“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”  – Friedrich Schiller (Schiller’s Werke, Nationalausgabe, Vol.20, pg.359.)

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You don’t have to buy into the absolutism of Schiller’s proclamation to acknowledge that the 18th century poet, playwright and philosopher was on to something with his theories around a human play drive. He believed that play allows an escape from the rigid structures provided by societal expectations, and in some ways melds our sensual experience with rationality, providing a path to both appreciation of aesthetics and critical thinking. Ultimately he saw play as an expression of freedom.

During the 200 years since, we have seen repeated waves of interest in the relationship between play, or playfulness, and the aesthetic experience as well as the production of art. Freud connected childhood play to creativity in ways that influenced generations:

“Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him ? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.” (Ref.)

The Surrealists embraced both his notions about what drives child play and his concept of the “uncanny,” so often associated with dolls. The Expressionist artists of The Brücke proclaimed that you had to return to seeing the world through a child’s eyes. The movement towards “Primitivism” included not just a focus on cultures untouched by technology and modern civilization, but on childhood productions of art as well.

In 1948 a group of French artists formed CoBrA, which publicly claimed the drawings of children as their inspiration. A child-like aesthetic was on the rise, although its content was very much about the existential sorrows of a post-war society. More recently, you have artists like Cy Twombley, Jean Tinguely, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name a few, whose creativity is informed by the processes, forms of expressions or materials involved in childhood play. And now we can engage with work by Ai Weiwei, whose most recent exhibition, Child’s Play, at Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York City, ends this week. Using Lego Bricks exclusively, he translates art-historical canvases, famous portraits and political news images into the medium of play.

Child’s Play. It’s your turn to play! Serious Play: Translating Form, Subverting Meaning. Prototyping Play. Push Play. Play Well. Playing Rules! (a weird translation from the literal German show title Playing means Changing.) These are all titles of exhibitions across the last years, some with formidable collections, others with brilliant ideas, most of them with an interactive component that hopes to increase cultural engagement.

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Play we shall. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University offers the opportunity to play while exploring art (or vice versa?) with its current exhibition Just Playin’ Around. Luckily for us, and unsurprisingly, given the caliber of the curator duo Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin, the work on view provides much more than the opportunity to take a break from the real world. There are serious issues to be thought through, new insights to be gained, novel connections established — in other words, reality and critical thinking intrude on the unstructured spontaneity so desired. The show is thus something of an articulation of Schiller’s concept of play: a synthesizing, through contradiction, of the human experience of sense and reason.

The exhibition stretches across two floors, walls painted in saturated primary colors that echo kids’ rooms of yore before the current vibe of sad beige children (a fun meme that is mocking trendy design ideas for pastel environments reflecting parental rather than kids’ tastes.) Exhibits span a range of modes — sculpture, installation, video reels, paintings, and costumes, featuring the work of Derrick Adams, Calvin Chen, Jeremy Okai Davis, Latoya Lovely, Jillian Mayer, Takashi Murakami, Jeremy Rotsztain, Heidi Schwegler, Joshua Sin, Matthew Earl Williams, and Erwin Wurm. The displays are very clearly marked for presence or absence of interaction, with the signage continuing the bubbly graphics of the handouts and announcement posters. Playful, perhaps; space-saving for sure — the spatial arrangements allow for introduction of and extended commentary by the artists in tight construction.

The entrance hall displays two columns made out of furry toys that artist Joshua Sin found in the bins of Goodwill stores. These are the kinds of soft companions embraced in the cribs and strollers of the younger set. They are the perfect metaphor for this exhibition, if you consider them transitional objects: a link to  D.W. Winnicott‘s “transitional object” theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts. During childhood they form a bridge towards growth. The artist, however, reflects on what we lose in the transition: “innocence, imagination and unbridled joy.” Have to disagree — innocence lost, perhaps, but imagination and unbridled joy are available still, and in fact captured by quite a few items within this show, or the reaction of this viewer.

That said, I was quite taken by the other sculpture that Sin created: a hundred or so small, mass-produced Beanie Babies, tightly encased in acrylic boxes, forming columns. They reminded me of display cases in airports or department stores, where merchandise is aimed at customers, young and old. The collectible quality of these creatures lures kids into a mode of amassing toys rather than forming a relationship with a few individualized ones. Creating want, rather than protecting from a world of commerce; shaping future consumers, fixed on brand. A poignant reminder of how even play can be devoured by market mechanisms.

