“If the distinction between product and production that I’ve proposed as the foundation of all of TW’s oeuvre seems sophistic, one might consider the decisive clarification that other terminological oppositions have been able to give to certain psychic activities that at first sight would seem confused. The English psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott has clearly demonstrated that it is false to reduce the games of children to a purely ludic activity; he asks us to note the opposition between game (which is strictly ruled) and play (which is free). TW, to be sure, is involved with play and not with game. But that isn’t everything. At a later stage of his discourse, Winnicott goes from play, which is still too limiting, to playing. The child’s -as well as the artist’s- reality lies in the process of manipulation and not in the product that’s produced. (Winnicott then systematically replaces a series of concepts with the verbal forms that correspond to them: phantasying, dreaming, living, holding, etc.) All of this works very well for TW. His work is based not upon concept (the trace) but rather upon an activity (tracing) -better still, perhaps, one could say that it’s based upon field (the sheet of paper), insofar as an activity takes place within it. According to Winnicott, children’s games are less important than the atmosphere that surrounds them. For TW, “the drawing” is of less importance than the atmosphere that drawings inhabit, mobilize, work on and explore -or rarefy.”
-Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly (1976, 1979)
Random corresponding thoughts (edited)
Thoughts on child’s play as about pretending to ‘be’ (pretend play) when really it is all about ‘doing’ (playing)…the act or activity (not what is happening in the head but what is outside it). Don’t get me wrong, what is going on inside the head -the structure of the relationships being formed, the rules being followed or changed- is important too. Just that the difference between the play that children and adults engage in has much to do with the being/doing aspect of play. When a child engages in pretend play the being is doing. I’m not sure adults readily achieve this when they engage in play. First, I guess a question I need to ask is how often do adults engage in the kind of pretend play, ‘being’, that leads to doing in child’s play? Do adults ‘pretend’ when playing to the point that they surrender the being to the doing? Is this the difference between playing and acting?
I’m reminded somewhat of former President Obama’s re-emergence talk I heard the other evening on the radio as I drove to pick up my children. He described the realization he came to after his first (and I think only) lost run for public office. He had to reframe the question [of why he was running for office] for himself from ‘what do I want to be?’ to ‘what do I want to do?’… making it about doing (present participle) rather than being (verbal noun).
What Winnicott seems to point to is this subtle difference (ambiguity) in the various functions of the gerund ‘playing’ in English. I wonder how Barthes handled this in the original French, I guess because he was referencing an English psychoanalyst it wasn’t an issue? I do recall reading this in the German translation and will check on it when I go upstairs after writing this email. [I checked the German translation from the French and found Barthes left the English.]
What I like about the present participle in English is, like the idea of modernism containing both pre- and post-, the present participle as an ongoing action or state in the present implies an action preceded it and an action will follow it. The difference between ‘playing a game’ and ‘playing’, like Winnicott said, games have rules, a structure and therefore end. When playing a game, the noun ‘game’ denotes the playing will in the future come to an end. Unless the ‘playing’ is not about ‘the game’ (noun, neither active or passive) but about ‘playing’ (the verbal noun, which is active)…we wouldn’t say: “we’re playing playing a game” even if that is what we mean, and it could mean that. When ‘playing’ playing any rules which might give the playing some form or structure, for example ’the game’ (noun) can be changed.
Lev Vygotsky in Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child used an example Sully’s observation of actual sisters playing a ‘game’ of sisters. This ‘game’ has rules that dictate how they are to behave which differ from how they actually behave when not ‘playing sisters’. Once the game ends the sisters return to their normal behavior.
What happens if the ‘playing’ is or becomes about playing and not about the game?
This begins to tie into what Vygotsky put forth on how humans develop through, for example, playing a game with a person knowledgeable about the rules to serve as a ’scaffold’ to help support the child’s learning/development. Once the child internalizes the rules of ‘the game’ his or her focus shifts to the action ‘playing’ the game. The game may still end, but the ‘playing’ the game does not in the sense that now the child has the knowledge he or she can resume ‘playing’ at any moment…re-entering the space that is ‘playing’
Duchamp, a fanatical player of games, internalized the rules of ‘the game’. He continued playing it… and still does!
This is how I understand the final sentence from Barthes on Tw and ’the drawing’.
Now to tie this into Playing Painting Personas, which may become Playing Personas Painting… and the persona as a tool. Tools, like games, generally have some sort of ‘rules’ of application associated with them. But once those rules of ‘how this tool can be used’ are internalized, like Obama, I can shift how I’m looking at the tool’s use from ‘how can this tool be used’ to using the tool -most importantly, how I use it for the task before me. The rules are still present, but it is no longer about the rules or playing the game by them, instead it is about the application or the action, the playing.
Actually, after hearing the Obama remark yesterday evening I felt what he was saying was related to the shift that might possibly (must? could?) happen when applying personas to a painting practice. If the approach to the development of the persona is ‘who do I want to be’ then the tool will likely be faulty Rather, it is based on this non-active ’thing’; shift the development to a persona with the (knowledge? traits?) the painter wishes to bring into, explore, or play with in painting. Then, the potential for the tool to open the painter’s painting to these ‘what I want to do’ things is greater because the focus is on not who the persona be but what the persona does. It’s still a form of copying; and the persona becomes in a way the ’scaffold’ alluded to by Vygotsky in his theory of developmental psychology.
This seems to be leading me back to the question of child’s play versus adult’s play. If one follows Barthes’ remarks on Cy Twombly, it is as a child that the artist plays, is playing...not as an adult. The playing personas of the painter might best be formed not by the structures associated with adult play, rather by the form of child’s play.