Reflection on Play

I found last week's exercise on play quite challenging. Of course, I'd like to imagine myself as a playful person, whimsical as a wisp of brightly colored silk, billowing in the breeze. Alas, this is not me. I am a methodical person, analytical, patient; more like meticulously tailored wool than an unbridled banner of silk. I can devote years to a single piece of work, never finding it finished. Even when I know the object at stake will just be tossed away, I struggle with the need to make it perfect, to realize my original vision, or some version thereof. Perhaps I need the spirit of play more than most.

Producing a large quantity of objects in a limited amount of time, embracing the imperfection, letting go of my own judgments, and trying not to think about the judgments of others; as important as I know this process is, it produces in me no small amount of anxiety. I realize that overcoming that fear and letting go of preconceptions are precisely the aim of exercises like these, but for me, that is more easily understood than accomplished. Ironically, this is perhaps yet another example of the way my overly conscious mind tries to dominate what should be intuitive.

I found it much easier to relax when we reached the group portion of the lesson. In a collaborative setting I felt comfortable throwing ideas around, letting my team members respond to them and vice-versa. I experienced less apprehension when the pressure to make final decisions about the visual impact of the piece was not on me alone. The collaborative result was a much more lively and evocative structure than anything I created on my own, loosely resembling a dragon.

The image I ended up with makes little mention of the original structure. An O’Keeffe-like abstract, this image was shot close-up with part of the sculpture placed inside a paper bag, illuminated by an LED flashlight. Somehow, the paper seems to glow with a most amazing blue radiance. I can only assume that this is the unplanned result of selecting the “wrong” lighting condition setting on my digital camera. Hurray for happy accidents!; a lovely little cliché which pretty well sums up the essence of play and why it's such a crucial sense for artists to exercise. Accidents and their unexpected results are bound to lead us in new creative directions that our logical cognitive processes never could have foreseen. If I had been trying to take a picture that looked like this one, I probably would have struggled for hours, trying to get the lighting just right, adjusting the settings on my camera; by the time I'd finished, the joy and spontaneity would have been thoroughly wrung out and who knows if it ever would have turned out just like I envisioned it in the first place. Perhaps sometimes it is necessary to forgo any particular vision at all and just skip straight to the process, letting chance and inhibition decide the outcome.

Olivia's Gude's presentation, as usual, was full of remarkable ideas and activities. Teaching surrealism to a group of young students seems like such a daunting task at first glance. Surrealism is a mystery to most well educated adults but perhaps that's just because their “creativity has been damaged by too much time in dehumanizing public schools.” I never really thought of surrealism as being all that playful. It always seemed so esoteric, and at times a bit morose. But I suppose whatever lurks down there in the subconscious, whether it's delightful and wacky or a bit dark and disquieting, one has to be able to let go of conscious control to uncover it. In that light it seems so obvious that play would be at the heart of this lesson or unit as a vehicle for facilitating the unpredictability and randomness necessary to “catch the unconscious mind unawares and capture the images of the unbridled imagination”.

I love the concept of “seeing into”, asking the students to take something that exists outside their sphere of control, such as a stain or an ink blot, and seek out what might exist within, thereby revealing much about their own perceptions. It serves as an exercise in the themes of surrealism, but can be applied at a variety of skill levels, making it accessible to everyone.