“Even in children’s games, we can find the beginnings of creative solutions. Every game, like art, contains elements of choice. To a certain extent, therefore, it can be said to be an “adult game” that preserves the charm of childhood.”
– Rudolf Fila
Pieter Brueghel the Elder painted the famous painting Children’s Games (1560) as a collective action, a massive playground on which two hundred and fifty children (or small adults) play ninety different games at once. A game as a full-fledged activity, not just as entertainment or a form of escape from reality, is not exclusively related to the world of childhood, although it plays a specific role. A game connects the world of children and adults, the world of art with the world of everyday life, and has become the subject of works of art throughout art history.
Defining the nature of games has been the concern of many thinkers. Jan Amos Komenský in Schola ludus (c. 1653) describes the play as a preparation for life. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, one of the founders of modern cultural history, writes in his book Homo Ludens (1949) about play as a cultural agent. In his words, play is a meaningful function; in an “imperfect world and confused life, it brings a temporarily limited perfection”. The French sociologist Roger Caillois, in his book Man, Play and Games (1961), classifies games into four basic categories based on whether they involve competition, chance, role-playing, or vertigo. In his essay, The Oasis of Happiness from 1957, the German philosopher Eugen Fink states that “play belongs essentially to the ontological constitution of human existence; it is an existential, fundamental phenomenon… In relation to the course of life and to its restless dynamic… playing has the character of a pacifed “present” and self-contained sense – it resembles an “oasis” of happiness – it resembles an “oasis” of achieved happiness arrived at in the desert of the striving for happiness and Tantalus-like seeking… Play gives us the present”.
The exhibition PLAY IN ART features a charming painting by Dominik Skutecký, depicting two boys – the artist’s son Ferdinand and his cousin Bartolomej – sitting at a round table in a dimly lit room, constructing a house, tower, or castle out of cards (Castle of Cards, 1890–1895, Central Slovak Gallery). It can be viewed as a showcase for a single painting, which interacts with other works by twenty-one artists from the second half of the 20th century to the present day. Together, these artworks engage in a dialogue, exploring the themes presented by the painting from various perspectives. The exhibition explores the theme of game as an archetypal activity and presents proposals for authorial cards and their involvement in the painting as ready-made. Through photo-documentation, it presents manifestations of performance and participatory art, in which the game as a principle of creation and a means of audience involvement has gained its privileged position. It exhibits playful objects, children’s work, and collaborations between children and adults, and it does not overlook family relationships. It transports us to the times of childhood and allows us to immerse ourselves in play, physical or mental, which has its meaning and place at every age.
One characteristic of contemporary art is a turn to collaboration, where artists emphasize the active viewer. While strengthening the co-authorship role places greater demands on the gallery visitor in interpreting works, sometimes stepping outside the comfort zone also brings the satisfaction of “being in the game.” As the artist and educator Rudolf Fila writes, “by creating work that requires a greater intensity of perception from us, we gain a deeper satisfaction. Cheap victories are less satisfying, which is true in all areas of creative human activity.”
– Daniela Čarná
The founder of the Central Slovak Gallery is the Banská Bystrica Self-Governing Region.