Play captivated artists late in the twentieth century. The game became a topic of discussion, an example in theory, and an object of art. In an article entitled, “Cold War Games and Postwar Art,” Claudia Mesch notes that “late twentieth-century artists consistently turned to the game as structure or subject for their art.”1 They explored theoretical and practical issues that continue to be relevant in new media art, and their game-related art provides a context for my own work.
A game of particular significance in late twentieth-century art is the game of chess, which more than a few artists appropriated in their work. Larry List, who curated “The Imagery of Chess Revisited,” a recreation of “the groundbreaking 1944 exhibition organized by Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst at the Julien Levy Gallery,”2 writes, “In a time of world conflict when many looked on helplessly, chess represented a controllable, tabletop form of ritual warfare, devoid of chance and predicated totally on skill.”3 The artists of the era “mined the rich associations of the game and its history.”4 They explored the form and function of chess set designs and created works that employed chess as a metaphor of conflict and conquest. The Modernists generally simplified the pieces to geometric forms expressing movement and function, as did the designers from the Bauhaus school. The Surrealist André Breton filled glasses with varying amounts of red or white wine to differentiate pieces and their functions. The pieces and board also inspired paintings such as Dorothea Tanning’s End Game in which a white, satin, high-heeled shoe violently crushes a bishop’s miter.5
Concerning Duchamp, List writes, “While his peers were beginning to veil the subject matter in their art, Duchamp was veiling the fact that he was making art at all, by camouflaging it as chess.”6 Duchamp, it is fair to say, was consumed by chess. It was an escape that allowed him “to live in a universe where symbolic equivalents replaced objects instead of referring to them,” a world that can be seen as the polar opposite of the Dadaist tradition for which he is famous.7 As a Dadaist, Duchamp achieved great success by creatively breaking and bending the rules of the art world; yet he had similar success as a competitive chess player, creatively following the rules of chess. Jerrold Seigel points out the irony of Duchamp’s approach to the worlds of art and chess: “one might notice first of all that unlike art–at least modern art–[chess] is a realm where the rules never change.”8
Duchamp played chess by the rules but also modified the board and pieces in interesting ways. Duchamp’s “Pocket Chess” was a modification of a commercially available chess set. He replaced the celluloid pieces with ones of his own design, adding pins to the board. The new pieces rested on the pins, which prevented them from slipping across the tiny board. The modifications, however, made the game more difficult to play.
It is well known that Duchamp sought to abandon retinal art in favor of an art that would challenge and engage the mind of the viewer. Seigel suggests that “for Duchamp, playing chess was one more way to paint a portrait of himself as a man and artist.”9 I believe that he found the level of engagement he sought not in art that was static and simply viewed, but in the activity of playing a game of chess.
André Breton once characterized the whole of Surrealism as a “persistent playing of games.”10 But the games that the Surrealists played were not art; rather, they the games were used to create art. Surrealist games were tools of automatism, a technique for spontaneously writing or drawing without aesthetic or moral censorship. When played by the rules, the games allowed a group of artists to act as one, without the dominating influence of a single ego. For example, the Exquisite Corpse (Cadavres exquis), a game developed in 1925, is a collaborative procedure of collecting and assembling words or images to compose a one work devoid of any one individual’s control over the participants. Players added sentences to a composition by following rules, or they added images based on seeing the end of what the previous player had contributed.11 The Surrealist Inquiries were question-and-answer games published regularly in various periodicals such as Littérature and La Révolution Surréaliste. These were designed to be unexpected and to reveal unsuspected and perhaps fundamental information about the respondents. The questioner might ask, “Suicide: is it a solution?” If respondents considered the question a moral one, they would often fall under editorial abuse.12 These types of surrealist games push inquiry almost to levels of inquisition, at times making them uncomfortable experiences.13
Although the rules worked, and the art works produced are unique, the artists were not able to control or predict what the final piece would say, or how it would be interpreted by players beyond an exploration into the sub-conscience. The games were designed to shed light on the inner, unacknowledged working of the human mind. The rules facilitated a letting go, a releasing of control, and leaving interpretation and chance to uncover hidden truths.
