Description
Book SynopsisExamines the wide-ranging influence of games and play on the development of modern art in the twentieth century.
Trade Review“Far too often the seriousness of high art has been invoked at the expense of compelling art’s sheer gratuitousness, irrepressible impertinence, and spontaneous playfulness. A welcome and particularly bracing overturning of this staid approach is David J. Getsy’s From Diversion to Subversion, a collection of lucid essays by established and emerging scholars, which focuses insightfully on the oxymoronic turns of serious humor, games played in earnest, and ludic research.”
—Robert Hobbs,Virginia Commonwealth University
“Getsy’s anthology is a strong piece of work, with older theories of play marshaled not to justify the fun house that the art world has become in our day, but to remind us of how deeply modernists have engaged with a range of ludic possibilities.”
—Jed Perl The New Republic
“The book's project is a worthy one; play as a source for the creative imagination has too long been secondary. One hopes that this slender volume of well-researched essays succeeds in its task.”
—A. J. Wharton Choice
Table of Contents 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
