterises play very broadly (emphasis mine):
Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not meant”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.
It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.
The survey was completed by 88 people, and the results were as follows:
The results appear to support the idea that, like play, art is something that absorbs us “intensely and utterly” by with most respondents agreeing that art making is engrossing (83% agree vs 5% disagree).
Likewise, respondents agree that it is something that exists “outside of ‘ordinary’ life” (72% agreed vs 16% disagree).
There were two questions looking at the “formation of social groupings”, and while respondents didn’t agree that art brought them closer to other artists (38% agreed vs 37% disagree), they did agree that artists were different for other people (69% agreed vs 17% disagree).
Respondents were asked if they make art “for its own sake” to test the idea that art, like play, is connected to “no material interest”. A majority agreed (64% agreed vs 15% disagree), but the large number of neutral or don’t know answers suggested the question was hard to answer.
Answers to the two questions related to “proper boundaries” were likewise mixed, with a slight minority of respondents saying they had a special place/time to make art (38% agree vs 39% disagree), and only around half (53% agree vs 17% disagree) agreeing that they only made art “consciously”.
The survey did not appear to support the idea that art, like play, is “freely undertaken”, with only half of respondents saying that they couldn’t make art if they were “forced to” (50% agree vs 26% disagree).
Most observers in the literature find that art shares a lot of characteristics with play, but has features that make it distinctive, which seemed to be the case here too. Even when considering a broad characterisation of play, like Huizinga’s, this seems to still be the case.
However, if we accept that there is significant overlap between art and play, there are still broad insights to be gained from the comparison of the two.
When we play, we establish ‘rules’ and anyone who breaks those rules is ‘cheating’ or ‘not playing properly’ and is usually ostracised from the group. If art is play, implicit social rules might relate to what we call ‘art’ and how we produce it.
Rules can be established, but they can also evolve as the game is played, and in general a lot of art history, especially modern art history, can be viewed as a series of influential artists deliberately breaking the ‘rules’ about what is ‘art’, and then slowly changing the ‘rules’. As a stretch, Contemporary Art itself could perhaps be seen as a new ‘meta game’ where the ‘objective’ is to push the rules of the ‘art game’ further and further.
One aspect of play that is highlighted by Huizinga across multiple characteristics, is its separation from everyday life. Play stands “outside of ordinary life”, it demands “boundaries of time and space”, we enter into it “intensely and utterly”, and those that play form groups that “stress their difference from the common world”. If we embrace the idea of art as play, we should embrace this separation in art too.
Moreover, if art is like play, we should embrace that it is fundamentally a social activity. As global crisis bites, and backlash against consumerism looms, now is surely the time for the artist to move beyond the stereotype of the ‘tortured lone genius’, dying penniless while their work sells for millions, toward a new role, as a sociable maverick, a shaman who stands outside of the everyday, but who brings people together through artistic ‘play’.
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