PLAYING THE ART GAME

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SYNOPSIS

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We’ll use a recent exhibition as a jumping off point to explore the dangers of attempting a radical confrontation of the status quo from within the structures and conventions of the ‘art-world’. Our contention is that in being aligned with ‘art’ (either explicitly, through self-application of the label ‘art’, or implicitly through exploiting the structures of ‘art’) radical acts run the danger of negating their own ends; whilst ‘art’ is many things, we’ll consider its potential as an arm of the State – a contortion of form that works to neutralize its true essence, an essence that often has very little to do with the structures of the ‘art-world’; and which, for reasons that will hopefully become clear, is inherently in opposition to restrictive State structures.

We’ll also consider the potential for art to act as a fetish or resting place; a world within which radicalism can be safely play-acted without the threat of substantial change - change that may, at bottom, threaten the structures upon which the ‘art-world’ is built.

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> Introduction
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INTRODUCTION

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How does the public participate in political dialogue? What constitutes public opinion? What do people understand “public space” to mean? The significance of the social plays a central role in the discourse on art. Concepts such as participation, collaboration, the social turn, and community-based art have clearly influenced both the production and the reception of art.

The exhibition project Playing the City reveals public space to be a collective, free, and designable space. From 20 April to 6 May 2009, twenty-three international artists, such as Ulf Aminde, Dara Friedman, Dora García, Cezary Bodzianowski, and Sharon Hayes, will turn central Frankfurt into the site of countless activities and situations, ranging from performances by way of installations to “guerrilla actions” that involve the audience in a wide variety of ways.

Playing the City can also be followed on the Internet, as a digital extension of public space: the Web page www.playingthecity.de—created especially for the show—brings together all the video, text, and visual materials, an exhibition calendar, and a blog. It is thus a catalog and exhibition forum in one. An office and exhibition headquarters has been set up in one of the Schirn’s gallery space where the exhibition team can do its work in public: fine-tuning the Web site, answering questions about the exhibition, and organizing, commenting on, and documenting all the actions. In addition, works by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Nasan Tur, among others, and videos of the actions that have already taken place will be shown in the gallery as a film loop.


This text comes from the press release for an event that took place recently in Frankfurt, called Playing the City. The release goes on to mention that the event is a “continuation of the ideas of important avant-garde movements of the twentieth century” and cites Dada, the Situationist International and Fluxus as being amongst these forebears. We’ll be considering the ambitions of this event, and reflecting on the use of viewing actions like these through the lens of ‘art’.


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> Art and the Everyday
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ART AND THE EVERYDAY

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To get a little perspective on the motivations and intentions of Playing the City, it will be handy to consider those avant-garde that it cites in its release. We’ll be interested in why they came about and why they took the form that they did. What were their ideas and motivations, and how might these still be relevant today?


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> Dada
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