Systems in Play: Simon Nicholson\u27s Design 12 Course, University of California, Berkeley, 1966

In 1966, British artist, designer and educator Simon Nicholson (1934–1990) offered a lower division course, Design 12, at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. Controversially, Nicholson promoted play as the principal method of design and invited children to assess students’ projects on the Berkeley campus and in local schools, parks, playgrounds and hospitals. This article presents Design 12 as an important example of environmental design pedagogy in the USA, which uniquely attempted to synthesize British post-war constructivism with ‘design science’ and adventure play. The result was a course that placed play at the centre of design pedagogy, where it could combine intuition with systems building to promote ‘involved science’ and co-construction

When Attitudes Become Toys: Play Orbit and the Cybernetics of Participation

This paper discusses the exhibition Play Orbit, curated by Jasia Reichardt, then Assistant Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, in collaboration with Peter Jones of the Welsh Arts Council and first shown at the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales in Flint from 4to 9 August 1969 and then at the ICA itself from 28 November 1969 to 15 February 1970. The exhibition consisted of ‘toys, games, and playables [produced] by people who are not professionally involved with the design of playthings, but who work in the field of the visual arts’, wrote Reichardt. In its choice of playthings Play Orbit mined, in Reichardt’s words, ‘a narrow periphery of painting, sculpture, and other activities developed from, or associated with them’, but in most cases the toys on display were only tenuously associated with the traditions of painting and sculpture, and Reichardt herself was reluctant to describe them as works of art at all. Play Orbit therefore occupies a quite singular position within the history of late-modernist exhibition making, as it expanded post-formalist and conceptualist tendencies toward serial and modular construction and aleatory process beyond the category of art to where they fell under the cognate but distinct category of play. Most important of all, Play Orbit’s introduction of participation and play into the space of art exhibition correlated to a change in the ontology of the works on display, which here means simply what type of thing the work of art was or could be and what manner of engagement it required as a result. This ontology privileged performance over representation, or what things do over what they are. After all, the toys and playables were primarily of interest in play, where players learnt what a toy did and what they could do with it. The principal claim of this paper is that the ontology of Play Orbit’s toys and playables was a cybernetic one.[i] If this claim is valid, Play Orbit might be considered in view of the earlier exhibition, Cybernetic Serendipity, also curated by Reichardt at the ICA from 2 August to 20 October 1968. This would identify Play Orbit as a significant, if still overlooked, moment in the history of systems art that grew through the artistic encounter with cybernetics in the late nineteen-sixties. Its significance would be that it expands cybernetics beyond its initial applications in engineering, computing, and psychiatry, to play and toys, and the sociability to which these give rise. [i] Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, Chicago, 2010

Lessons in Playing: Robert Morris’ Bodyspacemotionthings as a Biopolitical Environment

This paper will examine how, when certain current works of art are presented as playgrounds, in which previously unknown persons encounter one another, their play is both complexly organised around play objects and other constraints and governed within what Foucault termed a biopolitical milieu. On the one hand, this development changes the values and qualities that might describe aesthetic play, or the play particular to the encounter with works of art. On the other hand, it tests Foucault’s analysis of how biopolitical techniques of governance “make live” and allow players “to be free to be free.” In more detail, biopolitical techniques govern life, Foucault claims in the first volume of History of Sexuality, so that it is “made to live.” A principal problem for Foucault in his courses at the Collège de France from 1977 to 1979 is how techniques of advanced liberal governance produce subjects in ways other than by discipline or prohibition. These are techniques that instead seek to make live, that is, to produce subjects in such a way as “to be free to be free.” Playgrounds are of particular interest here, because if they are to be governed, this must not be too much—after all, players must be free to play. Taking the 2009 restaging at Tate Modern of Robert Morris’ Bodyspacemotionthings (orig. 1971) as an example of a work of art constructed as a playground, this paper argues that the aforementioned techniques of governance can be observed critically and in correlation with aesthetic play. As Michael Podro once summarised, aesthetic play is understood to have a constructive value as sensuous exploration and provisional, sometimes spontaneous, organisation. This paper will ask just what happens when the form taken by the work of art is that of a playground. To this end, I study how the objects, structures and protocols of Bodyspacemotionthings encourage construction and organisation through aesthetic play by variously constraining and letting players be, securing against catastrophe (which would end play), and distributing encounters with risks and contingencies through wobbling, clambering, sliding, bumping, and so on. In this example, aesthetic play is constructive and a unique adventure for each participant who plays, just as it cultivates a particular set of encounters with objects. In doing so, however, aesthetic play correlates with certain techniques of governing oneself and others. Philosophy at Play, University of Gloucestershire Wednesday 10th Apri

Reading Foucault After Modern Painting: From Object to System’