And speaking of brand, that is how one of, if not the most, famous contemporary Austrian artists is sometimes labeled. Erwin Wurm is represented at PSU with two instantiations of his One Minute Sculptures. This is a series that integrates time into the artwork, as well as interaction with the viewer, by offering basic materials, often casually collected as found objects, placed on a pedestal and provided with simple instructions: Do this or that with it for a minute, or as long as you can. Photos can be taken and archived, prolonging the otherwise short-lived sculptural constellation of a toy dog hanging on your shoulders. Wurm has been doing this for almost thirty years, restricting displays to galleries and museums for fear of it becoming a gimmick, and proudly announces that “only” 129 or so exist. Define gimmick, again?

An ongoing retrospective of his life’s work at the ALBERTINA in Vienna (which also shows other, equally identifiable series) at the occasion of Wurm’s 70th birthday sees the artist expand. The One Minute Sculptures are now rid of pedestals, come without instructions and provide abstract sculptures we are supposed to interact with. It was “too clean” up until now, according to Wurm. Mostly, though, the idea is to undermine the pathos elicited by so many highbrow, serious works of art, and engage the viewer with whimsey, fostering connection by playful interaction.(Ref.) And to be perfectly honest, an installation of his, an upside-down truck made into a platform inviting you to peruse the Mediterranean that I saw at an earlier Venice Biennale, was a striking commentary on the movement of goods and bodies across that body of water at a time where the refugee crisis changed political constellations in Europe. More thought, less play. For me, memorable.

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A video screen spanning the entire back wall of the gallery displays a loop of an azure sky with little white clouds and some inverse sky-writing in child-like script, slowly fading into oblivion. Maybe you can’t access your inner child — but you surely can still be treated like one, with the reassuring message that you’ll be OK (where is the pat on the back?). The mirror-image distortion of the words questions said sentiment, of course. What can we trust in a world where up is down or left is right, truth made ephemeral? Where assurances disappear while we are still trying to decipher them? Clever and beautiful work by Jillian Mayer.

Speaking of inner child, it surely helps to get back into play mode if the appropriate environmental cues signal the possibility of immersion in child-oriented environments. Latoya Lovely provides an inviting installation that is dominated by color, geometric murals, familiar books and object, artificial trees that hold clothes for (encouraged) dress up, and supersized magnetic wall puzzles that multiple people tried to rearrange during my visit. Environmental immersion is clearly en vogue, and people are willing to wait in line for hours to enter spectacular playgrounds that mix art and playfulness, like Meow Wolf in New Mexico (where I stood in said lines, dished out unspeakable sums of money, and still wonder why,) or now Hopscotch here in Portland.

The small scale and appreciated calm of Lovely’s installation somehow made a much more important point than the circus-like atmospheres mentioned above, bent on sating our unquenchable yearning for spectacle: Play (just like art) consists of making, taking apart and crafting back together, transforming space, and improvising, and so on. All of these processes are enabled or fostered by appropriately child-friendly environments where the materials themselves speak of playfulness and encourage reorganization.

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There is playfulness and then there is playing games, both an important aspect of experiencing the world through the lens of play. One is aimless, rule-free, independent. The other is often goal-oriented, bound by rules, and certainly open to or even in need of repetitive, practiced sequences rather than spontaneous moves. (Practice those scales and those pitches! Memorize those opening gambits in chess!)

Think of board games, Mahjong or Backgammon, or playing a musical score, or competitive games in sport. Jeremy Okai Davis’s paintings on the lower gallery level offer depictions of sports figures who surmounted obstacles and succeeded in a racist world, intentionally questioning the rules of the (larger) game. His work is well-rooted in a long line of artworks that made the game, and the social structures surrounding it, itself a topic, starting with the preoccupation with card playing in the 16th/17th century. Lucas van Leyden’s The Card Players, Carravagio’s The Cardsharps, LaTour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs are all examples where issues beyond play were slickly introduced: who wants to have fun, who is competitive who likes to take risks or is cautious, who is strategic, who is willing to cheat, and who is good or bad at losing the game. And who is, we can now add, included or excluded, by invisible rules reaching back to Jim Crow. Play and the fate of players as a metaphor, then, representing social conditions.

I am not a gamer, but the role that video games have come to play around the world cannot be underestimated. There are whole museums now dedicated to video game art, offering exhibitions concerned with all the questions I’ve raised so far, applied to the artificial screen. The British National Video Museum, for example, right now offers an exhibition, The Art of Play, that focuses on how artists create the mood and textures of the video scenes. Video games are the perfect template to create or enhance myths, through world-building and often sly ideological influence. They can be a vehicle to allow people to tend to baser instincts without real-life consequences, but they can also be the seed for incredible levels of creativity in the player who has options to design their path forward.

For me, the most intriguing and thought-provoking installation in the entire Just Playin’ Around exhibition tackles questions around the psychology of gaming. Matthew Earl Williams (Confederate Tribes of Grande Ronde) took stills of the game Red Dead Redemption 2, the successor of one of the most famous video games ever, Red Dead Redemption. Both have won critical acclaim and multiple awards, and have been wildly successful commercially.

