Art Lies, Volume 50, Spring 2006 Page: 34
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Justin Parr, I Own You, 2004
Vinyl ink on vinyl
Courtesy the artistperformance, which was, in actuality, part of a city-wide series of
site-specific installations organized in honor of Jefferson's legacy.
Fiore is an artist who, in practice, invents via play and plays via
invention. It is as if Fiore has only one rule: the natural functions
of every object or thing must be exploited, but no thing may be
used in an expected or normal way. She has backed up over objects
in her Subaru to make sculptures, created a painting with its rear
windshield wiper, made paintings with firecrackers, a souped-up
lawnmower, and a Scrambler amusement park ride. Her realization
of the reimagined potential in the world of objects invites everyone
to play with "the rules" and adapt and refashion material culture in a
human context, establishing an open system in which conventional
routines and expectations can be questioned. While this kind of re-
contextualization may have been one of the framing assumptions
of Dadaist play, it is also, more fundamentally, one of the basic
premises of creativity and flexible thought.
Open-system play theory has been explored by a variety of
thinkers in different fields, including psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott
and philosophers Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Winnicott saw
the stuff of play as potentially present in every situation and the
capacity to respond creatively as a fundamental element or sign of
a healthy psyche. That is, he perceived play as a function shared byall-adults and children-who occupy healthy emotional contexts.
Wittgenstein's language play, with its determined indeterminacy
and inconclusive conclusions, and Derrida's deconstruction both
require open-system play in which the attributes, relations and func-
tions of things are brought into constant, redefining recombination.
Derrida's principle that "deconstruction is always already con-
tained in the architecture of the work"13 has now functioned for three
decades through various modes of cultural production as a playful
means of reconsidering and restructuring things, ideas, texts and
phenomena. More recently, Oxford Brookes University Professor of
English Rob Pope synthesized a cooperative view of creativity whose
first attribute is "working and playing/work as play"14 and goes on
to include literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's "complexly dynamic
notion of 'responsiveness/response-ability/responsibility"'" 15 and
Pope's own idea of "co-becoming."
Another Brooklyn artist, writer and curator, Matt Freedman, with
fellow curators, Mary Ceruti, Director of SculptureCenter, and Sina
Najafi, editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine, took the idea of play
public with The Paper Sculpture Show in 2003, where visitors were
invited to create the works in the exhibition based on instructions
and materials for paper sculptures provided at the site. What was
most interesting for Freedman, however, was the way in which the34 ARTL!ES Spring 2006
U
The Project for the Old American Century, Untitled
Altered WW II era poster
Courtesy oldamericancentury.org
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Bryant, John & Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 50, Spring 2006, periodical, 2006; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228015/m1/36/: accessed May 4, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .