Play trip to London

Friedrich Frobels gifts were design for Kindergartens or children's gardens they were all a little prescriptive and involved making patterns but I would love to have some for my shelves.  I visited the exhibition "Play well " at the Welcome center on Wednesday I also went to Tate modern to see the   the work of Nam June Paik a Korean artist who navigated the edges of Fluxes and had worked with Jon Cage and Joseph Beuys before they were famous.

The play exhibition had a lot of art in it and the art exhibition had a lot of play in it, in some ways this felt good but it also made me wonder where I fitted in the mix.  I suppose I am an artist who is interested in play and my main interest is in making art.  Nam June Paik had fastened musical instruments to strings and dragged them around to make noises and it made me think of my exhibition of things on strings.

I had not really been thinking of art references but I had remembered a Gordon Matte Clark piece where he had walked around New York with a large magnet on a string and collected bits of random metal.  I like Fluxus works especially the idea of the score and the introduction of the accident and some of Brecht's ideas on intermediality  The thing about this kind of artistic backdrop is you find more meat in it if it remains a little bit of mythological history - the more you look into it especially beyond the works the less useful it becomes.  The shorthand of history allows it to go somewhere new, be reworked rather than pinned down.  Fluxus always seems to have an edge of ego and control that I'm not that sure about. The accidents feel contained and authored the artists hold on to their subjective position.  Art history is a well for artists, sometimes the water is father away  than the length of the bucket rope, sometimes the well is dry and sometimes the water has gone bad but it is always a well.

Philosophy or maybe theory if we like doesn't work like a well it works like a map of where to find a well or perhaps instructions of how to dig one.  I read about 50 pages of Barads Meeting the Universe Half Way on the train.  I have to say it was very good and I found it much easier to take seriously than Bennets Vibrant Matter.   I'm on a journey into new materialism to find an area where I can talk and not feel like an idiot.  Its making me feel a little bit uncomfortable as there is something essentially against the grain for me. Some of this may be being a privileged white man, some of it may be a life long commitment to humanism and trying to be a good human.  I am resistant to the dissolution of the subjective, it sometimes feels like just a mind game, a trick of positioning.  I secretly think that the conflict may not be the theory as much as the way it clashes with how we imagine art, how art can be speculative.  I know that for lots of the theorists this is a problem easily worked through, we can still have our subjective agency but it doesn't take priority over everything else. When you try to be an artist the drive to realise your ideas becomes a big part of who you are.  The motivation for the work, the priority, is to hold it together against multiple forces, a subjective dispersed across ecologies is difficult.

This is an image of the Opies skipping in a school. I really liked the play exhibition- it wasn't very academic but it did remind me how little I know about play and the play movement.  There was a limited amount about adventure play but a great film of Lady Allen it was nice to see her in the flesh.  She talked about building 500 playgrounds withing 5 years after the war, it made me feel sad that they are all closing and I recognised a danger within this nostalgia.  There was a brilliant film of a group of boys let loose in a gallery destroying sculptures and then rebuilding things and making dens although it actually wasn't that organised they really just smashed stuff up and then felt a bit guilty.

The artist Adam James who does lots of work about Larps had got into loose parts and made a strange sculpture that it seemed impossible to do anything with.  This said the enabler people were brilliant and loads of people were having a good go to build mini Stonehenge.  My reflection was although he talked about Loose parts theory he hadn't really taken it on board.  I have read the short piece by Nicholson and like the chapter in Anarchy in action by Colin Ward there is a definite lack of content in these texts.   They talk of different times and different worlds and I really do like them but they don't lay things out very clearly rather they put the issues at hand central. 

Writing this jumble I wonder if I'm getting distracted again I'm certainly working and reading and not doing anything else other than read write think and look but it feels a bit tractionless again, like a big tank stuck in the mud - that's a reference to Deleuze and Guattari's war machine now - last year it would of been a metaphor about feeling stuck.