I have been up all night, sweating, banging at typewriters, trying to explain my art to no one, only dead hares. But I'm not crazy. I suspect they are just sleeping.
In seemingly eternal gloom, I wallow in my thoughts, as I notice of art and life;
Everything new ages out into old
Everything old becomes indistinguishable from the dust it once gathered
Everything of dust vanishes into air
Earlier today I saw a Van Gogh bumper sticker on a white van. I saw Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, and modernity as encyclopedia entries with tall price tags. The Rite of Spring, once a starter of riots, is now just a museum-piece. The Postmodernists are dead, the Stuckists have become unstuck, Fluxus fluxed its last flux, and everyone else has moved on.
Everything new eventually vanishes into air.
But, alas, air is that which fills my lungs. Air is that which refreshes. Air is that which conducts sound, life, airplanes, and mood. Air is that which takes the photons from the sun, renders them blue in the brightest of days, and shifts them into red over the laziest of your afternoons.
And be you dead, alive, or not born yet, we all share the same air.
Ludism is here. Time has started.
Play has begun.
Game is a Dirty Word
Game is a dirty word. If you’re “gaming a system”, or “playing games”, you are an obtuse gambler, an underhanded manipulator, an insider trader engaging in sophistry, exploiting vulnerabilities with dishonesty. If you “think this is a game” you are a trivializer, unworthy of respect.
In a regular introductory Game Theory class, in any regular mathematics department, in any regular institution, it is not uncommon for the instructor to begin with an excuse: “I know it's called Game Theory, but it's not really about games... It's about business, politics, and war!” As if business, politics, and war were pursuits nobler and more deserving of analysis and appreciation than the concept of play.
In this world, in which play has been delegated pervasively to the digital computation of bits at the corner of someone's bedroom, we are at risk of withdrawing further and further from reality. The misdirection of play will end up feeding into the disastrous finite mindset of the toxic and tenured Game Theory instructor. For it is play that fuels business, politics, and war.
But it is this very pervasiveness of play, present from times immemorial, that is calling for a new kind of art to be born, The Art of the Game.
English speakers are lucky, they have been blessed with immediate access to the word “fun”. Clean, straightforward, beautiful. For some context, its closest relative for Spanish speakers is “diversión,” a word polluted by implications of immature distraction. But it is here where we can easily grasp the duality-centered mindset of someone infected by a culture of so-called-seriousness and auto-flagellation: Fun, and by extension play, is diversion, X steps removed from reality and worth less than ~blank~.
Furthermore, skholē, Ancient Greek for “school”, originally signified play, leisure, free time. But somewhere along the path, the world has gone astray. Now, a school is considered better when it is strict and oppressive, and a job is less valuable if you want to do it. We have associated productivity with pain, and purpose with pay. The Ludist school hereby reclaims the original meaning. Free time is paramount. It is time to be free. It is time to play.
Any and all discussions of play, including this one, requires a preface. A statement that “this use of the word play means serious play”.
Bullshit. All play is serious.
Ludism is The Name of The Game
We are playful.
We approach art with boldness, humility, and respect.
We approach games with thoughtfulness and strategy.
We approach games with improvisation and instinctivity.
We value joy, humor, seriousness, freedom, and passion.
We know that one can only play if one plays freely. As someone who isn't free, isn't really in play.
We value skill, be it of the hand, or of the mind.
We believe museums can be a place where art begins, as opposed to a place where art ends up.
We stand in awe of the fertility of the galleries' and museums' white walls. We understand their limitations, and seek to transcend them by means of them. These white walls are hue-less, yet simultaneously reflective of all wavelengths of light. Furthermore, we stand in awe of the museum's unreachable ceilings, as much as its restrooms and hidden electrical rooms. Even its trash cans here are filled with unexplainable air. Every molecule inside these institutions is special, worthy of attention and analysis. For at any moment, they may become vessels for the dwelling of something sacred: art.
We are neither futurists nor archivists. We are the gusts of wind in the museum's hallways. Art defibrillators. We are distributors of meaning, and we deal it to signifiers past, present, and future.
We believe that art is art while it is making itself. All art has been categorized as either process or object. If a concept is the machine that makes the art, we see the game as a machine that makes the concepts that make art.
We aim to embody art. Regardless of medium, we do the art's bidding as best we can. Thus, we are engaging in truly immersive art.
We are simultaneously the horses that drink, and those who lead them to water.
We don't abhor, but deter, functionalism. Play exists for its own sake.
We oppose idolaters of images. This opposition extends to artists, gallerists, collectors, and curators who revere the painted canvas, and the presented image (even if ephemeral or performed). The enforcers of the retinal at the cost of everything else.
Instead, we advocate for the understanding of pieces as network edges.
We seek for no ordinary life. We seek to participate in the transfiguration of the commonplace.
The Ludist has work to do in all spheres: From the smallest, to the largest. From the arts, to the sciences (if there even is a difference). From the personal, to the local, to the universal.
The Ludist isn't just a player. We are collaborators partnered in creation, distributed designers of games, stewards of the gameplay loop.
We are Homo Ludens. We are those who play.
Why?
Because I pity the people who look at a painting and only see an object.
Because metaphors and allusions eventually become just words.
Because when we play we can feel the red strings of fate tugging at our limbs, connecting my hand with your ear through our eyes.
Because the entire world is an installation.
Because the only installation needed is inside your mind.
Because the history of art is not cast in stone, nor is it calcified. It's in the air. It's mine. It's yours.
Because we know that in art, just as in life, there are no summits. Only local maxima.
Because we know that art has no end. Just more beginnings.
Because we know that an -ism is but a piece, and a piece is but a brushstroke.
Because when you listen to dreams you see an Idaho man skating and drinking cran-raspberry juice.
Because if Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse, Degas, and Manet had never decided to take canvases and easels to brothels, the paintings wouldn't have existed.
Because it is up to the artist to enrich life.
Because a painting connects our eyes with things removed.
Because in a universe of estranged people, only the artist possesses the faculties to pave the roads of connection.
Because if you can't afford the latest video game, you watch someone else play it for you.
Because you would much rather spend your days in infinity instead of preparing for finite war and expecting rain.
Because in spite of nihilism you still want to love.
Because we don't hate the players, nor do we hate the game.
Because you know you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep.
Because the world is round, and it turns you on.
Because transparent art, in all of its muddiness, allows for inhabitance. It beckons us.
Because art is art, from the mind, to the hand, to the page, to the canvas, to the eye, to the discarded sketch, to the unfinished work, to the artist statement you have been procrastinating on, to the biweekly crit session, to the stressful phone call, to the thought you don't even know you're currently having.
Because no time is wasted when you move with purpose.
Because it takes work, but it's good work.
Because you need connections to be in the art world, but the connections are also the art.
Because even your pornography sometimes has paintings on a wall.
Because Kusama urges you to enter a room. But in the end, it is the room that enters you.
Because when you look at a screen you don't see a screen. You see through it into all.
Because you know that meaning is both a verb and a noun, but still a singular thing.
Because it takes two to tango.
Because it takes a pitcher, a batter, and a catcher.
Because the pit that opens up in your stomach when a plane hits turbulence makes you feel your body in a new way. And that makes you feel alive.
Because we cry at the movies.
Because abstraction degrades.
Because all of the Pollock drip paintings and all of the Mondrian compositions are no longer abstract. They look like Pollocks and Mondrians.
Because even a modern art museum will eventually become a natural history museum.
Because there are no experts.
Because we've painted a hundred paintings and they remain in storage.
Because we've drawn a thousand sketches and they stay in our sketchbooks.
But when we play, inside is outside, and the hidden comes to light.
