Art as a Game and Games as Art

The article “Art as Performative Enactment” discusses Gadamer’s idea that art originates from three concepts: play, symbol, and festival, and these concepts have “direct bearing on Hans Breder’s intermedia work.” At first, I didn’t understand how the concepts of play and festival influence art (the concept of symbols was pretty obvious to me), but now it makes a lot of sense. The article talks about festivals in the sense of communities coming together to celebrate their “binding ties” and to “show themselves in their truth,” and I can definitely see how this relates to art. Art is very community-oriented in its nature, and it definitely has the power to unite people of the same community, just like festivals do. I also found it chilling to read about Breder’s interpretation of art as a festival with his project Nazi-Loop. While the idea of people coming together to celebrate as a community sounds like a positive activity, Breder puts a twist on it by showing that communities can also have extremely negative influences and meanings behind them.

                I think I most enjoyed reading about how art is like a game. I never thought of art in that light before, but it really makes a lot of sense to me. We are, essentially, submitting ourselves to the art and allowing it to call the shots. “The game plays itself through our movements;” so essentially, we are its puppets. Art tells us how to play its game and we are forced to abide by those movements and rules. We are still more powerful than art, however, because art would not exist at all if we were not there to make/propagate it. Just like the article says about Athena and Christ, if we are not participating in the game of art, then art does not exist. This sort of existentialist idea really got me thinking about different ways of viewing and perceiving art.

                I ended up finding an actual game (a video game) that’s about art and making art (http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/artgame/ArtGame.html ). The artist asks “Art Game is a game about art and a game about games. But is it art?” It’s not only interesting to think about art as a game, but also the reversal of that (games as art).