By his own admission, Foucault wrote with great pleasure about painting, feeling little need for polemics or strategic interpretation (DE II, 707). But he also thought through paintings, taking them to be exemplary objects of knowledge, uniquely indicative of transformations and discontinuities in discursive and non-discursive orders. This mixture of pleasure, preference, and analysis leaves us with a diverse body of work that might still assist in our understanding of the development of modern painting. Of particular interest is that during the period in which Foucault wrote, what counted as painting was radically questioned, leading to an expansion that marked painting’s discontinuity with previous practice and criticism. My aim in this paper is to show that we can use elements of Foucault’s analyses of painting to study this expansion, in a way that Foucault’s preferences perhaps did not allow him to do at the time. Foucault traced something of this discontinuity, from his analysis of modern painting, exemplified for him by the painting-objects of Edouard Manet (La peinture de Manet, 2004) and the archaeological “excavations” of Paul Klee (Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 1973; DE I, 554), to his analysis of postmodern painting, exemplified by the “photogenic” works of Gérard Fromanger (DE II, 707-715). However, throughout these analyses, Foucault remained committed to what Stefano Catucci calls “pictorial thought” (‘La pensée picturale,’ 2001). As Cattuci notes, this allowed Foucault to assign considerable importance to pictures as “diagrams” of the present. Yet this also limited his analyses at the historical moment that, through challenges to its pictorial integrity, painting acquired a changed epistemological and discursive status. Key among these challenges was the recognition that paintings are complexly systemic artefacts, integrated with social systems of distribution, communication, interpretation, and display. I ask how this expansion from painting-objects to painting-systems changes painting’s status as an exemplary object of knowledge. There are two parts to the paper. Firstly, I identify what analysis of modern painting Foucault provides. In La peinture de Manet, Foucault describes the painting-object as a precursor of painting that is distinctly modern insofar as it no longer accepts the demands of representation. Instead, painting plays with the material properties of painting and displaces the spectator before the canvas. However, in a 1966 interview, it is the work of Paul Klee that Foucault selects to exemplify contemporary thought. This is because Klee carries out an archaeology of painting, “composes and decomposes painting into the elements which, for all that they are simple, are no less supported, haunted, and inhabited by the knowledge [savoir] of painting” (DE I, 544). Klee also collapses the post-Renaissance distinction between plastic representation and linguistic representation, demonstrating new relations between the visible and the sayable. The works of both Manet and Klee remain consistent with the pictorial dispositif even as they decompose it. In his 1975 essay on Fromanger, Foucault laments that this decomposition has now gone too far and celebrates the reinstatement of the image that has emerged from the other side of modernism. Yet this decomposition also leads to expansion, to painting-systems that are both consistent and discontinuous with the painting-objects of Manet and the archaeological excavations of Klee. In the second part, I discuss three examples of these painting-systems: Yves Klein’s The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void (1958), Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961), and Mel Bochner’s Theory of Painting series (1969-70). In different ways, each of these painting-systems organises painting itself as a recursive and distributed system open to discontinuity and contingency and to second-order investigations into its conditions. Neither modernist “object to see” (Catherine Perret, ‘Le modernisme de Foucault,’ 2004) nor postmodern hybrid image, these painting-systems are significant investigations into painting as an object of knowledge and as a complexus of the visible and the sayable. In spite of his pictorial preferences, elements from Foucault’s analyses of modern painting can offer us unique insight into such works. Painting-systems consist of material objects, events of communication, and what Focuault himself termed “discursive systematicities” (L’Ordre du discours, 1971). Studying their development allows us to further the Foucauldian attempt to “think discontinuity,” as Judith Revel has described it (Foucault : une pensée du discontinu, 2010), and to reconsider what critical tools Foucault’s analyses of painting might still provide

Recursion and the Question: \u27When is Art?\u27 The Case of Tino Sehgal

This paper considers how two recent works by artist Tino Sehgal require us to ask again Goodman’s question, ‘when is art?’ No documentation of any sort is provided of these works, which consist of little more than performances repeated for the duration of an exhibition and whatever commentary is made upon these in various formats and media (reviews, press listings, word-of-mouth, and so on). Consisting of the transformation of actions rather than materials, these works are clearly not things, in the ordinary sense of the word. However, in answering the question ‘when?’ with regard to these works, it will be necessary to take into account something dismissed by Goodman—namely, self-reference. A crucial aspect of what these works do as art is to make self-reference productive, or more precisely, recursive. Arguably, Goodman’s account of the referential properties of art works requires further development because of the quasi-theatrical and expanded status of works such as Sehgal’s and the problems of construction and temporality raised by them in the absence of conventional specifications of medium. I will demonstrate that an understanding of recursive form derived from second-order cybernetics allows us to describe what distinguishes such works in time