Videogames and Art

SECTION I

Overviews

From Appropriation to Approximation

Axel Stockburger

Introduction

Recent years have seen a significant surge of museum and gallery exhibitions focusing on works in the context of computer and videogames. At the same time the discussion about the ontological status of computer games in relation to art, specifically whether they can be understood as an art form or not, is heating up.

Contemporary artists are increasingly influenced by computer and videogames, while game designers are turning towards the world of fine arts for inspiration.

It is the intention of this paper to examine the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and computer games. In order to understand how and why contemporary artist practice is moving towards games it is necessary to take a step back and take a look at the mutual attraction between the fields of games and art.

Modern Siblings

Johan Huizinga, the famous Dutch game scholar, posited play and games at the roots of all cultures and clarified that they permeate various sectors of society such as art, philosophy, law and politics. The notion of games as a core element of culture is also perceived by McLuhan. He states that Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture.¹ He hints at the historic importance of games as a form of collective art at the heart of ancient non-literate societies, for the constant modelling of the universe through dramatization and enactment. Similarly, Callois describes tribal rites as forms of play with mimetic functions that are often related to full bodily involvement.

According to McLuhan, the shift towards literacy brought about a change of focus from a mimetic relation to the outer world to the inner world of the human psyche. Tribal and participatory forms of art, which were homologous with games, evolved into literary substitutes and private dramatizations of the human psyche. Games in this context have to be described as a social art demanding bodily involvement and mutual participation. Adorno and Horkheimer identified the myth of the Odyssey and the personal struggle of the individual with this shift from the ancient world to an early phase of enlightenment. The cultural forms of art and games seem to depart onto separate tangents at this point. Text and the emergence of the individual narrative gradually create forms of art directed towards individuals, and thus move it away from the participatory game.

What then is the relation between art and games?

On the first glance we can identify a number of similarities, in that both are generating spatio-temporal zones, which are perceived as different from everyday life. Furthermore, art, as well as games, are said to be on the one hand governed by rules and on the other hand related to notions of freedom. The latter has led Sutton-Smith to critique the romantic conflation of art and play. He reflects upon the romantic ideal of childhood as a realm of freedom and creativity that can be traced back to Schiller and writes: Essentially what this ‘romantic’ relationship between children’s play and art did was to obscure whatever the true relationship between play and art actually is and to contribute instead the notion that what is most important about them is the freedom, originality and autonomy they connote.²

Sutton-Smith is convinced that the direct identification of play with art is clouding the options of explaining the true nature of play. However, the interest in so-called primitive art and children’s art as sources of innocent creativity has had a strong influence on modern art and therefore has to be treated as one important strain of proximity between the two forms.

Whereas child’s play has been idealized as seemingly free from constraints, games are usually based on rules. The consensual acceptance of these rules by all players is necessary to enter the spatio-temporal microcosm of a game. Furthermore, the rules are precisely the means to create the difference that defines the threshold between everyday life and game. This adherence to the rules can be likened to a contract, which if broken by one of the participants holds the power to destroy the game.

Objects of art emerge from being perceived as different from profane objects and it can be argued that this process is similarly based on rules. As Boris Groys has shown in his famous examination of the concept of the new in art, we are only able to identify works of so-called high art based on processes that generate a difference between the profane world and the realm of art. For him the locus of differentiation throughout the history of modernity is the museum. In relation to the avant-gardes of the last century he states that [t]he less an artwork differs visually from a profane object, the more necessary it becomes to draw a clear distinction between the art context and the profane, everyday, non-museum context of its occurrence.³

What is important here for our argument is that every profane object that is transported into the museum at some point in time is thereby valorized and transformed into a work of art. Consequently, if games are passing this line, they are becoming works of art. A number of artists are indeed using traditional strategies of the appropriation of elements from the popular culture phenomenon of computer games and transform these objects into pieces of art by placing them in the art context. Groys relates to Marcel Duchamp as one of the most important artists to directly address the process of transformation from non-art to art. The concept of the ready-made challenged the differentiation process itself and has thus also transformed the rules of art itself. Groys asserts that in recent years the artistic focus has gradually moved away from the transformational power of the object in the museum space to the creation and examination of the context surrounding the artwork. He writes:

