Contemporary Art Commons^™

When Attitudes Become Toys: Play Orbit And The Cybernetics Of Participation, Tim Stott

Conference Papers

This paper discusses the exhibition Play Orbit, curated by Jasia Reichardt, then Assistant Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, in collaboration with Peter Jones of the Welsh Arts Council and first shown at the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales in Flint from 4to 9 August 1969 and then at the ICA itself from 28 November 1969 to 15 February 1970.

The exhibition consisted of ‘toys, games, and playables [produced] by people who are not professionally involved with the design of playthings, but who work in the field of the visual arts’, wrote Reichardt. In its choice …

Reading Foucault After Modern Painting: From Object To System’, Tim Stott

Conference Papers

By his own admission, Foucault wrote with great pleasure about painting, feeling little need for polemics or strategic interpretation (DE II, 707). But he also thought through paintings, taking them to be exemplary objects of knowledge, uniquely indicative of transformations and discontinuities in discursive and non-discursive orders. This mixture of pleasure, preference, and analysis leaves us with a diverse body of work that might still assist in our understanding of the development of modern painting. Of particular interest is that during the period in which Foucault wrote, what counted as painting was radically questioned, leading to an expansion that …

Lessons In Playing: A Current Work Of Art As A Biopolitical Milieu, Tim Stott

Conference Papers

This paper will examine how, when certain current works of art are presented as playgrounds, in which previously unknown persons encounter one another, their play is both complexly organised around play objects and other constraints and governed within what Foucault termed a biopolitical milieu. On the one hand, this development changes the values and qualities that might describe aesthetic play, or the play particular to the encounter with works of art. On the other hand, it tests Foucault’s analysis of how biopolitical techniques of governance “make live” and allow players “to be free to be free.”

In more detail, …