Games without frontiers: Artistic encounters and entanglements with the politics of play and games

Play and games are a common trope in modern and contemporary art. In the early twentieth century, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga developed a cultural theory of play and games that would be very influential and picked up by French author Roger Caillois later on. Caillois’ connection to the Surrealist group meant he was very much attuned to the group’s use of games as tools to suppress conscious control over artistic processes. Among these artists, Marcel Duchamp is very prominent in his use of chance and especially in his interest in chess, which he used in many different ways and played professionally for many years. Scandinavian artist Öyvind Fahlström made his own versions of board-game-inspired artworks that commented on and criticised Cold-War era politics and other important issues, such as the global financial system and inequality between rich and poor countries. Emphasis on participation in 20th-century art installations included the use of the body, which remains an important characteristic and is especially evident in the popularisation of performance art. US-American artist Matthew Barney, for instance, prominently used his body in works that used physical restrictions as a way to structure many of his works. Games and play are not only ways to structure an artwork; they can also be an object of criticism, like in many of the works of Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, who, in one of her plays, views sports as a manifestation of proto-fascist values and of war in peacetime. Since games are essentially rule-based, they can be effectively used for subversion and critique. That is what both artists Yoko Ono and Ruth Catlow did with the game of chess, which had its rules subverted as a way to criticise war. In the case of activist art, game tactics can be used in order to have impact on specific issues in the real world, like the works of Spanish artist Núria Güell. My own work as a visual artist is briefly touched on at the end of each chapter. The works presented include many of the characteristics of play and games addressed throughout this research, including the use of chance, performance and political concerns