According to Mesch, “Fluxus always cultivated the qualities of play, which [George] Maciunas understood as being connected to the mass-culture phenomena of amusement and entertainment within art.”14 Fluxus games such as Chess on a Backgammon table were, of course, unplayable, but this did not make the works failures. They were artistic expressions and succeeded in making players and observers think about the nature of rules. To play chess on a backgammon table is to play neither chess nor backgammon, for the rules must be modified in a hybrid of the two games. Fluxus games were not gags; they were commentaries on the rules of making, buying, selling, and canonizing art. Through entertainment and “lack of seriousness,” they were able to grab the public’s attention, with the hope that Fluxus works “might bring the public to the realization of social and political injustice.”15
Yoko Ono’s “Play it by Trust” consisted of a series of installations based on the concept of an all white chess set. The installations vary in form. In East Hampton, New York, at Longhouse, Ono installed a 16.5 foot square marble and concrete chess set. There have been a number of small white table and chair sets produced, and an iteration of ten all white sets laid out at a conference table. Each are prime examples of a game—specifically a war game—adapted and utilized as a call for peace. In “Play it by Trust,” players ultimately lose track of their pieces as their forces move forward. The pieces become lost as “enemies” meet, and, unable to differentiate sides by color, players either have to remember where their pieces are, remember the direction their pieces face, or realize that they are all the same. The experience of becoming lost ultimately shows that both sides are equal, forcing players either to follow the standard rules for chess or to create a new way to play. Here a game that traditionally represents a war is used to show that there are alternatives to fighting, and that when people recognize their similarities, they can find new ways to play, work together, and coexist in peace.
Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi born American artist whose work met with much controversy in March 2008. Bilal’s Virtual Jihadi is a game modification once removed. To explain what I mean by “once removed,” I must trace the lineage of the original game and its first modification. In 2003 Petrilla Entertainment released Quest for Saddam, a first-person shooter in which the player hunts down and kills Saddam Hussein. In 2002, Petrilla Entertainment had released the game, Quest for Al-Qa'eda: The Hunt for Bin Laden. The Quest for Saddam game was marketed online and even promoted on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and Tech TV.16 In 2006, CNN reported that SITE (Search for International Terrorist Entities), a “a jihadist mouthpiece organization,” had created Quest for Bush: The Night of Bush Capturing, which was based on Quest for Al-Qa’eda, and they used the code from Quest for Saddam. In this game, however, players battled against armies of characters that look like George W. Bush.17 Quest for Bush was a modification of Quest for Saddam. Virtual Jihadi is a modification of Quest for Bush, in which Bilal uses the same game code but changes the skin of the protagonist to look like himself (much like Feng Membo does in Q4U). Bilal’s modification of the game is intend to illustrate the plight of Iraqis today. The game begins with the protagonist allied with American forces; as the game progresses, their allegiance shifts to Al-Qa’eda. The shift is not made for ideological reasons, but as a means of survival. To quote Bilal’s statement about the work, “In these difficult times, when we are at war with another nation, it is our duty as artists and citizens to improvise strategies of engagement for dialogue.”18 One may agree with what Bilal is saying about the need for dialogue and with what he is saying with his art, and yet recognize that his work is controversial and will continue to face challenges. One challenge is this: those who may need to understand the message of the work may protest the work and refuse to engage it. Some may condemn the work without knowing the work or its context.
Natalie Bookchin’s The Intruder is an internet adaptation of a short love story by Jorge Luis Borges.19 The story is brutal and tragic, and Bookchin makes it into a game, albeit a serious game. Over a course of ten playing levels, Bookchin uses differing Atari game interfaces as metaphors for “shooting, wounding and surveying (a woman’s body),” and she makes the metaphors “grossly apparent.”20 As players work through each level, they are rewarded with pieces of the Borges narrative instead with points. To confuse and implicate a player, Bookchin will shift the player’s position throughout the game. A player will shift to opposing sides, will assume the roll of a male and then a female character. Players also learn that in some levels, they must lose to proceed. This makes the player an accomplice in the tragic murder of a woman. If players choose to proceed, then the woman dies; if they do not, they are not able to see the full story.
Rafael Fajardo, a contemporary artist in the collaborative SWEAT, has worked on socially conscience video games related to U.S. Mexico border and immigration issues.21 The collaborative’s first game, Crosser, was completed in 2000 and is modeled after the arcade game, Frogger, a game about frogs crossing a busy street. In Crosser, the player helps Juan cross the U.S./Mexico border. Fajardo adjusted the controls of the game to make the game more difficult than Frogger. For example, using the controls to take one step forward might mean taking two steps backward, illustrating the challenges that immigrants experience when trying to cross the border. Mobility is limited by re-calibrated game controllers, and players encounter obstacles such as a polluted Rio Grand River and border guards who patrol on foot, in SUVs, and helicopters.
Mary Flanagan’s 2006 [Giantjoystick] is a ten-foot tall game controller that is modeled after the classic 1977 Atari model 2600 joystick.22 Flanagan wanted to create a collaborative interface, and she did this by increasing the controller’s dimensions. To use the joystick to play one of the classic Atari games, players have to work together. The joystick is so large that two people must move the stick back and forth and a third must push the fire button. It is simply impossible to play the game by oneself. Although the joystick is used to play traditional Atari games, Flanagan states that “it is not a software art piece but a collaborative social sculpture.”23 The work is nostalgic, prompting players to recall playing Atari games with friends and family members, and it encourages players to come together with others to enjoy the game.
Francisco Ortega-Grimaldo, a SWEAT collaborator and founder of the Ludoztli (“making games”) movement, created the board games, Crossing the Bridge and Observance. Both deal with U.S./ Mexico border issues. Crossing the Bridge is a game of chance and is similar to Monopoly and The Game of Life. The game is designed to illustrate “the symbiotic relationship of the El Paso-Juarez border by resembling the cliché of the illegal exchange of goods between both cities.”24 Players attempt to smuggle illegal cargo (i.e., food, drugs, illegal aliens) across the border. Before entering the United States, however, all cars are searched by the Border Patrol, and, if caught, the player/driver can loose the cargo, passport, or car. If a player successfully evades the Border Patrol, the player is awarded money, which can be used to buy appliances or cars to be smuggled into Mexico. To win, a player must get all of the appliances needed to furnish a first-class home.
Ortega-Grimaldo’s Observance is also chance-based, but the game is modeled after the war game, Battleship.25 Unlike Battleship, however, the goal is not to destroy an opponent’s ships. One player acts a the Border Patrol and tries to spot and prevent immigrants from entering the United States from Mexico; the other player acts as a group of immigrants seeking a green card, which has been hidden somewhere on the board, or seeking asylum in a church. Players assume the roles of hunter and hunted.
Gabriel Orozco has created modifications of ping pong, billiards, and chess. For Oval Billiard Table (1996), Orozco has modified billiards to be played by “the laws of the universe.” He has reshaped the traditionally rectangular billiard table into an oval and has suspended one of the three billiard balls on the end of a pendulum. In doing so he has made the game highly unpredictable; the swinging ball might hit one of the balls in its path or an unsuspecting player. In this modification, players have to create new rules to play. For his 1996 Horses Running Endlessly, Orozco redesigned the landscape of chess and removed all pieces but knights. He has increased the number of knights to four sets of sixteen and has increased the number of squares on the chessboard from 8 by 8 to 16 by 16. In the new landscape, the knights wander aimlessly. The modification fragments the world of the game. Orozco states, “You have this fragmentation and then you act. You have to move things, and then you commit yourself with the movement. And then, reality is coming back to you. Reality means the other player. And its coming back to you with a move that you probably expect. But it could be a surprise.”26 In a PBS interview, Gabriel Orozco talked about games as “expressions of how we believe the universe works in different cultures . . . . Every game has a connection to how we conceive nature and landscape. How we order and we structure reality.”27
Volker Morawe and Tilman Reiff of Fur Art Entertainment Interfaces sought to bridge the on-screen world of games and the real world of their work in PainStation (2001).28 The game is a duel recast as a game of pong and is played on an arcade console. Players stand across from each other, one hand on a controller and the other on a “pain execution unit” (PEU). Points are not won or lost during play; however, a player who fails to return a ball successfully is penalized by a burn, shock, or lash on the hand from the PEU. The player who first lifts a hand from the PEU loses the duel. Although players are playing pong, the game is not pong but a test of endurance, testing ability to withstand pain. What I find most interesting about the piece is what it reveals about human nature. Players become absorbed in the game, playing to avoid as well as to inflict pain, laughing at their own pain and enjoying the pain of the opponent.
Matthew Ritchie illustrates the nature of the universe in a game entitled, Proposition Player.29 The game is played in two different ways. The first is generative and is only played by the artist. The artist plays poker with a modified deck of cards, and the hands that are dealt guide the composition of paintings, which are then created by the artist. Each card has been modified to include a name and symbol representing a force or dimension at work in the cosmos (e.g., strong force, weak force, light, gravity, time, etc.). Some of the paintings that resulted from the game are M Theory (2000), based on four aces and a joker; Giant Time (2003), based on four aces; The Eighth Sea (2002), based on a straight; and After Lives (2002), based on two pair. There are fourteen in the series. In the generative version, the artist plays a card game, and the card game prompts the painting. The second version of the game is an installation, and the game is not played by the artist but by patrons. The game is modeled after the casino game, craps. Patrons roll oversized dice, and each roll is converted into information that is used to create a digital painting that is then projected on the wall. The installation explores the idea of risk and poses the question, “Is it possible to always win?” The slogan of the game is “You may already be a winner!”30 It is a game of chance, specifically modeled after the casino game of Craps. As players roll the dice, they are taken through five levels of play and a narrative relating the evolution of the universe. Ritchie converts the tradition approach of confronting ideas about the universe with awe to confronting the ideas with an act of play. He says, “The technology of the playing card is such a beautiful thing. It’s been around for a long, long time. No one mistakes it for some kind of art-related activity—it’s a playing card. You know you can throw it away.”31