In the modernist tradition, the art context was regarded as stable – it was the idealized context of the universal museum. Innovation consisted in putting a new form, a new thing, in this stable context. In our time, the context is seen as changing and unstable. So the strategy of contemporary art consists in creating a specific context which can make a certain form or thing look other, new and interesting – even if this form was already collected before.⁴

In other words, in his view, contemporary artistic practice is particularly concerned with examining, creating and transforming the rules governing the emergence of art itself.

The game of chess is the central metaphor in Marcel Duchamp’s work. For him: Chess is undoubtedly one of the most private forms of artistic activity, since the artist’s constructions, however beautiful, occur on the invisible plain of thought and could not be said to please a wide audience.⁵ The simple rules of chess are able to generate a universe of plastic constructions. Part of the pleasure that can be derived from this process is its solipsistic nature. It creates a private aesthetic spatio-temporal realm. Here we have the perspective that playing a game might be part of an artistic practice in its own right with the player as the audience. It might be far-fetched to relate the playing of a computer game to Duchamp’s notion of the creation of temporal aesthetic constructions on the plain of thought, but the core element of individual aesthetic pleasure could be said to be similar. This is not to claim that every player of a videogame is an artist of some sort. However, the practice of playing a computer game most definitely can be regarded as an aesthetic and sometimes creative process, constricted by time that generally does not leave an artefact behind.

Game elements turn up in various shapes in Duchamp’s work. There are the recurrent language games, the use of aleatorics or chance as an important part of artistic production, the constant play with gender identities, as well as the ever-present practice of chess. From the Surrealist exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis) over William Burroughs’ cut-up method and John Cage’s composition strategies to Karl Sim’s artificial life installations, the use of aleatoric elements has played an important role in artistic practice. Fluxus art strongly employed various game structures such as participation, chance and the examination and dramatization of rule-based behaviour. The playful approach to the representation of gender identities can be seen as another highly influential aspect of the game in modern art. Callois refers to this element of games that can be found in children’s play as well as forms of drama as mimicry. There are numerous examples of mimicry in art; some of the most famous include Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy as well as the work of Cindy Sherman.

Since computer games have only become important as a medium with the arcade games of the early 1980s the focus here will be on artists who have been influenced by and have used computer games for their artistic practice. Most of these artists seem to come from the fields of Net and Media art.

Between Appropriation and Approximation

In the last ten years we have witnessed a significant cultural re-evaluation of video and computer games. Whereas these games were generally treated as children’s toys during the 1980s, they have permeated the whole of society by the year 2000.

Academic research and contemporary artistic practice are accompanying a general establishment of the cultural importance of those games. Currently they are entering the museums from two directions. On the one hand they more and more perceived to be cultural products worthy of exhibition in their own right and on the other hand they have become an integral part of contemporary fine art practice.

The exhibition Game On⁶ was an interesting example for the shift of perception that has been taking place in the last decade. In the exhibition catalogue, Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire promote the notion of computer games as the art of contested spaces. They write: We should consider … viewing games as spatial art with its roots in architecture, landscape painting, sculpture, gardening or amusement-park design.⁷ This approach is especially worth noting if one considers the impact of installation art during the 1990s that was led by an examination of spatial configuration and audience participation in space. Whether one adheres to the notion of computer games as an art form or denies their potential for creating high art, it remains obvious that they have a number of characteristics that are not entirely shared by fine art.

First of all they are a mass medium attempting to deliver compelling entertainment for a fixed prize on a PC or console. Furthermore, they demand a high level of participation and engagement. To put it bluntly: As games they have to be played. In terms of production a lot of similarities with the medium of film can be observed. Computer games and films are usually produced by teams consisting of professionals with highly specialized roles. The emergence of hybrid entertainment products incorporating film, game, toys and even fashion manifestations has led to a strong connection between formerly separated entertainment