They are set in the late 1800s in the Wild West, with themes concerning cycles of violence, masculinity, redemption, and the American Dream, and the role player can choose who to be and with whom to align (multi-player mode possible), making practical and moral choices that have various rewards and punishments attached. Williams created a series of tintypes, popular in the late 19th century, and got permission from various players to capture images of their avatars, which they had imaginatively costumed to stay in character. He raised the question of why some would wish to be Native Americans during a historical period of their extreme suffering, when most players chose to be cowboys. Alas, no answer to that, as far as I could detect.

But the transfer of a digital fantasy creation onto a historical medium, the tintype print, created an illusion of historicity, when it had been all frictionless role play safely removed from real-life massacres. Add to that the choice of framing: garish, elaborately detailed and carved gold frames, that I immediately associated with the Orientalist paintings you find in the Louvre or other national museums. The exotic “other” is squeezed into frames representing the taste and status of an entirely different world, their brightness furthermore a visual contrast enhancement of the darkness of their subject. I have no idea if that was intended by Williams, but the association to framing of outsiders is riveting.

Alternatively, these frames could represent the highbrow art found in museums, now linked to the lowbrow art of video games, which draw in millions and millions of people, something museums can only dream of. Active play, connected to aesthetic experience of the created fantasy worlds, seems to be an ingredient we should indeed have a closer look at.

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“Art is a complete fairytale – art is an unending child’s birthday party (forever, and ever, and ever, like cookie monster.” — Jonathan Meese, Ausgewählte Schriften zur Diktatur der Kunst, Berlin, 2012, p.474. (My translation.)

The longing to live in a world of play, and the assumption that play, intent on breaking the chains of reason, will enhance creativity, often go hand in hand in the contemporary art world. There is nothing wrong to focus on escape when life is overall hard and overwhelmingly complex. Floating two-story-high yellow rubber duckies on European harbors, as Florentijn Hofman did, or building a pink castle inside a Danish museum, as Meese and associates were known to do, provided fun for most involved, levity that is perfectly acceptable once you relegate highbrow “art” to the background, at least for a stretch of time. Did it bring back a piece of childhood, though, as intended? Can you really reenter a childlike mode of playing, and does that have an actual effect on creativity? Is it not just appearance, a strategy, since the child-like aesthetic and the juvenile, playful demeanor are a consciously developed style of the artists, one which they consistently extend to adulthood? — or so asks art critic Larissa Kikol, who is an expert on the subject matter.

Contemporary psychologists have some answers to offer, although a core question remains unresolved. For one, try as you might, you cannot completely reenter the state of a young child that you left behind long ago. Even if I make it as easy as possible, leading you through age regression via hypnosis, for example, you will draw me a picture you think is that of a child, but which differs significantly from those drawn by actual children. We simply cannot erase all of what we have learned growing up.

In a limited way, however, play does enhance creativity. Research tells us that one of the prerequisites of creativity is to focus less on external rewards and payoffs, and to engage in activity just for the pleasure of it. A sense of play can help with this– after all, you are chasing fun. Likewise, a prerequisite for creativity is a willingness to step away from patterns and customs and explore the unknown and often ambiguous, a willingness to take risks; and free play can help here, too.

Note, though, that I refer to these as prerequisites. They set the table for the creative process, but there is no scientific consensus on what the process actually involves. It certainly aids creativity if you relax assumptions and ignore boundaries and let your thoughts go wherever they will. But research suggests that these steps give you more options, not necessarily better options. And the creative mind seems able to separate the jewels from the junk. It also makes someone more likely to move into the direction of the jewels. How this happens remains something of a mystery. Can play put you in the right mindset? Often, yes. Is play the golden key that unlocks all doors? Likely not.

But for those of us experiencing art, rather than being called to produce it, an invitation to play is often the way to jump over barriers keeping us from enjoying something we fear we might not understand. The gallery attendants, singularly helpful, knowledgeable young people, reported that the rooms fill with students when there are larger breaks between classes. By these reports, they have not previously made much use of the gallery integrated into the PSU complex, and the nature of the exhibition clearly provides a draw.

As it should, offering more than just playin’ around. After all, we need adults in the room, now more than ever, and much of the presented work helps us to get there.

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This essay was originally published on YDP – Your Daily Picture on Friday, Feb. 21, 2025. See Friderike Heuer’s previous ArtsWatch stories here.

Just Playin’ Around

• Where: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, 1855 S.W. Broadway, Portland.
• Through: April 26, 2025
• Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, closed Sundays-Mondays.
• Admission: Free.